Hello.
I've encountered a problem with installing Gentoo (this is my first attempt to do it). I've seen the similar question in other forum, and it was answered, but the answer does not fit my problem.

So, to configure the WPA network access I need the wpa_supplicant app, that should be installed via emerge.

The latest minimal CD itself does not contain the portage.
I have booted from it, created the file systems for installation, unpacked the stage3 and the latest portage snapshot.

When chrooting, I have emerge, but when I run "emerge wpa_supplicant", it needs Internet access (though wpa_supplicant is present in the portage tree), leading to viscious circulus.

Is downloading the wpa_supplicant source and manually building it the only option?

Hi,

I never encountered this kind of trap beacause I can use LAN and/or have admin access to the wireless AP I'm using and could thus reconfigure it temporarily to not be encrypted.
I suppose you tried asking for that or something similar already.

But I guess one possible solution would be to use some other Live-CD you know or like (be it Ubuntu or Knoppix or DSL or Puppy or ...) instead of the Gentoo minimal CD.

That way you have the Networking capabilities of that particular Distribution and can use it to build your Gentoo system.
It should not matter if you are using the Gentoo CD or any other Linux Distribution - you always build the Gentoo system in a chroot from the initially running Distribution.

HTH

Thank you, jomen, your solution sounds nice. I understand the concept of building in chrooted environment (I have the experience of building LFS in virtual machine). So this is a workaround that will help me.
But the problem is still there and I'm curious what's the source of it. As for me, if I have downloaded the portage snapshot, I should be able to install programs from there.
And what is interesting, here the guy did have the working wpa_supplicant in his environment.

Your problem is that your network connection doesn't work. I can't help much with that, as I try to avoid wireless unless I am forced to use it for many reasons that are not relevant to this thread.

You can use *any* livecd or even another distro that's already installed as a base to install Gentoo. All you need is a working linux system that you can use to chroot from, and that can provide you with a working internet connection. So, as long as it's up to date enough to be able to chroot (mainly in which regards glibc) you shouldn't have any problem.

There are also instructions on how to install without network connection, however I don't advice that unless you have absolutely no other way to proceed. It's just inconvenient and tedious.

I have no idea of the current status of wireless support on the official livecds, however I really advice to use whatever you know that works instead, so you can comfortably search the net if needed in firefox while you install Gentoo on an xterm. There are hundreds of livecds out there that are much better and complete, and some of them are even smaller than the Gentoo one in size. As much as I love Gentoo, it's the pure truth

...about the last sentence in guard's post:
I don't know if the Gentoo minimal CD has the neccesary tools "on board" to connect to a WPA secured network. The driver for your wireless card would need to be included in the booted Live-CD as well as wpa_supplicant.
Reading the post you linked to I understand that everything should be there.
It would then be "only" a matter of configuration.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=4&chap=4

Reading you, at least the latter (wpa_supplicant available) seems not to be the case.
Then it gets a little more difficult...

I don't know which one it is - I have no CD available to try.

portage does not contain any sourcecode - it only contains the ebuilds which are the info on how emerge is to build the source into executables and then install them.
Without a working internet-connection you will however not be able to download any souce-code - not wpa_suppliciant nor anything else
...and thus cannot build anything.
You are using the internet connection of the system from which you did the chroot - if this was not working, it will not work in chroot.

It might be possible to download the source of wpa_supplicant and any other source which it depends on beforehand - as you did with the portage-snapshot and the stage-tarball - then build it (sources go into /usr/portage/distfiles) and transfer it back to the environment the Live-CD is running in - but the easier way is to just use a distribution which can connect you to your WPA network out of the box.

To me it looks like WPA should be possible, but I'm not sure.
Did you try configuring it - and how?
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=4&chap=4

So, the problem is really there - minimal CD does not have necessary tools. wpa_supplicant is required for WPA configuration, so I haven't tried to configure the key. Only WEP could be configured with the iwconfig. As for the driver, it's loaded automatically during the boot, as iwconig shows the correct info about my wireless card.

Thanks for the explanation of portage, I thought the snapshot contains the sources.

And I was not able to find any official Live CD newer than the 2008.0.
So I think I will use the Puppy Linux Live CD for the task.
But it is so strange that Gentoo did not try to include this minimal requirement into its minimal CD As I think, WPA/WPA2 networks (and wireless at all) are becoming much and much more popular than the classic Ethernet.

Hi, maybe you should try to install Gentoo via Ubuntu LiveCD or SystemRescueCD.

After trying an old 2007 minimal CD I'm not convinced that WPA is not possible.
I never ever tried configuring it via commandline but it should work - of course you need to change the driver given in the example here to what you actually have.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=4&chap=4
You need to have the network up before you go to chroot - that is why I mentioned:
via:
/mirrors/gentoo/releases/x86/current/ (note the "current" vs. "2008") you'll find a recent version of the CD's
e.g.:
http://ftp.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de/m...l-20090623.iso

Still, installing Gentoo using another Distribution would probably be the easier way.

Have fun!

jomen, thanks again, but you have missed some points, probably.
I have the current minimal CD. wpa_supplicant is required for WPA configuration. wpa_supplicant is not included in minimal CD. wpa_supplicant is probably included in earlier versions of Live CD, but there are no current Live CDs available on the mirrors.

Anyway, I have already started building Gentoo using Puppy.

Thanks again for all the replies, I was surprised by the speed they appeared

wpa_supplicant was even included in the minimal from 2007 I have here - what I was not sure about was if WPA could really be done with it since I never even tried to configure that via commandline (no need to).
It _is_ there.

The link in my last post pointed to a minimal CD which is (should be, from the name of it) more recent than the latest "official" one - which is, as you mentioned, from 2008.

But all that does not really matter now and you are probably already halfway through installing Gentoo using Puppy.

All the best!

Yes, it's strange, but it is now available from the minimal-cd (or I'm so stupid not to find it =)
Thanks for the wishes, I have built the kernel and plan to continue today.

guard,

You can use sneakernet http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p...9.html#3461249 to get the source code for WPA_Supplicant in the same way as you fetched the stage3 and portage snapshot

Thank you, Neddy, but using other Live CD is really much easier )