Gentoo Install Notes

July 2014

(Because I hate it when I find an article and I can’t tell how out of date it is)

Some tips for anyone insane enough to install Gentoo :)

When you’ve first booted it up from the install CD, run “ifconfig”. Assuming it found and got your network card working, instead of eth0 suggested later in the setup documentation, you’ll need to enter what your card actually appears as.

In my case : “enp3s0”

This may save you a lot of hair removal when you reboot and think it should all be working.

For some reason, the Gentoo maintainers seem to hate ReiserFS. I’m not sure why yet. It seems to work fine, but your mileage may vary. Be warned though, that if you went for reiser at partitioning stage, when you get to kernel compile time, you get a big unfriendly warning message if you try to use “genkernel”.

While we’re near the kernel compile stage, unless you’re blessed with a very kernel friendly system, the “initramfs” section is pretty much essential. You may even be wise here to have a pause and check if you need to emerge any firmware packages for your particular setup before you do the first reboot. For others, the challenge of downloading firmware for your network device when the network isn’t working can be intriguing. (Just boot the install CD back up, mount your Gentoo root somewhere, download whatever you need, then either chroot or reboot and install it).

The install docs also make a big thing out of defining “USE flags” during the setup. It’s a nice idea in theory, but be warned that if you go to town on defining things here, you’re likely to find things just refuse to resolve when you run emerge later. Keep it to a minimum would be my advice.

Another handy hint, if you like LILO (like me) as a boot system, remember it’s the weird little partition Windows maintains that you need to specify for your Windows boot, not the main partition with all your files on it. Don’t panic if you get a “Can’t find MBR” message (it’s something like that), you probably just pointed it at the wrong partition.

Otherwise. So far so good! It’s not nearly as bad as everyone says. With a powerful 4 core machine, you can have it installed and a basic XFCE session running in .. er .. well .. I guess around 10 hours or so if the install went smoothly. :-)

Yeah. Gentoo. It’s for Linux nutters.