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1. About the Gentoo Linux Installation

• Introduction
• Fast Installation using the Gentoo Reference Platform

1.a. Introduction

Welcome!

First of all, welcome to Gentoo. You are about to enter the world of customization and performance. When installing Gentoo, this is made clear to you several times -- you can choose how much you want to compile yourself, how to install Gentoo, what system logger you want, etc.

Gentoo is a fast, modern meta-distribution with a clean and flexible design. Gentoo is built around free software and doesn't hide from its users what is beneath the hood. Portage, the package maintenance system which Gentoo uses, is written in Python, meaning you can easily view and modify the source code. Gentoo's packaging system uses source code (although support for precompiled packages is included too) and configuring Gentoo happens through regular text files. In other words, openness everywhere.

It is very important that you understand that empowerment is what makes Gentoo run. We try not to force anything on our users and try our best to empower you to make the choices you wish. If you feel a change should be made, please file a bug report about it.

How is the Installation Structured?

The Gentoo Installation can be seen as a 10-step procedure, corresponding to chapters 2 - 11. Every step results in a certain state:

• After step 1, you are in a working environment ready to install Gentoo
• After step 2, your internet connection is prepared in case you need it (this is however optional)
• After step 3, your hard disks are initialized to house your Gentoo installation
• After step 4, your installation environment is prepared and you are ready to chroot into the new environment
• After step 5, core packages, which are the same on all Gentoo installations, are installed
• After step 6, you have compiled your Linux kernel
• After step 7, you have written most of your Gentoo system configuration files
• After step 8, necessary system tools (which you can choose from a nice list) are installed
• After step 9, your choice of bootloader has been installed and configured and you are logged in into your new Gentoo installation
• After step 10, your Gentoo Linux environment is ready to be explored

When you are given a certain choice, we try our best to explain what the pros and cons are. We will continue then with a default choice, identified by "Default: " in the title. The other possibilities are marked by "Alternative: ". Do not think that the default is what we recommend. It is however what we believe most users will use.

Sometimes you can pursue an optional step. Such steps are marked as "Optional: " and are therefore not needed to install Gentoo. However, some optional steps are dependant on a previous decision you made. We will inform you when this happens, both when you make the decision, and right before the optional step is described.

What are my Options?

You can install Gentoo in many different ways. You can download and install from one of our Installation CDs, from an existing distribution, from a bootable CD (such as Knoppix), from a netbooted environment, from a rescue floppy, etc.

This document covers the installation using a Gentoo Linux Installation CD, a bootable CD that contains everything you need to get Gentoo Linux up and running. There are two types of Installation CDs, the InstallCD and the Installer LiveCD. The InstallCD is a minimal environment which contains only those packages necessary for installing Gentoo Linux. The LiveCD is a complete Gentoo Linux environment and can be used for multiple tasks, one of which is installing Gentoo Linux. The LiveCD is not available on all architectures at this time. If your architecture does not have a LiveCD, then this document will refer to the Universal InstallCD for you.

This installation approach however does not immediately use the latest version of the available packages; if you want this you should check out the Installation Instructions inside our Gentoo Linux Handbooks.

For help on the other installation approaches, please read our Alternative Installation Guide. We also provide a Gentoo Installation Tips & Tricks document that might be useful to read as well. If you feel that the current installation instructions are too elaborate, feel free to use our Quick Installation Guide available from our Documentation Resources if your architecture has such a document available.

Troubles?

If you find a problem in the installation (or in the installation documentation), please check the errata from our Gentoo Release Engineering Project, visit our bug tracking system and check if the bug is known. If not, please create a bug report for it so we can take care of it. Do not be afraid of the developers who are assigned to (your) bugs -- they generally don't eat people.

Note though that, although the document you are now reading is architecture-specific, it will contain references to other architectures as well. This is due to the fact that large parts of the Gentoo Handbook use source code that is common for all architectures (to avoid duplication of efforts and starvation of development resources). We will try to keep this to a minimum to avoid confusion.

If you are uncertain if the problem is a user-problem (some error you made despite having read the documentation carefully) or a software-problem (some error we made despite having tested the installation/documentation carefully) you are free to join #gentoo on irc.freenode.net. Of course, you are welcome otherwise too :)

If you have a question regarding Gentoo, check out our Frequently Asked Questions, available from the Gentoo Documentation. You can also view the FAQs on our forums. If you can't find the answer there ask on #gentoo, our IRC-channel on irc.freenode.net. Yes, several of us are freaks who sit on IRC :-)

1.b. Fast Installation using the Gentoo Reference Platform

What is the Gentoo Reference Platform?

The Gentoo Reference Platform, from now on abbreviated to GRP, is a snapshot of prebuilt packages users (that means you!) can install during the installation of Gentoo to speed up the installation process. The GRP consists of all packages required to have a fully functional Gentoo installation. They are not just the ones you need to have a base installation up to speed in no time, but all lengthier builds (such as xorg-x11, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla, ...) are available as GRP packages too.

However, these prebuilt packages aren't maintained during the lifetime of the Gentoo distribution. They are snapshots released at every Gentoo release and make it possible to have a functional environment in a short amount of time. You can then upgrade your system in the background while working in your Gentoo environment.

How Portage Handles GRP Packages

Your Portage tree - the collection of ebuilds (files that contain all information about a package, such as its description, homepage, sourcecode URLs, compilation instructions, dependencies, etc.) - must be synchronised with the GRP set: the versions of the available ebuilds and their accompanying GRP packages must match.

For this reason you can only benefit from the GRP packages Gentoo provides while performing the current installation approach. GRP is not available for those interested in performing an installation using the latest versions of all available packages.

Is GRP Available?

Not all architectures provide GRP packages. That doesn't mean GRP isn't supported on the other architectures, but it means that we don't have the resources to build and test the GRP packages.

At present we provide GRP packages for the following architectures:

• The amd64 architecture (amd64). Note: The packages are now available on the Installer LiveCD.
• The ppc architecture (ppc32, ppc64)
• The sparc architecture (sparc64)
• The x86 architecture (athlon, athlon-xp, athlon-mp, pentium-pro, pentium2, pentium3, pentium4 and pentium-m) Note: The packages are for i686 and are available on the Installer LiveCD.

If your architecture (or subarchitecture) isn't on this list, you are not able to opt for a GRP installation.

Now that this introduction is over, let's continue with Booting the Universal InstallCD/Installer LiveCD.

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