Installation Guide

Exherbo doesn’t recommend particular filesystems or installation procedures but the following is a simple example of how to install Exherbo. You can customise the process any way you like from changing the choice of filesystems to more advanced installations including LVM2 or preparing for diskless installations.

Read the documentation
- Re-read everything on paludis.exherbo.org and exherbo.org.
- Check recent mailing list posts for any possible issues, especially paludis upgrade information
Boot a live system
- Download SystemRescueCD (it has both 32 and 64 bit support)
```
# links http://www.sysresccd.org/Download
```
- Burn it to a CD or use UNetbootin to put it on a USB stick
- Reboot, choose the right kernel, and get your network up
```
# net-setup wlan0
```

Prepare the hard disk

Create a boot partition (~16MB), a root partition (>=4GB), and a home partition
```
# cfdisk /dev/sda
```

Format the filesystems for each partition

# mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3

Mount root and cd into it

# mkdir /mnt/exherbo && mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/exherbo && cd /mnt/exherbo

Get the latest archive of Exherbo from Stages and extract it

# wget http://dev.exherbo.org/stages/exherbo-amd64-current.tar.xz && unxz -c exherbo*xz | tar xpf -

Update fstab

# cat <<EOF > /mnt/exherbo/etc/fstab
# <fs>       <mountpoint>    <type>    <opts>      <dump/pass>
/dev/sda1    /boot           ext2      defaults    1 2
/dev/sda2    /               ext3      defaults    0 1
/dev/sda3    /home           ext3      defaults    0 2
EOF

Chroot into the system

Mount everything for the chroot

# mount -o rbind /dev /mnt/exherbo/dev/

IMPORTANT: Take a closer look that you really use the “rbind” option to bind mount /dev, otherwise paludis will not work properly.

# mount -o bind /sys /mnt/exherbo/sys/
# mount -t proc none /mnt/exherbo/proc/
# mount /dev/sda1 boot/
# mount /dev/sda3 home/

Make sure the network can resolve DNS
```
# cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/resolv.conf
```

Change your root

# env -i TERM=$TERM SHELL=/bin/bash HOME=$HOME chroot /mnt/exherbo /bin/bash
# source /etc/profile
# export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"

Update the install
- Make sure Paludis is configured correctly – changing C/CXXFLAGS to -march=native might be a good idea
```
# cd /etc/paludis && vim bashrc && vim *conf
```
- Sync all the trees – now it is safe to sync
```
# cave sync
```
Make bootable
- Download the latest stable kernel from The Linux Kernel Archives.
```
# export KERNEL_VERSION=3.0.4
# wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v${KERNEL_VERSION::3}/linux-${KERNEL_VERSION}.tar.xz
```
- Extract it
```
# tar xvJf linux-${KERNEL_VERSION}.tar.xz
```
- Install the kernel
```
# cd linux-${KERNEL_VERSION} && make menuconfig
# make && make modules_install && cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel
```
- Install GRUB
```
# grub-install /dev/sda
```
- GRUB 2 example configuration
```
# cat<<EOF > /boot/grub/grub.cfg
set timeout=10
set default=0
menuentry "Exherbo" {
    set root=(hd0,1)
    linux /kernel root=/dev/sda2
}
EOF
```
- Install an init system
  
  There’s no init system in our stages. This allows you to choose whatever init system (or none) you’d like to use:
  - sys-apps/systemd (recommended) - modern, fast init system. Needs kernel >=2.6.36-rc1.
  - sys-apps/baselayout - Gentoo’s old, crufty Baselayout-1.
  - sys-apps/upstart - Ubuntu’s init system. We don’t generally supply init scripts for this.
  Here’s a HowTo for installing systemd on Exherbo.
  
  Be sure to set either the “systemd” or the “baselayout” option (preferrably globally, for example by adding “*/* systemd” to /etc/paludis/options.conf) before you proceed with installing packages so that you get the init scripts/services you want.
  
  You may want to re-install the packages included in the stage which have either flag:
```
# cave resolve world -cx
```
  This will pick up the changes and re-install affected packages.
```
# cave resolve -x sys-apps/systemd
```
- Configure your hostname for your chosen init system.
  - baselayout: edit /etc/conf.d/hostname
  - systemd: edit /etc/hostname
- Make sure your hostname is mapped to localhost in /etc/hosts, otherwise some packages test suites will fail because of network sandboxing.
```
# cat<<EOF > /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1    localhost    my-hostname.domain.foo    my-hostname
::1          localhost
EOF
```
- Install any hardware stuff you might need, check the FAQ for “Masked by unavailable” errors
```
# cave resolve -x iwlwifi-4965-ucode
```
- Set root password
```
# passwd
```
- Install any locales you might need
```
# localedef -i en_US -f ISO-8859-1 en_US
# localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
```
- And change the LANG environment variable if you prefer a different system wide locale than the default en_GB.UTF-8
```
# echo LANG="en_US.UTF-8" > /etc/env.d/99locale
```
- Reboot
```
# reboot && sacrifice a goat && pray
```

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