The Funtoo Linux project has transitioned to "Hobby Mode" and this wiki is now read-only.
F2FS Install Guide
Introduction
These docs assume you have a "PC compatible" computer system with a standard PC BIOS. Many new computers support UEFI for booting, which is a new firmware interface that frequently replaces the older MBR-based BIOS. If you have a system with UEFI, you will want to use this documentation along with the UEFI Install Guide, which will augment these instructions and explain how to get your system to boot. You may need to change your PC BIOS settings to enable or disable UEFI booting. The UEFI Install Guide has more information on this, and steps on how to determine if your system supports UEFI.
Installing on F2FS isn't terribly different from installing on XFS or EXT4;; but there are enough factors that warrant a guide of its own
Live CD
Funtoo doesn't provide an "official" Funtoo Live CD, but there are plenty of good ones out there to choose from. A great choice is the Debian-based GRML as it contains lots of tools and utilities and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
It is also possible to install Funtoo Linux using many other Linux-based live CDs. Generally, any modern bootable Linux live CD or live USB media will work. See requirements for an overview of what the Live Media must provide to allow a problem-free install of Funtoo Linux.
To begin a Funtoo Linux installation, boot your preferred live media & start a commandline session.
Starting an SSH session
This is only required if you wish to perform the installation process on a computer other than where you are installing funtoo to
service ssh start; passwd; ifconfig
This starts SSH, asks for a root password, and then displays the IP address
Install required programs
apt-get update; apt-get install f2fs-tools elinks
F2FS is not included in current linux kernels, and elinks is used to download the stage3 tarball
Partitioning
cfdisk /dev/sda
Your partition layout should be similar to
Partition | Size | MBR Block Device (fdisk ) |
MBR Code |
---|---|---|---|
/boot |
512 MB | /dev/sda1 |
83 |
swap | 1.5 to 2x RAM for low-memory systems and production servers; otherwise 2GB. | /dev/sda2 |
82 |
/ (root) |
minimum of 10GB. Note: to compile the debian-sources kernel, requires a minimum of 14GB free space in /tmp ; consider a minimum of 20GB in this case. |
/dev/sda3 |
83 |
/home |
User storage and media. Typically most of the disk. | /dev/sda4 (if created) |
83 |
Formatting
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1 mkswap /dev/sda2 swapon /dev/sda2 mkfs.f2fs /dev/sda3 mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4
Mounting the new system
mkdir /mnt/funtoo mount -t f2fs /dev/sda3 /mnt/funtoo mkdir /mnt/funtoo/boot mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/funtoo/boot mkdir /mnt/funtoo/home mount -o noatime /dev/sda4 /mnt/funtoo/home
Downloading the system
cd /mnt/funtoo/ elinks build.funtoo.org
Navigate to your build, arch, and subarch and save stage3
Installing stage3
tar xpfv stage3-latest.tar.xz cp /etc/resolv.conf etc
chrooting into the new system
mount -t proc none proc mount --rbind /sys sys mount --rbind /dev dev env -i HOME=/root TERM=$TERM; chroot . bash -l export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"
Downloading the Portage tree
For an alternative way to do this, see Installing Portage From Snapshot.
