Apply Filesystems

Installing Gentoo - Apply Filesystems

Now that we've created our partitions, we need to apply filesystems to them and activate the swap partition. First we'll apply an ext2 filesystem to the boot partition. Remember to use the alias the kernel assigned your hard drive in the place of /dev/sda in the examples below if it is different.

# mke2fs /dev/sda1

Next we'll apply the ext3 filesystem to the root partition.

# mke2fs -j /dev/sda3

After the filesystem has been applied, we can activate the swap partition.

# mkswap /dev/sda2
# swapon /dev/sda2

There are plenty of other filesystems available in Linux, all with different advantages and disadvantages. These filesystems are supported by almost every linux kernel and have sufficient speed and security for most users. In addition to innately supported filesystems, custom filesystems like ReiserFS and AndrewFS can be used, as long as support for them is enabled in the kernel. There is also the ext4 filesystem, which is the next step in the evolution of the Linux innate filesystem, but additional configuration is needed to support it.

Once you have applied the filesystems to your boot and root partitions and activated your swap, you can Mount Partitions.