Today i have just installed a new gentoo system.

Installing Gentoo

From http://www.gentoo.org i grabbed the liveCD installer

While booting my new machine from the livecd Xorg failed but no problems i just used the command line installer.

The command line installer does not force you to enter each command yourself (but you can if you like) it is just a wizzard that does not use Xorg.

I just pressed next…next…next…next (the defaults will do)

I could now reboot into my shiny new gentoo.

First Boot

On first boot the first problem was that i had not installed a dhcp client so i had no network card address

You can get around this by following the steps in my previous post.

Once my network card is on i first wanted to get a dhcp client

emerge dhcpcd

I could now run

dhcpcd eth0

This got an IP address from my router

The other thing to set before we do some updates is to add some USE flags to /etc/make.conf

USE=”a52 aac aalib accessibility dns administrator alsa apm arts avi libaudiofile bash-completion bluetooth bzip2 cddb cdr cups curl dbus divx dri dts dv dvb dvd dvdnav dvdr dvdread eds emboss encode esd exif expat ffmpeg flac foomaticdb ftp gdmdb gif gpm gtk gtk2 gnome hal ipod java javascript jpeg kde lame libg++ libwww libcaca libwww win32codecs mad mikmod motif lirc mp3 mjpeg mpeg mplayer mysql mythtv nas nptl ncurses nls ogg opengl oss png pdf qt qt3 qt4 quicktime real samba sdl spell ssl taglib theora tiff truetype videos cdparanoia quicktime qt3support tqt4 real vcd vidix win32codecs vim-syntax unicode udev vorbis workbench X xinerama xml xscreensaver xv xvid xine xmms xv zlib”

This is mine for my desktop PCUpdating Gentoo

Now we have an internet connection i now needed to update my system

But first gentoo needs to know what packages are available. Run

emerge –sync

To sync your computer with the gentoo update servers

Now to do a full update run

emerge -uvDN world

I also have a post describing what that command does

You should now run a

revdep-rebuild

To make sure that no packages are pointing to old versions of other application

Install Some Important Packages& build new kernel

emerge gentoolkit openssh genkernel eselect gentoo-sources

run

eselect kernel list

To list the available kernels & take note of the number in the box. eg [3]

eselect kernel set 3

Where 3 is the number from the box

Now you have your kernel selected you can run

genkernel –install –menuconfig all

To run menuconfig so you can set your options  & install your kernel

This will put your new kernel & initramfs in /boot

Now open /boot/grub/menu.lst  and add something like this depending on your kernel version

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.23-gentoo-r6
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.23-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda3
initrd /initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.23-gentoo-r6

You can now reboot into your new up to date gentoo operating system