Stage tarball

A Stage tarball is an archive of the basic files used for the installation of Gentoo. It is offered in architecture specific versions as stage 3 on get.gentoo.org and hosted on distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/ /autobuilds/

Downloading and expanding the stage tarball as described in Gentoo handbook will install an almost complete and almost functional system (the most important parts still missing are a kernel and a bootloader).

Stage 4 tarballs have become available for amd64 on distfiles.gentoo.org recently.

External resources

 * http://www.funtoo.org/Stage_Tarball - Stage tarball explained on the Funtoo Linux wiki.