Artur Hefczyc

Well, the installation went smooth and without any problems. I have made one mistake though. For some unknown to me reason I selected Mac UK keyboard as one of final settings. After restart there was no way to login or change the  settings. Now reinstalling Gentoo again.

Very short guide for those who are interested how to install Gentoo in less then 30 minutes:

1. Get the livecd-i686-installer-2007.0.iso or more recent image if it is available. Just make sure you download the full live CD not the minimal version.
2. Setup the virtual machine in VMWare and point it to the ISO image as an installation disk. After you finished setting it up VMWare tries to run it automatically. Don't let it to do so.
   • Depending on your needs set proper HDD size. It doesn't need to be very huge as you can always attach another virtual HDD later on. On the other hand HDD in VMWare starts at zero size and grows when it is needed up to the size you set. So in theory you can set quite huge size. I set 20GB for my installation.
   • I would recommend a least 1GB RAM. But again it depends what your are going to do with the Gentoo installed.
3. Stop it and go to settings and at least adjust memory settings. Defaults are usually quite low. I set 1.5GB for the Gentoo as my Macbook has 4GB.
4. Now, after you adjusted your all settings (in my case VMWare always crashes at least once) start virtual machine and let it boot from the ISO image.
5. The best and quickest way to install it is to use Networkless installation mode provided by the GUI installer. But before you run it I would recommend to setup partitions on your hard drive manually as the defaults offered by the installer are not the best for my preferences. My preferred layout (for private desktop, workstation) is: 100MB /boot partition, 2GB swap and the rest of hard drive for / - the rest of the system including home and var directory. On the server I usually set a separate partition for /home. Here is a step by step guide how you set partitions for your installation:
   • Browser menu: Applications -> Accessories and click Terminal
   • Terminal opens so set the root password to whatever you like using command: sudo passwd
   • When the new password is set switch to root user with command: su - and when asked enter the password you just set
   • Set your hard drive partitions with fdisk: fdisk /dev/sda
     • 'n' - creates a new partition, when asked what type of the partition to create answer 'p' - primary, and then press '1' - the first partition. It asks you for the first sector number, press Enter to accept default. It asks you then for the last sector number or the size of the partition, enter: +100M - 100 MB size as this is your boot partition.
     • 'n' - creates next partition, when asked about partition type answer 'p' (primary) again and press '2' - the second partition. Accept the default first sector and enter +2000M (2GB swap) as the size (last sector).
     • 'n' - creates your third and last partition, again 'p' for primary partition and '3' - the third partition. Accept the default first and if you accept the default for the last sector the rest of the whole hard disk will be allocated.
     • Change the second partition type from the default Linux to Linux swap by pressing 't' and then select the second partition by pressing '2' and when asked for the Hex code enter 82.
     • You can now press 'p' to display your partition table to make sure everything is set as it is expected.
     • 'w' to write your new partition table and exit fdisk.
   • Now you have to create filesystems on your new partitions:
     • mke2fs /dev/sda1 - creates ext2 filesystem on your /boot partition
     • mkswap /dev/sda2 - creates swap on your second, swap partition
     • mkreiserfs /dev/sda3 - creates Reiserfs file system on your third / the system partition

Now you can run Gentoo Linux Installer (GTK+) and if you select Networkless installation you have Gentoo system setup in less then half an hour.