Now it's time to install a copy of the Portage repository, which contains package scripts (ebuilds) that tell portage how to build and install thousands of different software packages. To create the Portage repository, simply run emerge --sync
from within the chroot. This will automatically clone the portage tree from GitHub:
emerge --sync
If you receive the error with initial emerge --sync
due to git protocol restrictions, change SYNC
variable in /etc/make.conf
:
SYNC="https://github.com/funtoo/ports-2012.git"
Configuring your system
As is expected from a Linux distribution, Funtoo Linux has its share of configuration files. The one file you are absolutely required to edit in order to ensure that Funtoo Linux boots successfully is /etc/fstab
. The others are optional. Here are a list of files that you should consider editing:
File | Do I need to change it? | Description |
---|---|---|
/etc/fstab |
YES - required | Mount points for all filesystems to be used at boot time. This file must reflect your disk partition setup. We'll guide you through modifying this file below. |
/etc/localtime |
Maybe - recommended | Your timezone, which will default to UTC if not set. This should be a symbolic link to something located under /usr/share/zoneinfo (e.g. /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Montreal) |
/etc/make.conf (symlink) - also known as:/etc/portage/make.conf |
Maybe - recommended | Parameters used by gcc (compiler), portage, and make. It's a good idea to set MAKEOPTS. This is covered later in this document. |
/etc/conf.d/hostname |
Maybe - recommended | Used to set system hostname. Set the hostname variable to the fully-qualified (with dots, ie. foo.funtoo.org ) name if you have one. Otherwise, set to the local system hostname (without dots, ie. foo ). Defaults to localhost if not set. |
/etc/hosts |
No | You no longer need to manually set the hostname in this file. This file is automatically generated by /etc/init.d/hostname . |
/etc/conf.d/keymaps |
Optional | Keyboard mapping configuration file (for console pseudo-terminals). Set if you have a non-US keyboard. See Funtoo Linux Localization. |
/etc/conf.d/hwclock |
Optional | How the time of the battery-backed hardware clock of the system is interpreted (UTC or local time). Linux uses the battery-backed hardware clock to initialize the system clock when the system is booted. |
/etc/conf.d/modules |
Optional | Kernel modules to load automatically at system startup. Typically not required. See Additional Kernel Resources for more info. |
/etc/conf.d/consolefont |
Optional | Allows you to specify the default console font. To apply this font, enable the consolefont service by running rc-update add consolefont. |
profiles |
Optional | Some useful portage settings that may help speed up intial configuration. |
If you're installing an English version of Funtoo Linux, you're in luck as most of the configuration files can be used as-is. If you're installing for another locale, don't worry. We will walk you through the necessary configuration steps on the Funtoo Linux Localization page, and if needed, there's always plenty of friendly, helpful support. (See Community)
Let's go ahead and see what we have to do. Use nano -w <name_of_file>
to edit files -- the "-w
" disables word-wrapping, which is handy when editing configuration files. You can copy and paste from the examples.
It's important to edit your /etc/fstab
file before you reboot! You will need to modify both the "fs" and "type" columns to match the settings for your partitions and filesystems that you created with gdisk
or fdisk
. Skipping this step may prevent Funtoo Linux from booting successfully.
/etc/fstab
/etc/fstab
is used by the mount
command which is ran when your system boots. Statements of this file inform mount
about partitions to be mounted and how they are mounted. In order for the system to boot properly, you must edit /etc/fstab
and ensure that it reflects the partition configuration you used earlier:
nano -w /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2 /dev/sda2 none swap sw 0 0<br> /dev/sda3 / f2fs rw,acl,active_logs=6,background_gc=on,user_xattr 0 1 /dev/sda4 /home ext4 noatime 0 1 #/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,ro 0 0
acl,active_logs=6,background_gc=on,user_xattr are default mount options for F2FS.
/etc/localtime
/etc/localtime
is used to specify the timezone that your machine is in, and defaults to UTC. If you would like your Funtoo Linux system to use local time, you should replace /etc/localtime
with a symbolic link to the timezone that you wish to use.
(chroot) # ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/MST7MDT /etc/localtime
The above sets the timezone to Mountain Standard Time (with daylight savings). Type ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
to see what timezones are available. There are also sub-directories containing timezones described by location.
/etc/make.conf
MAKEOPTS can be used to define how many parallel compilations should occur when you compile a package, which can speed up compilation significantly. A rule of thumb is the number of CPUs (or CPU threads) in your system plus one. If for example you have a dual core processor without hyper-threading, then you would set MAKEOPTS to 3:
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
If you are unsure about how many processors/threads you have then use nproc to help you.
nproc
Set MAKEOPTS to this number plus one:
USE flags define what functionality is enabled when packages are built. It is not recommended to add a lot of them during installation; you should wait until you have a working, bootable system before changing your USE flags. A USE flag prefixed with a minus ("-
") sign tells Portage not to use the flag when compiling. A Funtoo guide to USE flags will be available in the future. For now, you can find out more information about USE flags in the Gentoo Handbook.
LINGUAS tells Portage which local language to compile the system and applications in (those who use LINGUAS variable like OpenOffice). It is not usually necessary to set this if you use English. If you want another language such as French (fr) or German (de), set LINGUAS appropriately:
LINGUAS="fr"
/etc/conf.d/hwclock
If you dual-boot with Windows, you'll need to edit this file and change the value of clock from UTC to local, because Windows will set your hardware clock to local time every time you boot Windows. Otherwise you normally wouldn't need to edit this file.
