Handbook:Main Page

Introduction
The Gentoo Handbook is an effort to centralize documentation into a coherent handbook. This handbook contains the installation instructions for Internet-based installation approaches and parts about working with Gentoo and Portage.

Architectures
Gentoo Linux is available for many architectures. But what exactly is an architecture?

An architecture is a family of CPUs (processors) who support the same instructions. The two most prominent architectures in the desktop world are the x86 architecture and the x86_64 architecture (for which Gentoo uses the amd64 notation). But many other architectures exist, such as sparc, ppc (the PowerPC family), mips, arm, ...

A distribution as versatile as Gentoo supports many architectures. For that reason, you'll find that our Gentoo Handbooks are offered for many of the supported architectures. However, that might lead to some confusion as not all users are aware of the differences. Some are only aware of the CPU type or name that their system is a part of (like i686 or Intel Core i7). Below you will find a quick summary of the supported architectures and the abbreviation used in Gentoo. However, most people that do not know the architecture of their system are mostly interested in x86 or amd64.

Viewing the handbook
Assuming that you know (or at least have an idea) which architecture your system is using, you can now select your choice of handbook.

Can't you magically have the handbook dynamically created for each choice?
Everything is possible, but we have opted to only do this on a per-architecture level. Other choices, like partitioning, kernel selection, tool installation and more are easy enough to explain in a single document.

I can't find stage1 information in the Gentoo handbook
Instructions on using a stage1 or stage2 tarball are now available in the Gentoo FAQ. A stage3 installation is the only supported installation as of now.

I disagree with ...
Please report your idea; disagreeing without providing us with constructive feedback doesn't help the situation. Documentation is made for the community, so community feedback is well appreciated.

However, you must know that most decisions made while developing documentation are based on a consensus-model. It is impossible to write/structure documentation in such a way that everybody is happy with it. You must be able to accept a "No" with the reason that we believe the current implementation benefits most people.