It's been a while since I actually did any Gentoo installations, so all of this is IIRC. If I screw up, somebody please correct me.
On Thursday 06 March 2003 11:31, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> 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)?
The bootstrap process gives you a working set of basic tools, and a compiler,
so you can compile your own base system (i.e. the compiler, and system
tools).
> 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?
You might want to go through the bootstrap process if you have special CPU
optimizations you want to use. Although, I've found the stageX tarballs which
are compiled for your specific CPU tend to give pretty reasonable defaults.
>
> * I get the impression that stage3 doesn't compile anything. Is this
> correct?
Sort of. Stage3 is basically a precompiled base system for your CPU, so you
don't have to go through bootstrapping and compiling glibc and whatnot
yourself. This tends to be a pretty big time-saver.
After you have a stage3 system setup, you'll have basic system utilities like
a shell, cp, ls, fsck, etc. You still need to install programs like a cron
daemon, a syslog daemon, and any other programs you want to use (X, mozilla,
KDE, GNOME, etc). And, you'll also still need to compile your own kernel.
Hope this helps.
-- Josh
-----------------------------------------
Joshua J. Berry
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's backed up on tape somewhere."
-- /usr/games/fortune
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