I would like to practice installing Gentoo from scratch since I like the idea of the distro, but I’m quite new to Linux at all and only had experience with Debian. I suppose my very basic knowledge of terminal isn’t enough to install Gentoo, even with the handbook. So, what would you recommend to learn or practice before I actually try installing Gentoo? Also, any specific tips on installing Gentoo inside a VM?
It might be a very stupid question, but, does Gentoo handbook assume I’m preparing to install Gentoo from an already working Linux system?
Sort of. The minimal install image provides a (lightweight command-line) Linux environment, and that’s what you would typically expect to boot into to install. If you have another piece of live media that you prefer, you can use it for the install instead (I’ve used Raspbian and its successor distros as hosts to install Gentoo on Pis from time to time), but there can be occasional gotchas that come from things like different handling of the resolv.conf file on other distros.
Just download the file marked “Minimal Installation CD” from here (assuming you’re installing to an x86_64 system) and mount it as a CD according to the VM’s documentation, then boot the VM.
@pixeldaemon You always install gentoo from an “already working” system. Basically, all yer gonna do is partition/format the drive, explode the file system to it, and chroot over to set shit up. You can easily build gentoo on an external drive on one (more powerful) computer, and throw it in the one it’s for when yer done. This is a very common way of installing it on an SBC.
With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.
If I remember correctly it, it explicitly recommended that you use at least the minimal gentoo live disk to get your system into a running state. You’d be working from the live cd for the first couple of sections before booting into a very basic install on your hard disk. From there you would compile the rest of your system.
Even the minimal disk provides all of the tools that you need to bootstrap the system. Sources for everything else are downloaded as they are needed. Come to think of it, I think the full desktop live dvd was fairly new at that time, in it’s first or second release.
Even at that time the Gentoo manual was incredibly well written and is in my opinion the gold standard for how user documentation should be written. I had been toying with linux for about 3 months at that point and was able to get a working desktop system up and running in about a month , mostly just waiting for things to compile on the slow processors we had back then. I would run a few commands and then go off and do something else for a few hours. rinse and repeat.
@StrawberryPigtails @pixeldaemon Round that time, I remember the goto advice was to use whatever #systemrescuecd you had layin around; they were gentoo discs back then, always worked a charm.