Installing Gentoo using a manjaro usb

This is a manual to install Gentoo on a target host system, by using a Manjaro USB stick. It should be possible to follow this guide using other linux distributions, both from USB or the old installation which is still on the target host. The main reason why you want to do this, is because you can use firefox and other GUI tools, which helps troubleshooting.

Another example is that you want to install Gentoo alongside the regular install. For example, you have an Ubuntu or Arch Linux currently installed and you want to install gentoo on a seperate partition.

We will only note different steps compared to the Gentoo Handbook. If steps are skipped, it means that there is no difference between using Gentoo’s USB and Manjaro’s USB.

Step 0: Reading the entire manuals

Read both the Gentoo Handbook and this guide in its entirety at least once.

Step 2: Configuring the Network

We can use the network from the Manjaro installation. This is especially useful if you are dealing with wireless.

Step 4: Preparing the disks

This step can also be donewith GUI tools such as Gparted. Take note which partition you choose to be the root partition, we assume it will be /dev/sda3 for the remainder of the guide. If you want to have multiple OS installed on the pc, this is the time to think about the partition layout and which OS has which partition. In this case it is also useful to seperate /home and /boot so that they are used by all installations.

Step 5: Installing Stage 3

This step is somewhat different compared to the handbook. After choosing the correct tarball, we can use firefox to get the correct downloadlink.

First we navigate to the partition.

mkdir /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo

And then with the downloadlink, we download and unpack the tarball.

wget -O tarball.tar.xz <DOWNLOADLINK>
sha512sum tarball.tar.xz
tar xpvf tarball.tar.xz --xattrs-include='*.*' --numeric-owner

Step 6: Chrooting into the new environment

If you are interrupted and want to resume, don’t forget to mount the root system.

Step 9: Bootloader

The bootloader from the manjaro system can also be used, ie:

grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/gentoo/boot/grub/grub.cfg

This is particularly useful if you want to have a multi-OS system.

Step 10: Reboot and pray

If the prayers were succesful, you can boot into the new gentoo installation.

If the prayers were not a lot, then you can still boot into the existing Manjaro USB/installation.