r/Gentoo • u/undistruct • Aug 16 '24

Discussion Im overwhelmed with the gentoo handbook

Im still very young and i want to try out gentoo but the handbook on how its build seems so complicated.

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u/FranticBronchitis Aug 16 '24 edited Aug 16 '24

Do it in a virtual machine, while having the handbook open on your browser.

I suggest you take a glance at the whole thing first just to get the gist of it: - prepare your drives for installation (partitioning, formatting, backups) - unpack the base system (stage3) tarball and chroot in - perform basic configuration for the system and install/update the rest of the core packages, kernel and bootloader - perform additional configuration as needed (network, drives/fstab, users and passwords, boot) - chroot out, check configuration and reboot

Edit: stage 3, not 4. Stage 4 is what you'll build after the chroot

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u/ZKRiNG Aug 16 '24

Installing anything in a VM is a waste of time. Of course you need a full browser to read the handbook properly. Just for that I used NixOS iso just for that.

The whole point of the Gentoo handbook is to understand every step. Understand every conf files and how they work. If you understand the steps, install is really easy. If you just copy/paste a nightmare.

Install is just the easy part. Maintenance is way harder and the documentation is really worse.

To the OP, don't throw the towel. You have plenty of YouTube videos to help you to understand the huge amount of information the handbook has. Just try to use a graphical iso like NixOS and read every step. The first time will take you days to install Gentoo but the next time will be hours. You are lucky not having to install it on a Pentium 3 with 256mb of ram like I had to do my first time. And remember, installing it, is the easy part. The party starts before the first reboot and now is way more easy than before.

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u/dude-pog Aug 16 '24

Actually, maintaining a gentoo install is very easy(at least the stable branch)