Apparently, though unproven, at 02:06 on Friday 13 May 2011, Felix Miata did opine thusly:
> I guess I missed the requirement to be running Gentoo to be able to > initiate an install of Gentoo. This is not correct > I thought whatever Linux was already > installed would be good enough, this is correct > until I got to the mirrorselect > instructions, and found no incorporated alternative such as Indi has > replied with. Indeed, not needing to have booted Gentoo to run a Gentoo > installer was part of the allure that got me started. That part of the doc assumes that the user is indeed running from the LiveCD-like environment provided by the official installer. There are other docs (far less verbose in their explanations) covering alternate install sources. All an installer (for any distro does) is write stuff to disk, and what it writes is in the correct format so that when the user reboots into it, what has been written there functions correctly as an OS. Most distros provide a customized environment to do this in, usually in the form of a bootable CD. This works well for them because that installer was coded to take care of all the distro's quirks (and to provide a seamless installer, and if necessary to dumb it down to the point where Aunt Tillie can do it). There is no *requirement* anywhere that the installer OS matches the installed OS. Heck the installer can even be Windows, and in the case of Wubi, is IS windows :-) Virtually anything that can fetch, use and unpack a stage3 then do a chroot works fine as an installer, as long as it has drivers for your hardware and the filesystem you plan to use. Of all the Gentoo installs I have done, I can only remember the first ever using a Gentoo installer - that was long ago when doing a stage1 earned streetcred points. Nowadays doing a stage1 usually tags you as a sado- masochist (but I digress). All my installs since then have been whatever LiveCD I happen to have handy, usually Ubuntu or my trusty RIPLinux rescue system on a flash drive. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
