1.  Gentoo Documentation Resources

Available Languages

Our documentation is also available in the following languages:

Czech | English | French | German | Italian | Japanese | Polish | Simplified Chinese | Spanish

Introduction

Welcome to the Gentoo Documentation Resources. This page will give you a quick overview on the documentation we provide. Most documentation is released under the Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license, an open documentation license. All documentation should also be available in a printer-friendly format. To view this document, append ?style=printable to the URL. You'll also find a "Print" link on the top-right corner of each document.

If you find bugs in our documentation or have proposals, please use our Bugtracking System and fill in a bug report for "Documentation" or "Doc Other". These bug reports will then be handled by the Gentoo Documentation Project.

Documentation Repository

Our documentation is categorized and hierarchically navigable. If you want a quick overview of all available documentation without the additional information, please use our Documentation Listing page. We also have a full listing of all our documents with their descriptions.

2.  System Administration Documentation

General System Administration

Using UTF-8 with Gentoo: This guide shows you how to set up and use the UTF-8 Unicode character set with your Gentoo Linux system, after explaining the benefits of Unicode and more specifically UTF-8.

Gentoo Security Handbook: This handbook is a step-by-step guide for hardening Gentoo Linux.

Gentoo Linux Prelink Guide: This guide tells you how to make use of prelink support in Portage 2.0.46 and later.

Gentoo IPv6 Router Guide: This guide shows how to setup IPv6 on a Gentoo system. This includes establishing a tunnel with a tunnel broker, some basic DNS configuration and configuring clients to use the system to connect to IPv6 addresses.

Gentoo Linux Developer's guide to system testing with User-Mode Linux: This guide shows Gentoo Linux developers how to set up and use user-mode linux for testing potentially system-breaking changes.

Gentoo Linux Localization Guide: This guide should help users localize their Gentoo Linux distribution to any European locale. It uses Germany as a case-study, since it is translated from the German doc. Includes configuration for use of the euro currency symbol.

Gentoo Linux Cron Guide: This guide describes how to setup and use cron.

Gentoo Linux Kernel Upgrade Guide: This document describes the process of upgrading your kernel from one release to another.

Gentoo Sudo(ers) Guide: When you want some people to perform certain administrative steps on your system without granting them total root access, using sudo is your best option. With sudo you can control who can do what. This guide offers you a small introduction to this wonderful tool.

Gentoo Man Guide: This guide shows how to navigate man pages using man.

Gentoo Info Guide: This guide is meant to show how to navigate info pages using the info command.

Gentoo Linux Initial RAM File System Guide: More and more systems require an initramfs to boot up properly. In this guide, we tackle the concepts of the initramfs as well as how to properly create and manage initramfs instances.

Gentoo Linux Kernel Configuration Guide: This document aims to introduce the concepts of manual kernel configuration, and to detail some of the most common configuration pitfalls.

zsh Configuration and Installation Guide: This guide shows how to install and configure zsh quickly. After reading this document you will be able use many zsh features such as advanced tab-completion, command correction and prompt management.

Specific Administration Guides

MySQL Startup Guide: This document helps a user set up and use MySQL.

PostgreSQL Quick Start Guide: This is a quick start guide to PostgreSQL. It covers emerging PostgreSQL and configuring it. This is complementary to the official documentation, but does not supplant it.

Diskless Nodes with Gentoo: This HOWTO will help you create setup diskless nodes with Gentoo Linux.

Gentoo Distcc Documentation: This document serves as a HOWTO for using distcc with Gentoo.

DistCC Cross-compiling Guide: This guide shows you how to set up distcc for cross-compiling across different processor architectures.

Device File System Guide: In this document you'll find information on what devfs is really about and how to work with it.

Gentoo udev Guide: This document explains what udev is and how you can use udev to fit your needs.

Gentoo Printing Guide: This document covers the installation and maintenance of printers using CUPS and Samba. It covers local installation and networked installations and you'll also find instructions on using shared printers from other operating systems.

Gentoo Linux OpenAFS Guide: This guide shows you how to install an OpenAFS server and client on Gentoo Linux.

Virtual Mailhosting System with Postfix Guide: This document details how to create a virtual mailhosting system based upon postfix, mysql, courier-imap, and cyrus-sasl.

Gentoo mailfiltering gateway guide: This guide is step-by-step guide for installing spam fighting technologies for Postfix. Among them Amavisd-new using Spamassassin and ClamAV, greylisting and SPF.

netqmail/vpopmail Virtual Mail Hosting System Guide: This document details how to create a mail hosting system based upon netqmail, vpopmail, courier-imap, mysql, and horde's imp.

Gentoo Linux based Netboot HOWTO: Guide for setting up a netboot server for use with the Gentoo/SPARC netboot installation images.

OpenBoot PROM (OBP) Reference: The OpenBoot PROM (OBP) Reference provides a list of useful OBP commands that can help when booting, configuring and performing diagnostics upon Sun SPARC hardware and clones.

Gentoo Samba3/CUPS HOWTO: Setup, install and configure a Samba server under Gentoo that shares files and printers without the need to install drivers.

Home Router Guide: This document details how to turn an old Gentoo machine into a router for connecting your home network to the internet.

Compilation Optimization Guide: This guide provides an introduction to optimizing compiled code using safe, sane CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS. It also as describes the theory behind optimizing in general.

Gentoo Linux-VServer Howto: In this Howto you will learn to setup a basic virtual server using the Linux-VServer Technology

Gentoo Java Guide: This guide will introduce you to Java and explain how to use Java with Gentoo Linux.

Baselayout and OpenRC Migration Guide: This guide shows you how to migrate from baselayout-1 to baselayout-2 and OpenRC.

Multipathing for Gentoo: This document teaches you how to set up multipathing services for data storage.

Gentoo BIND Guide: This guide will teach you how install and configure BIND for your domain and your local network.

Gentoo Linux Keychain Guide: This document describes how to use ssh shared keys along with the keychain program. It assumes basic knowledge of public key cryptography.

High Performance Computing on Gentoo Linux: This document was written by people at the Adelie Linux R&D Center <http://www.adelielinux.com> as a step-by-step guide to turn a Gentoo System into a High Performance Computing (HPC) system.

Troubleshooting Apache: This document covers a number of ways to figure out how to fix your Apache installation when things are not working correctly.

Upgrading Apache: This document describes the procedure end-users should follow to safely upgrade their apache installation.

Upgrade guide to MySQL 4.* or 5.0.*: The MySQL herd is proud to announce that MySQL 5.0 will soon be found in Gentoo's stable tree. This document describes how to upgrade to MySQL 4.* and to 5.0.*.

"Unslotting" a slotted MySQL Installation: This document describes how to go back to an unslotted MySQL.

Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide: This document will guide the user through the process of upgrading GCC.

Changing the CHOST variable: This document explains how to change the CHOST variable of an existing system.

Jffnms Installation and Setup Guide: This guide shows you how to proceed with the post installation setup of Jffnms, a network management and monitoring system, and how to monitor your systems with it.

Gentoo vpnc HOWTO: This document details how to connect your workstation to a Cisco VPN concentrator utilizing vpnc to manage the connection.

How to get meaningful backtraces in Gentoo: This guide is meant to provide users with a simple explanation of why a default Gentoo installation does not provide meaningful backtraces and how to set it up to get them.

Configuring Gentoo with Xen: This guide describes how to start using Xen on your Gentoo system

Logcheck Guide: This guide shows you how to analyze system logs with logcheck.