Requirements

General Installation Requirements

Software required

This page is intended to cover a basic overview about what tools and what hardware is required to sucessfully install and run a Funtoo Linux installation. In the installation documentation, SystemRescueCD is recommended as installation media. But there are plenty of good LiveCDs out there and there also might be good reasons to using one of them instead of SystemRescueCD.

This is intended to contain some information about what's at least needed to successfully do a Funtoo Linux Installation within the live media of your choice.

Absolutely must have

The live media of your choice must at least contain these executables to successfully install Funtoo Linux. Without these tools you won't be able to successfully install Funtoo Linux:

• chroot
• tar (with xz support)
• wget (or equivalent)
• fdisk (for MBR partition tables)
• gdisk (for GUID partition tables)
• a text editor
• 64-bit kernel for 64-bit installation, or:
• 32-bit or 64-bit kernel for 32-bit installation

Recommended

It is possible to install Funtoo Linux without these tools, but having them available makes your life easier during installation:

GNU screen or tmux

You can do without, but since there are some parts during installation which take quite a long time to complete (such as compiling the kernel and tools) it might come handy to run all this stuff inside a screen session. This enables you to detach your session from your current screen, prevents you from canceling the current compile in case of a disconnected network connection and work in paralel with multiple shells without the need for opening multiple SSH sessions or terminals.

xz-utils

Since many files in Funtoo Linux are compressed with an LZMA compression algorithm (such as the stage files and portage snapshots) you will need these to extract the files from those archives. This is considered to be only a recommended requirement, since it's possible to download and extract the tar archive on another machine and download it from there in order to continue even with Live-Media, which do not provide this application (like several recovery images of "Root Server" providers).

Hardware required

Funtoo Linux installs flawlessly on the following architectures:

• amd64
• x86

You will need the following to successfully install Funtoo Linux:

   Important

The Debian-Sources kernel recommended in the installation guide requires 20GB of storage to compile the kernel. You must use at least 30GB for the / filesystem if you use this kernel.

• Live-Media to boot an installation environment
• Supported network device
• 9 GB of disk space (including a 2 GB swap) for the basic system. Please be aware, that even though this is enough to install a very minimal environment, you will definitely face problems and a full disk very soon! So please consider this as the absolute minimum and consider to raise this by mounting additional space into multiple branches of the FS-Tree, soon.

Physical/Network Access

Network

Please make sure there's a network connection available on the machine you are installing Funtoo Linux on. It might be possible to install Funtoo Linux without, by providing the needed resources by an USB media or such, but this isn't the intended way to do things. You will have some extra work to do to achieve this and though this way of installing isn't officially supported, you might be lucky and find someone who is passionate and patient enough to help you with this. But since you'll need a network connection to read within IRC and Forums, you might serve this connection to the destination machine in the first place and prevent you and others from getting gray hair in the first place.

Physical access or at least a remote sight onto the console

This is important to diagnose potential bootup issues like missing modules in the kernel, not accessible filesystems, or issues with the bootloader configuration. It's important to be able to issue a reset in case of failure, too. You might need physical access to the machine to remove the Live-Media once you installed your machine, too and enter it in the first place.