Installing without being connected to the internet

[stippi]

Hi all,

having downloaded the 1.4 iso (UT2003 version), I wonder what else I need to install Gentoo Linux. When I download a stage 3 tarball optimized for my system, will this be all I need, or will the install process try to download additional files? The reason I ask is because I don't have net access from the machine onto which I want to install.
Another question is about the boot loader. My primary OS is BeOS, and it comes with its own boot loader, which I want to continue to use. So I install GRUB into the Gentoo boot partition, and leave the BeOS loader in the MBR?

Thanks for any and all replies that help get me going... regards,
-Stephan

[474]

I think the stage3 tarball should contain ready-made binaries for everything considered to be a system package ("emerge -p --emptytree system" for more info), and you won't need to bootstrap. But you'll probably still need to get a logger (metalog) at least, and the kernel sources (gentoo-sources). Plus other things (e.g. reiserfsutils if you use reiserfs, and so on). Ideally, get them in advance on another installation with the "emerge -f" command, then tar your entire /usr/portage directory onto some kind of medium. Then untar the tree on to your target machine after you've dealt with the stage3 tarball, and you should be able to emerge the extras without any problems. You might as well fetch anything else you need beforehand. That's what I did and it works fine.

Not sure about the bootloader. It depends on how the BeOS bootloader works. Usually, Grub will not destroy the bootloader belonging to another OS. It will just appear first in the chain, then if you had a Grub entry for BeOS, the BeOS bootloader would appear after you selected BeOS. Can't make any promises though ... I would advise backing up the MBR (after you've made your partitions during install, and before you've installed grub) like so:

[rac]

In addition to the things that kerframil mentioned, stage3 tarballs no longer contain a portage tree, so you will need to download a snapshot from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/snapshots/.
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