The instructions in the “Gentoo handbook”:http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook are very good if you are doing the setup for the first time. Now I just open it to not forget anything and scroll over the most, so today I decided to make my own check list.

• Set up partitions
• Make filesystems
• Unpack the stage3 archive

  links ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/amd64/current-stage3/
  sha512sum stage3-amd64-<release>.tar.bz2
  tar xvjpf stage3-*.tar.bz2
  

• Edit /etc/portage/make.conf
• Chroot

  cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/
  mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
  mount --rbind /sys /mnt/gentoo/sys
  mount --rbind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
  chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
  

• Sync portage

  mkdir /usr/portage
  emerge-webrsync
  

• Set some system settings
• Profile and useflags
• Timezone

  ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Stockholm /etc/localtime
  echo `Europe/Stockholm` > /etc/timezone
  

• Locale settings

  vim /etc/locale.gen
  locale-gen
  vim /etc/locale.conf
  

• Hostname

  echo `HOSTNAME` > /etc/hostname
  

• KERNELTIME!
• Don’t forget the bootloader

  emerge -av syslinux
  mkdir -p /boot/extlinux
  extlinux -i /boot/extlinux
  dd bs=440 count=1 conv=notrunc if=/usr/share/syslinux/gptmbr.bin of=/dev/sda
  cp /usr/share/syslinux/{menu,vesamenu}.c32 /boot/extlinux
  vim /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
  

• set root password
• install stuff you need
  • dhcpcd
  • cryptsetup
  • …
• reboot and hope you did not forget anything ;)