1.  Hardware Requirements

Introduction

Before we start, we first list what hardware requirements you need to successfully install Gentoo on your box using the Installer LiveCD.

Hardware Requirements

1.  The Gentoo Linux Installer LiveCD

Introduction

A LiveCD is a bootable medium which contains a self-sustained Gentoo environment. It allows you to boot Linux from the CD. During the boot process your hardware is detected and the appropriate drivers are loaded. The Gentoo Installation CDs are maintained by Gentoo developers.

There currently are two Installation CDs available:

• The Installer LiveCD contains everything you need to install Gentoo. It provides a graphical environment, a graphical as well as console based installer which automatically carries out the installation for you, and of course, the installation instructions for your architecture.
• The Minimal Installation CD contains only a minimal environment that allows you to boot up and configure your network so you can connect to the Internet. It does not contain any additional files and cannot be used during the current installation approach.

1.  Download, Burn and Boot the Gentoo Linux Installer LiveCD

Downloading and Burning the Installer LiveCD

You can download the Installer LiveCDs from one of our mirrors. They are located in the ${release-dir}livecd/ directory.

Inside that directory you'll find an ISO file. That is a full CD image which you can write on a CD-R.

After downloading the file, you can verify its integrity to see if it is corrupted or not:

• You can check its MD5 checksum and compare it with the MD5 checksum we provide (for instance with the md5sum tool under Linux/Unix or md5sum for Windows)
• You can verify the cryptographic signature that we provide. You need to obtain the public key we use (17072058) before you proceed though.

To fetch our public key using the GnuPG application, run the following command:

$ gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 17072058

Now verify the signature:

$ gpg --verify <signature file> <downloaded iso>

To burn the downloaded ISO(s), you have to select raw-burning. How you do this is highly program-dependent. We will discuss cdrecord and K3B here; more information can be found in our Gentoo FAQ.

• With cdrecord, you simply type cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc <downloaded iso file> (replace /dev/hdc with your CD-RW drive's device path).
• With K3B, select Tools > Burn CD Image. Then you can locate your ISO file within the 'Image to Burn' area. Finally click Start.

Booting the Installer LiveCD

Once you have burned your LiveCD, it is time to boot it. Remove all CDs from your CD drives, reboot your system and enter the BIOS. This is usually done by hitting DEL, F1 or ESC, depending on your BIOS. Inside the BIOS, change the boot order so that the CD-ROM is tried before the hard disk. This is often found under "CMOS Setup". If you don't do this, your system will just reboot from the hard disk, ignoring the CD-ROM.

Now place the LiveCD in the CD-ROM drive and reboot. You should see a boot prompt. At this screen, you can hit Enter to begin the boot process with the default boot options, or boot the LiveCD with custom boot options by specifying a kernel followed by boot options and then hitting Enter.

Specifying a kernel? Yes, we provide a few kernels on our LiveCD. The default one is gentoo. Other kernels are for specific hardware needs and the -nofb variants which disable framebuffer.

Below you'll find a short overview on the available kernels:

You can also provide kernel options. They represent optional settings you can (de)activate at will. The following list is the same as the one you receive when you press F2 through F7 at the bootscreen.

Hardware options:

acpi=on

This loads support for ACPI and also causes the acpid daemon to be started by the CD on boot. This is only needed if your system requires ACPI to function properly. This is not required for Hyperthreading support.

acpi=off

Completely disables ACPI. This is useful on some older systems and is also a requirement for using APM. This will disable any Hyperthreading support of your processor.

console=X

This sets up serial console access for the CD. The first option is the device, usually ttyS0 on x86, followed by any connection options, which are comma separated. The default options are 9600,8,n,1.

dmraid=X

This allows for passing options to the device-mapper RAID subsystem. Options should be encapsulated in quotes.

doapm

This loads APM driver support. This requires you to also use acpi=off.

dopcmcia

This loads support for PCMCIA and Cardbus hardware and also causes the pcmcia cardmgr to be started by the CD on boot. This is only required when booting from PCMCIA/Cardbus devices.

doscsi

This loads support for most SCSI controllers. This is also a requirement for booting most USB devices, as they use the SCSI subsystem of the kernel.

sda=stroke

This allows you to partition the whole hard disk even when your BIOS is unable to handle large disks. This option is only used on machines with an older BIOS. Replace sda with the device that requires this option.

ide=nodma

This forces the disabling of DMA in the kernel and is required by some IDE chipsets and also by some CDROM drives. If your system is having trouble reading from your IDE CDROM, try this option. This also disables the default hdparm settings from being executed.

noapic

This disables the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller that is present on newer motherboards. It has been known to cause some problems on older hardware.

nodetect

This disables all of the autodetection done by the CD, including device autodetection and DHCP probing. This is useful for doing debugging of a failing CD or driver.

nodhcp

This disables DHCP probing on detected network cards. This is useful on networks with only static addresses.

nodmraid

Disables support for device-mapper RAID, such as that used for on-board IDE/SATA RAID controllers.

nofirewire

This disables the loading of Firewire modules. This should only be necessary if your Firewire hardware is causing a problem with booting the CD.

nogpm

This disables gpm console mouse support.

nohotplug

This disables the loading of the hotplug and coldplug init scripts at boot. This is useful for doing debugging of a failing CD or driver.

nokeymap

This disables the keymap selection used to select non-US keyboard layouts.

nolapic

This disables the local APIC on Uniprocessor kernels.

nosata

This disables the loading of Serial ATA modules. This is used if your system is having problems with the SATA subsystem.

nosmp

This disables SMP, or Symmetric Multiprocessing, on SMP-enabled kernels. This is useful for debugging SMP-related issues with certain drivers and motherboards.

nosound

This disables sound support and volume setting. This is useful for systems where sound support causes problems.

nousb

This disables the autoloading of USB modules. This is useful for debugging USB issues.

slowusb

This adds some extra pauses into the boot process for slow USB CDROMs, like in the IBM BladeCenter.

