User:Zulu Foxtrott/GentooOnARM

Welcome
First of all, welcome to Gentoo! You are about to enter the world of choices and performance. Gentoo is all about choices. When installing Gentoo, this is made clear several times - users can choose how much they want to compile themselves, how to install Gentoo, what system logger to use, etc.

Gentoo is a fast, modern meta-distribution with a clean and flexible design. It is built on an ecosystem of free software and does not hide what is beneath the hood from its users. Portage, the package maintenance system which Gentoo uses, is written in Python, meaning the user can easily view and modify the source code. Gentoo's packaging system uses source code (although support for pre-compiled packages is included too) and configuring Gentoo happens through regular text files. In other words, openness everywhere.

It is very important that everyone understands that choices are what makes Gentoo run. We try not to force users into anything they do not like. If anyone believes otherwise, please file a bug report.

Installation options for Gentoo on ARM
Depending on the circumstances, there are mainly

Installing the easy way
Gentoo can be installed directly to a storage device of choice (like a SD-Card, an eMMC, a USB stick, an external hard drive, etc.) from a working Linux command-line environment.

Prerequisites
Prerequisites to be able to install Gentoo the easy way are:


 * a host system that provides a Linux command-line environment with:
 * network access
 * write access to the storage device of choice
 * the ability to perform commands as root
 * a target system that is able to boot from the storage device of choice.

The professional installation
Taking the professional approach, Gentoo is also installed directly to a storage device of choice from a working Linux command-line environment. However, in most cases, the professional installation approach requires emulating the target system on the host system.

Prerequisites
Prerequisites for performing a professional Gentoo installation are:


 * a host system that provides a Linux command-line environment with:
 * network access
 * write access to the storage device of choice
 * the ability to perform commands as root
 * a host system that supports virtualization
 * a target system that is able to boot from the storage device of choice.

The traditional installation
The traditional way of installing Gentoo is to boot the target system from Gentoo boot media and install Gentoo from there to any other storage device of the target system. If no official Gentoo boot media is provided this necessitates creating the bootable media first. This can be done by following one of the other installation approaches outlined above, which both yield exactly that - Gentoo boot media.

Prerequisites
The main prerequisite to perform a traditional installation is:


 * the possibility to obtain Gentoo boot media for the target system.

remove:
Sometimes however none of the aforementioned methods works, for example on systems that only support one storage medium at a time or for which no installation media whatsoever is available. Such situations are probably most often encountered in the sphere of embedded devices or bleeding edge architectures.

To that end, this document covers installing Gentoo directly to a storage device of choice (like a SD-Card, an eMMC, a USB stick, an external hard drive, etc.) from a working Linux command-line environment. This method also provides a shortcut in every case where no official Gentoo installation media is available.

Prerequisites are a working Linux command-line environment with network access and write access to the storage device of choice. Furthermore root privileges within that environment and knowledge of the name of the target system's architecture are required. The command-line environment does not need to run on a system of the same architecture as the target system, implying it does not need to run on the target system itself. But of course the target system must support the storage device and be able to boot from it.