I've had gentoo installed before a couple of times, but previously I just had to download the liveCD and the packages CD so that I could just do a relatively straight forward "stage 3 + GRP" install.

Now, it appears that the x86/i686 packages CD images have disappeared from the mirrors i.e. there still seems to be a "GRP" folder on the mirrors, but nothing in it.

I checked 6 or 7 different mirrors within about 500 miles radius of the UK but none of them seemed to have the packages CD image/iso

So how do I install gentoo and obtain the pre-compiled GRP packages these days ? Is it just that I must do a network connected install and obtain the packages as bin packages ? Or is there another way of doing a "no network" install but still being able to obtain the GRP/pre-compiled packages ?

Yes, I've already downloaded the i686 live installer CD.

As ever, any advice is much appreciated.

regards

John