Coupla broad ? on the basics

[inxi]

These are probably stupid Q's that anyone with reasonable intelgence should be able to figure out on there own but I cant find a straight answer on the whole proccess of installing gentoo (beside dumb I'm allso bad with computers).

Here's what I figured so far: for a stage3 install I make the partitions, untar the stage3 ,chroot in build the kernel,X,etc, add the entry in the bootloader, reboot and I'm ready to go.My main question is whats in the stage3 (yea, still waiting for the download)? The handbook says the portage tree is over 500mb but the stage3 file is only 120M. So whats in the portage snapshot? Is it like other distro's in that it has a shitload of sources that I may not neccesrly need (KDE,GNOME?).

Is the partitioning critical to gentoo or can I keep it all in one partition?

After installation ,whats the purpose of updating portage, other than keeping things recent?

If not can I skip that and still expect to use gentoo? When I hit sync how much downloading am I gonna need to do and can it work over a broken connection like wget (cuz I only get net access now and then and it's gonna take till tommorow at the least for the tarball to finish)

Thanks

[yngwin]

The stage3 is a pre-compiled basic system that you will need to install other software with. The portage snapshot is an archive of the portage ebuilds and profiles, basically the files needed for the package manager to work (which programs are available, how to install these, and so on).

You can use web-rsync to update the portage tree as well.
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[inxi]

Allright, so the stage3 has things like gcc and the snapshots have the location/architecture specific's/other PM things, like the list of available packages in synoptic?

So portage is not in the base system and needs to be installed or just part of it is in their and a snapshot needed to complete it? Thanks again for bearing with me.

[NeddySeagoon]

inxi,

Welcome to gentoo.

Gentoo comes in pieces, so you only install the bits you want. The stage 3 tarball is the basic core system. It contains the things that are essential to every Gentoo install and nothing else. No cron, no logger, no bootloader, no kernel. While these items are also essential, yo have a choice, which is what Gentoo is about.

The portage snapshot contains the portage tree of all of the ebuilds (scripts) to build all of the software in the official portage tree. You need this to install the rest of your system.

As you have poor or intermittent internet access, you may want to modify your install slightly to make it easy to use remote internet access. See sneakernet, such a modified system works normally too.

The current stage3 dates to Aprol 2007. You will hit the expat problem when you begin to add things to your install.
Its important that you update libexpat as soon as you possibly can and then run revdep-rebuild from gentoolkit to fix the broken links that this update causes. There are many posts on the topic here.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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