2008.0

About Gentoo

Gentoo is a source based distribution.
After the bootstrap step, the installation of all the software is done from the source. Main strong points:

Highly configurable: supports a wide variety of software
Optimisation: all the software can be built for a specific sub-architecture to take full advantage of a particular processor(s) features
Great documentation and very helpful mailing lists and IRC channels (the installation instructions are available in 12 languages and for 7 different architectures)
Empowers its users to know more about their system

How these images were built

Because Gentoo is normally built using a chroot, building a UML instance only requires minor tweaks after following the standard installation instructions, using the host and a loopback mounted filesystem instead of booting from an install CD.

The Disk Images

These images are on an ext3 filesystem and use 2GB of diskspace.

x86

download-link root_fs (~150MB) MD5 SHA
Boot test log

AMD64

download-link root_fs (~170MB) MD5 SHA
Boot test log

SELinux

No longer available...

(last updated on the 2011-07-02)

Keeping it up to date

Gentoo updates are handled using the 'emerge' tool, by running:


emerge update
emerge -uDavt world
etc-update