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Installation
The installation of a Gentoo Linux system differs much from the installation methods of more desktop-oriented operating systems, like Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Unlike these, the Gentoo Linux installation is a manual approach where the user is invited to execute, in a guided manner, the necessary commands to set up their system. Because of this, the installation is one of the major hurdles users have to go through, but once accomplished, they will already have learned quite a lot of Linux in general, and Gentoo in specific.
If you expect support for the installation (or results of the installation) you have to follow the official documents. Using unofficial guides may result in a request to start all over again using the official documents.
Installation resources
Official instructions
The official installation instructions are hosted in the Gentoo Handbooks as their first part. These are kept up to date by the Handbook Project in close cooperation with the release engineering team, architecture teams and maintainers.
Unofficial instructions
Various community-driven installation instructions have emerged. A small set of these is listed below.
- Installing Gentoo Linux, as part of the Linux Sea online e-book
- Complete Handbook, a community-driven effort to create a fully documented approach on Gentoo Linux
- Sakaki's EFI Install Guide, a detailed tutorial showing how to install a dual secure-boot Gentoo system on a Windows 10 (or 8) UEFI PC, including full instructions for LUKS, LVM, systemd and GNOME 3. Now extended to also cover the "GNOME 3 with OpenRC" use case.
Some instructions are made specifically for one hardware type (for instance a particular laptop).