User:Ris/where

= Where is Gentoo Linux =

Gentoo Linux is made up of many files, destined to reside on the local persistent storage of the system that will host the Gentoo installation. Here we will Article description::explain where these files come from, and how they get onto the local system.

Installation media
Gentoo provides a bootable "CD" iso, which can be written to a CD, flash drive or similar removable media to get a minimal Gentoo environment up and running - this can be useful to install Gentoo from.

Links to this Minimal Installation CD iso file can be found at the https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/ page which will [|link] to directories on mirror servers that provide the actual files to download.

There is also an "admin CD" that provides extra tools than the minimal install CD.

Stage tarballs
Stage tarballs contain the files necessary to get a new Gentoo system up and running. They are hosted along with the installation CD.

Gentoo ebuild repository
The Gentoo repository contains ebuilds, files containing instructions on how to build software. In the repository there is an ebuild for each version of available packages.

Packages / source code / package files / Distfiles
The ebuilds contain instructions for fetching the files needed to build and install each package. This data will come from diverse sources, often the source code repositories of the software projects themselves.