General info on gentoo installation

feddozz · n00b Joined: 24 Feb 2011 Posts: 38

Hello,

I am considering to try gentoo. I realised i will have to spend several hours which I will need to spread over several weekends. I was wandering whether it is possible to interrupt the installation shutdown the machine and resume after days. I understand that it depends on the stage you're at. I just wanted some general comments about it as did not see anything on the handbook about it yet.

Bye

disi · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 10:27 am Post subject:

You can interrupt the installation at any time.

All you do is, boot a liveCD or bootstick or whatever and copy,extract,delete,edit files on the local harddrive.
If you interrupt before installing the kernel [and|or] bootloader, just remember to boot from a liveCD and chroot again.
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Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21633

Installation time does not need to be contiguous. However, you cannot interrupt the build of a given package and reuse the interrupted work later. The simplest way to express this is that, if emerge is running, you should wait for it to finish before halting the system. This is a slightly overbroad restriction, but is easier than delving into the details of exactly when you can and cannot safely interrupt operations.

If you interrupt installation, then once you have booted back to the LiveCD on subsequent sessions, you will need to repeat some, but not all, of your prior commands to return to the hard disk installation environment. You will need to repeat your mount commands and the chroot call. You must not repeat the partitioning or filesystem creation steps, since those would destroy all work from your prior session.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

The (interrupted) sequence would be roughly:

Boot some sort of linux, usually a live CD.
Download and unpack the stage 3 file and a portage snapshot.
Chroot into the installation.
Start emerging stuff.
(The handbook gives all the details - follow it carefully.)

Then, when you want to stop, kill the current emerge and exit the chroot.

To resume building, re-connect to the internet, re-enter the chroot,
and re-start emerge. Portage will start where it left off, but any unbuilt
package will be rebuilt from scratch, so try not to shut down while
building one of the larger packages.

Good luck - Will

feddozz · n00b Joined: 24 Feb 2011 Posts: 38

feddozz · n00b Joined: 24 Feb 2011 Posts: 38

Now that i am in the middle of it i have more detailed questions:
do i need to resync portage? The first time i did it it told me to update.
also do i need to rechoose the profile?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2011 1:23 pm Post subject:

feddozz,

If you did the emerge --sync when you were told to, there is no need to do it again until you can boot your own kernel.
You only need to change the profile if you want to, or when its being depreciated by Gentoo. In the latter case, you will get a notice.
If you keep ignoring the notice until the profile is removed, you will find that gcc gives you a fatal error too. Thats something you can't ignore.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.