Volume/Device Management:

dolvm

This enables support for Linux's Logical Volume Management.

Other options:

debug

Enables debugging code. This might get messy, as it displays a lot of data to the screen.

docache

This caches the entire runtime portion of the CD into RAM, which allows you to umount /mnt/cdrom and mount another CDROM. This option requires that you have at least twice as much available RAM as the size of the CD.

doload=X

This causes the initial ramdisk to load any module listed, as well as dependencies. Replace X with the module name.
Multiple modules can be specified by a comma-separated list.

dosshd

Starts sshd on boot, which is useful for unattended installs.

passwd=foo

Sets whatever follows the equals as the root password, which is required for dosshd since we scramble the root password.

noload=X

This causes the initial ramdisk to skip the loading of a specific module that may be causing a problem. Syntax matches that of doload.

nonfs

Disables the starting of portmap/nfsmount on boot.

nox

This causes an X-enabled LiveCD to not automatically start X, but rather, to drop to the command line instead.

scandelay

This causes the CD to pause for 10 seconds during certain portions the boot process to allow for devices that are slow to initialize to be ready for use.

scandelay=X

This allows you to specify a given delay, in seconds, to be added to certain portions of the boot process to allow for devices that are slow to initialize to be ready for use. Replace X with the number of seconds to pause.

Now boot your CD, select a kernel (if you are not happy with the default gentoo kernel) and boot options. As an example, we show you how to boot the gentoo kernel, with dopcmcia as kernel parameters:

boot: gentoo dopcmcia

You will then be greeted with a boot screen and progress bar. If you are installing Gentoo on a system with a non-US keyboard, make sure you immediately press Alt-F1 to switch to verbose mode and follow the prompt. If no selection is made in 10 seconds the default (US keyboard) will be accepted and the boot process will continue. Once the boot process completes, Gnome will start up and you will be automatically logged in to the "Live" Gentoo Linux system as "gentoo" in graphical mode. You will be logged in as "root", the superuser on the other consoles and should have a root ("#") prompt there. You can switch to those consoles by pressing Alt-F2, Alt-F3, Alt-F4 Alt-F5, Alt-F6. Get back to the graphical desktop you started on by pressing Alt-F7. To switch to other consoles from within X, you must prefix the above with Ctrl. You are able to run commands as root from any terminal within the graphical environment by using the sudo application. You can even become root within a terminal to perform multiple tasks.

(Example only)
(Editing the group file)
# sudo vi /etc/group
(Becoming root for a session)
# sudo su -

Extra Hardware Configuration

When the LiveCD boots, it tries to detect all your hardware devices and loads the appropriate kernel modules to support your hardware. In the vast majority of cases, it does a very good job. However, in some cases, it may not auto-load the kernel modules you need. If the PCI auto-detection missed some of your system's hardware, you will have to load the appropriate kernel modules manually. These tasks require root access.

In the next example we try to load the 8139too module (support for certain kinds of network interfaces):

# modprobe 8139too

Optional: User Accounts

If you plan on giving other people access to your installation environment or you want to chat using irssi without root privileges (for security reasons), you need to create the necessary user accounts and change the root password. You need root access to change the root password and add new users.

To change the root password, use the passwd utility:

$ sudo su -
# passwd
New password: (Enter your new password)
Re-enter password: (Re-enter your password)

To create a user account, we first enter their credentials, followed by its password. We use useradd and passwd for these tasks. In the next example, we create a user called "john".

# useradd -m -G users john
# passwd john
New password: (Enter john's password)
Re-enter password: (Re-enter john's password)

You can change your user id from root to the newly created user by using su:

# su - john

You can also change the password for the "gentoo" user in the graphical environment. This account is already suitable for use on the Internet.

$ passwd
New password: (Enter your new password)
Re-enter password: (Re-enter your password)

Optional: Viewing Documentation while Installing

If you want to view the Gentoo Handbook (either from the CD or online) during the installation, you can view it with Mozilla Firefox (from the graphical environment) or with links (from a terminal environment).

# firefox /mnt/cdrom/docs/handbook/html/index.html

If you would prefer to use links to see a text-only version of the handbook, make sure you have created a user account (see Optional: User Accounts). Then press Alt-F2 to go to a new terminal and log in.

# links /mnt/cdrom/docs/handbook/html/index.html

You can go back to your original window by pressing Alt-F7.

However, it is preferred that you use the online Gentoo Handbook as it will be more recent than the one provided on the CD. You can view it using Firefox or links as well, but only after having completed the Configuring your Network chapter (otherwise you won't be able to go on the Internet to view the document):

# firefox http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/${online-book}

# links http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/${online-book}

You can now choose to proceed by using the (GTK+ based installer) (which needs X) or the (Dialog based installer) that can be run on a console.