Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo install methods

["Chad M. Huneycutt" <chad.huneycutt@acm.org>]

Jan Henkins wrote:
> Just a thought (I'm sure you were posed this question before...), how 
> about making a set of source CD's available that can be accessed by 
> portage as an alternative source of software?

Portage already has the functionality to do this.  The biggest issue with 
actually doing it is that Gentoo is a moving target.  We could make CD with 
the source images, but as soon as we update the portage tree for a new 
version of an ebuild, the CD is no longer completely valid.

Here are the step to roll your own:
   Grab a snapshot of the portage tree (just the ebuilds).  I believe daily 
snapshots are available on ibiblio now.  The next part is hardest, because 
I don't think anyone has scripted it yet.  You need to go through each 
ebuild (either all of them or just those that you want) and grab the 
corresponding tarball from the distfiles directory and burn them to a CD 
(in all it should be 1GB or smaller (2 CD's at most).

Once you have a Gentoo ISO, the portage tree, and all those packages, you 
can unpack the build tarball per the instructions, unpack the portage tree 
to /usr/portage, and then either mount the CD to /usr/portage/distfiles (if 
there is 1 CD) or copy the contents of the CD's' with packages to 
/usr/portage/distfiles.

Make sure you don't do emerge sync to synch your portage tree, or you will 
have to hit the network.  Once you have your system setup like you want it, 
then you can do 'emerge sync' and upgrade as you like over the network.


-- 
Chad Huneycutt                                try { Windows }
Ph.D. Student                                 catch ( Exception BSOD )
Georgia Tech College of Computing               { linux };
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~chadh