gentoo installation questions
 

I think I want to do a stage 1 install. However I have a wireless connection which I have to use ndiswrapper for. I need the universal liveCD for that isn't it?

Can I run the installation via a xterminal in debian with fluxbox? Cause I hear it takes quite a while and I actually don't want to miss my computer for long now. Or is the step till you can run fluxbox in gentoo not that long?

depends how long "too long" is really. and how fast your system is. Essentially, on a modern machine, say a 1.5ghz p4, you should be able to start emerging fluxbox about.. 2 to 3 hours into doing the low level library installs. once you're that far, you can let it automatically install XFree86 / Xorg overnight, and flux should be ready in the morning.

Gentoo isn't a "low down time" installation though. You really need to be happy to give it a day.

Mind you though, i'm saying this for a stage1 installation, which is what i normally do. if you did a stage 3 run, or from the live cd you could probably expect to be running within 2 hours easy.

I want a stage 1. And well I have a 733 mHz so I can add a lot more time. So there's no way to actually run it via a terminal window? I heard something about mounting the iso file and then running it somhow?

edit: and probably 24 hours is too long. I should have done that when I was learning my exam tests lol

i'm not sure what you mean by a terminal window... it's not like a LFS installation where you have an existing build environment. to compile it within.

i think i might now what you mean actually... running it in chroot... to be honest i'm not sure, i guess it could be, but i've not needed to know.

I mean that I'm running my normal debian on fluxbox and in the meantime install gentoo via xterm. Just like you can compile a kernel in xterm so the only time you miss is the reboot time. Or isn't that possible.

But I'm confused I thought chroot was a security program or can it pull this kind of stuff off too?

well part of the gentoo install is to chroot itself. which is basically pretending your root, /, is somewhere else, so you'd want to bulild your gentoo at /usr/src/gentoo but with the installation, you'd want to trick "gentoo" into thinking that installing something globally within itself world, e.g. /usr/bin, while it's actually going to /usr/src/gentoo/usr/bin/ thing with this though is that you'd then have gentoo all in one single partition, which would need ripping apart to actually get it onyo your system. if you had spare partitions on a drive already, then they could be mounted as in the real system, but this is all gettting quite convoluted. go for it! install that stage1 proper!

OK then I'll wait till I have school again so I don't care my PC's running all day and I can't do nothing on it. I have the partitions already setup but it sounds pretty hard to work around it. So that'll probably only give me more trouble later :)

Take a look here
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml

Scroll down to the 6th point "Installing Gentoo from an existing Linux distribution"

Ive done it that way mainly because i also cant miss the time that gentoo is installing.

Have fun

Awesome I completely missed that link. So it looks like I can still do the stage 1 installation this way :) Thanks!