Minimal install - no links, no noting

[empathon]

First at all - Hello Gentoo community

I have been using Slackware since long time as my desktop. Now, after upgrading my PC to amd64 I decide to change my distribution. Something easy to upgrade but giving me full control... and here I am! Yeah I'm glad to see your happy faces when I announce it Ok, here is my problem.

I use /gentoo-2007.0-minimal/amd64/ and I have fallow Installation Guide. Using stage 3, configured grub - everything seems to work. BUT ( here is the funny part ) system is clean, there is no links and other tools I had available on CD. I did it twice - first time on VM and then live.
It should be like that? It's not that I don't figured out how get that tools but its look like I screw something or I'm not?

Regards

[Sadako]

No, that's normal, the base install isn't supposed to be like the livecd, from this point onwards you choose exactly what you do and don't want.

[ShinyThings]

You can install those tools through portage. Just do emerge links to install links, emerge vim to install vim, etc.

You may want to make use of the -a and -v flags. -v gives verbose output and -a will show what actions will be carried out and ask if you want to proceed. So then it would be emerge -av links vim other-package-name.

[deathcon1]

If you like the -av (very useful to inspect the USE flags each package has before emerging which you should *always* do) then set EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTIONS="--ask --verbose". Also, look into FEATURES="parallel-fetch", it'll continue downloading in the background while things compile, handy when you're emerging something like Gnome or KDE-meta (both of which are pretty big). A handy tool for finding packages faster then emerge is eix. Just emerge eix, and after each emerge --sync run update-eix (alternativly you can run eix-sync which does both) then if you need to look for a package type eix <package name> or if you can only remember a part of the package name then you can look for that as well. It's very handy.