(chroot) # nano -w /etc/conf.d/hwclock
Localization
By default, Funtoo Linux is configured with Unicode (UTF-8) enabled, and for the US English locale and keyboard. If you would like to configure your system to use a non-English locale or keyboard, see Funtoo Linux Localization.
Introducing Portage
Portage, the Funtoo Linux package manager has a command called emerge
which is used to build and install packages from source. It also takes care of installing all of the package's dependencies. You call emerge like this:
When you install a package by specifying its name in the command-line, Portage records its name in the /var/lib/portage/world
file. It does so because it assumes that, since you have installed it by name, you want to consider it part of your system and want to keep the package updated in the future. This is a handy feature, since when packages are being added to the world
set, we can update our entire system by typing:
emerge --sync emerge -auDN @world
This is the "official" way to update your Funtoo Linux system. Above, we first update our Portage tree using git to grab the latest ebuilds (scripts), and then run an emerge command to update the world
set of packages. The options specified tell emerge
to:
a
- show us what will be emerged, and ask us if we want to proceedu
- update the packages we specify -- don't emerge them again if they are already emerged.D
- Consider the entire dependency tree of packages when looking for updates. In other words, do a deep update.N
- Update any packages that have changed (new) USE settings.
You should also consider passing --with-bdeps=y
when emerging @world, at least once in a while. This will update build dependencies as well.
Advanced users may be interested in the Emerge wiki page.
Make sure you read any post emerge messages and follow their instructions. This is especially true if you have upgraded perl or python.
Configuring and installing the Linux kernel
Now it's time to build and install a Linux kernel, which is the heart of any Funtoo Linux system. The kernel is loaded by the boot loader, and interfaces directly with your system's hardware, and allows regular (userspace) programs to run.
A kernel must be configured properly for your system's hardware, so that it supports your hard drives, file systems, network cards, and so on. More experienced Linux users can choose to install kernel sources and configure and install their own kernel. If you don't know how to do this, we provide ebuilds that will automatically build a "univeral" kernel, modules and initramfs for booting your system that supports all hardware. This is an extremely simple way of building a kernel that will get your system booted.
What is our goal? To build a kernel that will recognize all the hardware in your system necessary for booting, so that you will be greeted by a friendly login prompt after installation is complete. These instructions will guide you through the process of installing a kernel the "easy" way -- without requiring user configuration, by using a "universal" kernel.
Building the Kernel
See Funtoo Linux Kernels for a full list of kernels supported in Funtoo Linux. We recommend debian-sources
for new users.
emerge -av sys-kernel/gentoo-sources sys-kernel/genkernel f2fs-tools<br> cd /usr/src/linux; make menuconfig<br>
F2FS is not included by default; we must specify that we need it
Under foo-->bar:
Filesystems-->Miscellaneous-->F2FS
Save config as 'f2fs.config'
genkernel --kernel-config=f2fs.config all<br>
Installing a Bootloader
An alternate boot loader called extlinux can be used instead of GRUB if you desire. See the extlinux Guide for information on how to do this.
Installing Grub
The boot loader is responsible for loading the kernel from disk when your computer boots. For new installations, GRUB 2 and Funtoo's boot-update tool should be used as a boot loader. GRUB supports both GPT/GUID and legacy MBR partitioning schemes.
To use this recommended boot method, first emerge boot-update
. This will also cause grub-2
to be merged, since it is a dependency of boot-update
. (You may need to adjust GRUB_PLATFORMS
if you are on a UEFI system. See UEFI Install Guide).
(chroot)emerge boot-update nano /etc/boot.conf
Then, edit /etc/boot.conf
and specify "Funtoo Linux genkernel
" as the default
setting at the top of the file, replacing "Funtoo Linux"
.
