User:Zulu Foxtrott/GentooOnARM/EasyInstall

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Installing Gentoo the easy way

Warning
Do not use! The instructions are unofficial, as such unsupported, and they're incomplete! The content is not intended for use by the public.

How the installation is structured

The Gentoo Installation can be seen as a 9-step procedure, corresponding to the next set of chapters. Each step results in a certain state:

Step Result
1 The user is in a working environment ready to install Gentoo.
2 The hard disks are initialized to host the Gentoo installation.
3 The installation environment is prepared and the user is ready to chroot into the new environment.
4 Core packages, which are the same on all Gentoo installations, are installed.
5 The Linux kernel is installed.
6 Most of the Gentoo system configuration files are created.
7 The necessary system tools are installed.
8 The proper boot loader has been installed and configured.
9 The freshly installed Gentoo Linux environment is ready to be explored.

Whenever a certain choice is presented the handbook will try to explain the pros and cons of each choice. Although the text then continues with a default choice (identified by "Default: " in the title), the other possibilities will be documented as well (marked by "Alternative: " in the title). Do not think that the default is what Gentoo recommends. It is, however, the choice that Gentoo believes most users will make.

Sometimes an optional step can be followed. Such steps are marked as "Optional: " and are therefore not needed to install Gentoo. However, some optional steps are dependent on a previously made decision. The instructions will inform the reader when this happens, both when the decision is made, and right before the optional step is described.

Selecting the target platform

Devices of all shapes and sizes are built around ARM's instruction set architectures (ISA). They range from tiny embedded controllers for robots to big server hardware for data center workloads, with some of them based on the older ARM ISA and others featuring the newer AArch64 (often referred to as ARM64) ISA. Thus it is only logical that no single set of installation instructions fits all target systems.

Note
Have a look at the vendor's or manufacturer's documentation or ask the Internet in general to determine the target system.

Select the system that is supposed to run Gentoo.

ARM systems

  • ASUS Chromebook C201
    • firmware: depthcharge
    • partitiontable: gpt (recommended)
    • platform: rockchip
    • board: veyron-speedy

ARM64 systems

Arch: arm64

  • ROCKPro64
    • firmware: rockchip
    • partitiontable: gpt (recommended)
    • platform: rockchip
    • board: rockpro64
  • Generic
    • firmware: uefi
    • partitiontable: gpt (recommended)
    • platform: generic
    • board: generic