Download a Stage Tarball

Installing Gentoo - Download a Stage Tarball

Now that the partitions have been mounted, we need to download what is called a stage tarball. The archive contains the base files needed to establish a working Linux system. First, let's change our working directory to the location we've just mounted our partitions to.

# cd /mnt/gentoo/

Before we can download the tarball, we're going to need to know the full path of the file. The tarballs are hosted here. Choose the folder specific to your architecture; amd64 for 64-bit systems, and x86 for 32-bit systems. Again, if you don't know which architecture you have, choose x86. In the next folder you'll want to select the current-stage3 folder. Inside that folder will be an archive ending with the extension *bz2. Make a note of the full path to the file. Use the wget command to download it using the following example:

# wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/gentoo/releases/x86/current-stage3/stage3-i686-20101111.tar.bz2

After the file has finished downloading, extract it to the filesystem.

# tar xvjpf stage3-*.tar.bz2

Once the extraction has completed, you can delete the archive.

# rm *.bz2

Now we need to download and extract the latest snapshot of portage, Gentoo's package management system. First we move the usr directory.

# cd /mnt/gentoo/usr
# wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/snapshots/portage-latest.tar.bz2
# tar xvjpf portage-lat*

As before, once extracted, delete the archive.

# rm *.bz2

Now that you have a system that is ready to go. But before we chroot into the new environment, we need to Configure make.conf.