/etc/boot.conf
should now look like this:
boot { generate grub default "Funtoo Linux genkernel" timeout 3 } "Funtoo Linux" { kernel bzImage[-v] # params += nomodeset } "Funtoo Linux genkernel" { # if you use bliss-kernel package # you should change string # kernel kernel[-v] # to # kernel kernel/[-v]/kernel[-v] kernel kernel[-v] initrd initramfs[-v] params += real_root=auto # params += nomodeset }
If you use bliss-kernel, your /etc/boot.conf
should look like:
boot { generate grub default "Funtoo Linux genkernel" timeout 3 } "Funtoo Linux" { kernel bzImage[-v] # params += nomodeset } "Funtoo Linux genkernel" { kernel kernels/[-v]/kernel[-v] initrd initramfs[-v] params += real_root=auto # params += nomodeset }
Please read man boot.conf
for further details.
Running grub-install and boot-update
Finally, we will need to actually install the GRUB boot loader to your disk, and also run boot-update
which will generate your boot loader configuration file:
grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda boot-update
Now you need to update your boot loader configuration file:
boot-update
You only need to run grub-install
when you first install Funtoo Linux, but you need to re-run boot-update
every time you modify your /etc/boot.conf
file, so your changes are applied on next boot.
Configuring your network
It's important to ensure that you will be able to connect to your local-area network after you reboot into Funtoo Linux. There are three approaches you can use for configuring your network: NetworkManager, dhcpcd, and the Funtoo Linux Networking scripts. Here's how to choose which one to use based on the type of network you want to set up.
Wi-Fi
Using NetworkManager
For laptop/mobile systems where you will be using Wi-Fi and connecting to various networks, NetworkManager is strongly recommended. The Funtoo version of NetworkManager is fully functional even from the command-line, so you can use it even without X or without the Network Manager applet. Here are the steps involved in setting up NetworkManager:
emerge linux-firmware emerge networkmanager rc-update add NetworkManager default
Above, we installed linux-firmware which contains a complete collection of available firmware for many hardware devices including Wi-Fi adapters, plus NetworkManager to manage our network connection. Then we added NetworkManager to the default
runlevel so it will start when Funtoo Linux boots.
After you reboot into Funtoo Linux, you will be able to add a Wi-Fi connection this way:
addwifi -S wpa -K 'wifipassword' mywifinetwork
The addwifi
command is used to configure and connect to a WPA/WPA2 Wi-Fi network named mywifinetwork
with the password wifipassword
. This network configuration entry is stored in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections
so that it will be remembered in the future. You should only need to enter this command once for each Wi-Fi network you connect to.
Using wpa_supplicant
If for some reason you don't want to use a tool such as NetworkManager or wicd
, you can use wpa_supplicant for wireless network connections.
First, emerge wpa_supplicant:
emerge -a wpa_supplicant
Now, edit the wpa_supplicant configuration file, located at /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. The syntax is very easy:
network={ ssid="MyWifiName" psk="lol42-wifi" } network={ ssid="Other Network" psk="6d96270004515a0486bb7f76196a72b40c55a47f" }
You will need to add both wpa_supplicant
and dhcpcd
to the default runlevel. wpa_supplicant
will connect to your access point, and dhcpcd
will acquire an IP address via DHCP:
(chroot) # rc-update add dhcpcd default (chroot) # rc-update add wpa_supplicant default
Desktop (Wired Ethernet)
For a home desktop or workstation with wired Ethernet that will use DHCP, the simplest and most effective option to enable network connectivity is to simply add dhcpcd
to the default runlevel:
rc-update add dhcpcd default
When you reboot, dhcpcd
will run in the background and manage all network interfaces and use DHCP to acquire network addresses from a DHCP server.
Server (Static IP)
For servers, the Funtoo Linux Networking scripts are recommended. They are optimized for static configurations and things like virtual ethernet bridging for virtualization setups. See Funtoo Linux Networking for information on how to use Funtoo Linux's template-based network configuration system.
Finishing Steps
Set your root password
It's imperative that you set your root password before rebooting so that you can log in.
passwd
Next Steps
If you are brand new to Funtoo Linux and Gentoo Linux, please check out Funtoo Linux First Steps, which will help get you acquainted with your new system. We also have a category for our official documentation, which includes all docs that we officially maintain for installation and operation of Funtoo Linux.
We also have a number of pages dedicated to setting up your system, which you can find below. If you are interested in adding a page to this list, add it to the "First Steps" MediaWiki category.
{{#ask: | format=ul }}
If your system did not boot correctly, see Installation Troubleshooting for steps you can take to resolve the problem.