creating a personalised stage3 install ?

toliman · n00b Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 14 Location: Melbourne, AU

i was reading this forum post about installing gentoo on older hardware with limited HDD space, https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=24687, and it has some great tips on stripping locale info, doc's, and also suggests installing a handful of apps before churning through stage 3 (emerge system) and the -Os flag, which im willing to try out later today. combined with some of the other tips and hints, i hope to get a useful system that i wont need to tinker for days just to get GUI & apps installed. (it was fun the first dozen times ... )

the system i want to install to is a compaq K6-2 400mhz laptop, has 96mb of RAM, and 1.2gb HDD, but it runs out of space fairly quickly once xfree86, and gnome &/or kde is installed, leading to a reinstall of everything once a new version of some installed app comes out. the gcc compile alone takes about 4-7 hours, so i'd like to avoid doing it again. and again. and again.

the thought occured to me, is there any tricks or tips needed to install gentoo on a different platform & different system (in this case, VMware on an athlon Xp 2100) and then move the files over, a 'la' stage3 / stage4, with xfree86, openoffice, mozilla, xmms, fluxbox, preinstalled ?

are there any issues with this ? any nasty surprises or tips ?

lx · Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 2:20 pm Post subject:

What you could do is build it using the -b option, and thus making packages, on one system and unpack them on another, but the first systems needs the same libraries as the later, so all lib dependencies are in sync. You can unpack the cd image and rsync/ copy the packages to /usr/portage/packages or you could even mount it using NFS i suppose. Well it's a thought,

Ps it's better to use a chroot environment and not vmware (cause it costs a lot of processor when compiling), If done of seperate partition you could even create a backup system if you break your athlon-xp gentoo system, cause athlon-xp also runs k6 (or doesn't it?).

Cya lX.
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px · Guru Joined: 26 Sep 2002 Posts: 497 Location: Metz, France

you can also check for the how to make a stage 4 in this forum, I saw it a few week ago.
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paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

If you have a working gentoo system, or any other linux system for that matter, here is a quick how-to:

make a build directory and untar an existing gentoo stage3 to it:

toliman · n00b Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 14 Location: Melbourne, AU

ahh thanks for that , i really appreciate the effort to write that up ...

my main concern was compiling larger, intensive apps like openoffice and mozilla in the "emerge system" part of stage3, because those two monsters alone take up somewhere in the vicinity of 20-30 hours to compile and... well over 2gb of temp-space towards the end. The same could be said about gnome/kde, so the theory works for other intensive apps that require a day and a half (or more) to compile.

also i added some gimmicky things like gtkam, gtksee, gtkskan, fortune-mod, grip, fluxbox, gkrellm, ngrep, nmap, hotplug, procinfo and others.

as was expected, openoffice under vmware took an ungodly amount of time. . . finally, after finishing the compile, stripping the docs and the distfiles/temp directory, copying it over via tar/ftp, installing it, it seems to be working just fine.

i'm now curious about scp though, would scp also move permissions and ownership over ? what would i check/set for scp ?

to make things worse, i rsync'd today, and lo and behold, i now need to recompile essentially from stage1 again, new binutils, gcc, texinfo, perl, python etc.
( is this gentoo v1.4 final being run through the testing stages? )

.. again, another 2 whole days of compiling in front of me.

paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

I know what you're saying when you talk about building open office. I built it just to see how long it would take. 27 hours on my 900MHz machine and then it failed to work :cry:

It's my opinion that the openoffice-bin is the ideal way to go. It's just a waste of time and cycles to build it from scratch with no real advantages.

The system I use with the pre-built stage three tarballs allows me to install a system in less than an hour though, and that's good :wink:

I'm supprised that no one has begun building tarballs and putting them up for download anywhere.

With scp, you're kind of stuck. The ownership of the files is that of the user who sent them to the remote system. However, you could scp the binary (tbz2) package to the machine and then install it with ssh: