[gentoo-dev] Install w/o CD

[Will Glynn]

I was recently (40 minutes ago) placed in a position where I wanted to install Gentoo on an existing Linux computer. But... I didn't have a Gentoo CD, nor did I have access to a burner. I'm sure that there are others who are in this same position but would still like to use Gentoo.

...no, this e-mail isn't asking for help. How I did this may be obvious to some of you, but it took me a good half hour to figure out. I booted up the computer, downloaded the 16 MB ISO, did a mount -o loop .iso gentoocd/ and copied the contents into /boot/gentoo. The machine was running grub, so I added the following to /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Gentoo Linux Setup
      kernel /gentoo/isolinux/kernel devfs=nomount vga=normal load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=22000 root=/dev/ram0 rw
      initrd /gentoo/isolinux/rescue.gz

Then I rebooted and the world was happy. (After trying to figure out why it didn't work for half an hour, that is. But it works now, anyway.) This seems like a reasonable way to load Gentoo without writing to a CD-R, which some people might find useful.

--delta407