User:NeddySeagoon/Historical Gentoo

Why?
Like everything else gentoo, because I can.

Background
Gentoo started life on 1999-10-04. I didn't join in the fun until April 2003. I remembered it as April/May 2002, when I finally got ADSL. However I unearthed my original gentoo-minimal-1.4-rc4.iso CD the other day when I was was looking for bits to get and old A7N8X install to boot. Thats another story.

Having unearthed the gentoo-minimal-1.4-rc4.iso I just had to take it for a spin. After 18 years, it still works. That was a suprise.

It also contains a i686 stage 1. I couldn'd have used that in 2003 as my original Gentoo install was on a 450MHz k6-2.

So, I have a bootable ISO, a stage1 tarball. What else do I need for an install.

A contemporary portage snapshot and some distfiles.

I still have a rather dog eared, pages out of order, paper copy of the 2003 handbook if I can find it.

So I'll try an April 2003 Gentoo Install just because I can.

Preparation
Spin up a Virtual Machine. I gave it 1 core and 8G HDD.

Boot the gentoo-minimal-1.4-rc4.iso, make a DOS partition table and create boot 32M, swap 512M and root the rest of the HDD.

Make filesystems ext2 on boot, ext2 -j on root. (That's ext3)