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?
@pixeldaemon As a 20+ year gentoo user, I often point people to the handbook as a tool for helping them to gain a solid understanding of linux. The way I recommend you go about it is to first read through the entire handbook and (most importantly) go read about each thing you encounter in it that you don’t understand. Once you think you somewhat have a grasp of why each step is in there, start running through an install. Only use prebuilt kernels for now (ever really), there is no need to build one yourself unless you need something specific. Don’t worry about fuck ups, just keep going till you get through it, you’ll learn what you did wrong as you progress. Once you’ve made it as far as a functional desktop, rinse and repeat until you find yourself only referencing the handbook for verification, not reading it, then move on to learning about portage.
It might be a very stupid question, but, does Gentoo handbook assume I’m preparing to install Gentoo from an already working Linux system?
With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.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.