Recently I had to reinstall Gentoo on my PC. The installation itself is very simple, but that final setup process is somewhat nuanced. There is always something I forget to do and end up booting into the live CD again. So in hopes of avoiding this problem ever again, I’ve decided to compile a little checklist.
Of course, not all of the following actions must be performed before making that final reboot into your new Gentoo system, it just might be more convenient this way. Once you’re done with the installation, you probably want everything to just work, right?
While certainly important, setting up the root password is probably not the most exciting step in preparing your new system. It’s so easy to forget about this part, I don’t think I’ve ever actually not found myself in front of the login screen without any idea what to type next.
Not as critical as the previous point, but still annoying if you forget about it. This is also a good time to copy your user-local configs.
Funny thing, when I checked my fstab on this machine, it turned out to be empty. So I suppose this step can be optional, depending on your setup. I will add an entry to actually use tmpfs for my /tmp mountpoint, though. Done.
This step is better done before updating the world or installing new software. Sure, you can reinstall everything again later, but that’s a lot of wasted cycles, both for your CPU and your SSD.
Don’t forget to set:
FEATURES: personally, I like to disable parallel-fetch;COMMON_FLAGS: optimization level, -pipe;ACCEPT_KEYWORDS: I like to live on the edge, so ~x86 ~amd64;CPU_FLAGS_X86: I just use whatever /proc/cpuinfo gives me and hope for the
best. Usually it’s close enough.This one stings the worst. Everything works, but you don’t have any internet connectivity. When that happens, pretty much your only choice is to reboot back into some live CD and install that sweet sweet net-misc/dhcpcd.
Another optional step, but if you’re dealing with wifi or graphics cards, you probably want to install this.
Here’s the list of things I use regularly but sometimes forget to install: