Configure Networking
Installing Gentoo - Configure Networking
Maybe it just works? (blatantly stolen from the Gentoo Handbook)
Chances are after booting with your installation media, you have a functional networking system. This can be tricky for some devices, especially wireless ones, and is dependent on whether or not the correct module has been loaded for your network device. You can test whether or not your network is working correctly by issuing a simple ping command.
# ping -c 3 www.gentoo.org
If you get responses from the server, you are ready to proceed. If the requests time out, you may need to investigate your DHCP settings or even set a static IP. Chances are you know best how your network is set up. To save you the trouble of fiddling with things manually, there is a simple utility provided. To set up networking on the first wired network device in your system,
# net-setup eth0
For a wireless device,
# net-setup wlan0
If you cannot run the utility or get error messages, you can examine the networking devices that were set up at boot time and determine local IP addresses. This is equivalent to the ipconfig /all command in Windows.
# ifconfig
I will try to add more info for troubleshooting network devices here later.
Optional - perform your install over ssh
If you are installing Gentoo onto a physical machine, you'll be working in an environment that, depending on what you know, lacks multitasking capability and a graphic interface. This isn't ideal, so to compensate, we'll set up an ssh connection. This will allow you to log into the machine remotely from another PC with an operating system already installed so you can access web resources such as this guide while performing the installation, not to mention copy and paste commands. To start the ssh daemon
# /etc/init.d/sshd start
In order to connect, we'll need to set the root password. You'll need to enter the password twice to set it.
# passwd
You should now be able to connect to it via another machine. If you are stuck with a Windows machine, you can use a tool such as PuTTY to connect to the ip address you noted above with the user root and password you just entered. If you are using a linux box, you can connect using the following command:
$ ssh root@ipaddress
Once you have successfully set up your networking devices, you can move on to Partitioning.