Stage 1 confusion..

[George Harrison]

I have installed Gentoo many times but have only done a Stage 3 for my athlon xp. I am using Debian right now but I want to reinstall Gentoo badly but before I go ahead and extract that same old tarball, should I just do the Stage 1? I think I should but I'm not quite grasping a Stage 1. What do you mean compile everything by yourself? Is there a separate guide for Stage 1 or do I just use the standard Gentoo handbook? I don't get what I would have to do in the install that would be so different from a Stage 3. What's this all about configuring all the bootstrapping? I don't get the term "Compile everything by scratch", do I still get to use CFLAGS to compile it for me? I am completely lost and would like to do this install but I won't do it until I get some info on it. Thanks for the help and excuse my newbness.

[jaboua]

I was wondering that myself about a month ago, just try stage1. I thought it would be hyper-complicated too, but it really ain't that much harder. But it takes some time, thought. The only problems I encountered was with me adding ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" in my /etc/make.conf, resulting in glibc not compiling, so I restarted from scratch with only some ~x86-packages, spesified in /etc/portage/package.keywords I think... And the other problem was with not being able to su root, but as you can see in my post somewhere in this forum (search) I found the solution.

If you wonder about differences, look here to see how to work from stage1 to stage2 to stage3:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ap=6#doc_chap2

[oz]

I always do stage1 installs, but that's just me. It takes me about 3 extra hours to go from stage1 as compared to stage3. You are just compiling the whole system with a stage1.

Yes, you follow the same guide. Good luck with it...

[George Harrison]

Thanks guys.

Time I have - All I have to do is Finals and then I'm out. it'll be a week until Finals though.. I can start my Stage 1 install fairly soon. Thanks again for the info; hopefully I won't run into problems like not being able to use the testing branch ~x86 because I like doing that and not being able to su - would be hellish but after figuring everything I guess it would be a better Gentoo.