Hello,
I've read the Gentoo x86 installation instructions. I have them in front of me right now. I don't entirely understand the difference between stage1, stage2 and stage3 tarballs. I have some questions that might clear things up for me:
* What is the bootstrap process (in this context)?
I know that the difference between stage1 and stage2 is that stage2 skips this. Why would I want to go through the bootstrap process? What does it compile?
<From http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml#doc_chap12>
<snip>
bootstrap.sh will build binutils, gcc, gettext, and glibc, rebuilding binutils, gcc, and gettext after glibc. Needless to say, this process takes a while. Once this process completes, your system will be equivalent to a "stage2" system, which means you can now move on to the stage2 instructions.
</snip>
This took about 3 hours on my Athlon XP 2100+, IIRC.
* I get the impression that stage3 doesn't compile anything. Is this correct?
So with stage2 you compile your system, but with stage3 you just install pre-compiled binaries just like all the other Linux distributions.
Am I right?
Yes. You can still choose stuff built specifically for your architecture (depending on which iso you downloaded), but you won't be compiling anything with a stage3 install. Thus, you will be unable to tweak optimizer flags and USE variable stuff.
HTH
-- Stephen W. Juranich [EMAIL PROTECTED] Electrical Engineering http://students.washington.edu/sjuranic University of Washington http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/ssli
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