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5. Installing the Gentoo Installation Files

• Installing a Stage Tarball
• Default: Using a Stage from the Installation CD
• Installing Portage
• Configuring the Compile Options

5.a. Installing a Stage Tarball

Setting the Date/Time Right

Before you continue you need to check your date/time and update it. A misconfigured clock may lead to strange results in the future!

To verify the current date/time, run date:

# date
Fri Mar 29 16:21:18 UTC 2005

If the date/time displayed is wrong, update it using the date MMDDhhmmYYYY syntax (Month, Day, hour, minute and Year). At this stage, you should use UTC time. You will be able to define your timezone later on. For instance, to set the date to March 29th, 16:21 in the year 2005:

# date 032916212005

5.b. Default: Using a Stage from the Installation CD

Extracting the Stage Tarball

The stages on the CD reside in the /mnt/cdrom/stages directory. To see a listing of available stages, use ls:

# ls /mnt/cdrom/stages

If the system replies with an error, you may need to mount the CD-ROM first:

# ls /mnt/cdrom/stages
ls: /mnt/cdrom/stages: No such file or directory
# mount /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom
# ls /mnt/cdrom/stages

Now go into your Gentoo mountpoint (usually /mnt/gentoo):

# cd /mnt/gentoo

We will now extract the stage tarball of your choice. We will do this with the tar tool. Make sure you use the same options (xvjpf)! The x stands for Extract, the v for Verbose to see what happens during the extraction process (this one is optional), the j for Decompress with bzip2, the p for Preserve permissions and the f to denote that we want to extract a file, not standard input. In the next example, we extract the stage tarball stage3-ppc-2007.0.tar.bz2. Be sure to substitute the tarball filename with your stage.

# tar xvjpf /mnt/cdrom/stages/stage3-ppc-2007.0.tar.bz2

Now that the stage is installed, continue with Installing Portage.

Unpacking the Stage Tarball

Now unpack your downloaded stage onto your system. We use tar to proceed as it is the easiest method:

# tar xvjpf stage3-*.tar.bz2

Make sure that you use the same options (xvjpf). The x stands for Extract, the v for Verbose to see what happens during the extraction process (this one is optional), the j for Decompress with bzip2, the p for Preserve permissions and the f to denote that we want to extract a file, not standard input.

Now that the stage is installed, continue with Installing Portage.

5.c. Installing Portage

Unpacking a Portage Snapshot

You now have to install a Portage snapshot, a collection of files that inform Portage what software titles you can install, which profiles are available, etc.

Unpack the Snapshot from the Installation CD

To install the snapshot, take a look inside /mnt/cdrom/snapshots/ to see what snapshot is available:

# ls /mnt/cdrom/snapshots

Now extract the snapshot using the following construct. Again, make sure you use the correct options with tar. Also, the -C is with a capital C, not c. In the next example we use portage-<date>.tar.bz2 as the snapshot filename. Be sure to substitute with the name of the snapshot that is on your Installation CD.

# tar xvjf /mnt/cdrom/snapshots/portage-<date>.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr

Copy Source Code Archives

You also need to copy over all source code from the Universal Installation CD.

# mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles
# cp /mnt/cdrom/distfiles/* /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles/

5.d. Configuring the Compile Options

Introduction

To optimize Gentoo, you can set a couple of variables which impact Portage behaviour. All those variables can be set as environment variables (using export) but that isn't permanent. To keep your settings, Portage provides you with /etc/make.conf, a configuration file for Portage. It is this file we will edit now.

Fire up your favorite editor (in this guide we use nano) so we can alter the optimization variables we will discuss hereafter.

# nano -w /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

As you probably noticed, the make.conf.example file is structured in a generic way: commented lines start with "#", other lines define variables using the VARIABLE="content" syntax. The make.conf file uses the same syntax. Several of those variables are discussed next.

CHOST

The CHOST variable declares the target build host for your system. This variable should already be set to the correct value. Do not edit it as that might break your system. If the CHOST variable does not look correct to you, you might be using the wrong stage3 tarball.

CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS

The CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS variables define the optimization flags for the gcc C and C++ compiler respectively. Although we define those generally here, you will only have maximum performance if you optimize these flags for each program separately. The reason for this is because every program is different.

In make.conf you should define the optimization flags you think will make your system the most responsive generally. Don't place experimental settings in this variable; too much optimization can make programs behave bad (crash, or even worse, malfunction).

We cannot explain all possible optimization options here, but if you want to investigate them all, read the GNU Online Manual(s) or the gcc info page (info gcc -- only works on a working Linux system). For common optimizations and architecture specific settings, please read /etc/make.conf.example. This file also contains lots of examples and information; don't forget to read it too.

A first setting is the -march= or -mcpu= flag, which specifies the name of the target architecture. Possible options are described in the make.conf.example file (as comments).

A second one is the -O flag (that is a capital O, not a zero), which specifies the gcc optimization class flag. Possible classes are s (for size-optimized), 0 (zero - for no optimizations), 1, 2 or 3 for more speed-optimization flags (every class has the same flags as the one before, plus some extras). -O2 is the recommended default.

Another popular optimization flag is -pipe (use pipes rather than temporary files for communication between the various stages of compilation). It has no impact on the generated code.

Using -fomit-frame-pointer (which doesn't keep the frame pointer in a register for functions that don't need one) might have serious repercussions on the debugging of applications.

When you define the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, you should combine several optimization flags. The default values contained in the stage3 archive you unpacked should be good enough. The following example is just an example:

CFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=powerpc -mtune=powerpc -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe"
# Use the same settings for both variables
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

MAKEOPTS

With MAKEOPTS you define how many parallel compilations should occur when you install a package. A good choice is the number of CPUs in your system plus one, but this guideline isn't always perfect.

MAKEOPTS="-j2"

Ready, Set, Go!

Update your /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf to your own preference and save (nano users would hit Ctrl-X). You are now ready to continue with Chrooting into the Gentoo Base System.

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