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.ext4 /dev/sda1
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
# mkfs.ext4 /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 verify the consistence of the file

# wget http://dev.exherbo.org/stages/exherbo-amd64-current.tar.xz
# wget http://dev.exherbo.org/stages/sha1sum
# grep exherbo-amd64-current.tar.xz sha1sum | sha1sum -c

Extract the stage
```
# 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 $(which chroot) /mnt/exherbo /bin/bash
# source /etc/profile
# export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"

Update the install
- Make sure Paludis is configured correctly
```
# cd /etc/paludis && vim bashrc && vim *conf
```
- Sync all the trees – now it is safe to sync
```
# cave sync
```
Make bootable
- Download and extract the latest stable kernel from The Linux Kernel Archives.
- Install the kernel
```
# cd path-to-kernel && 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.
  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    my-hostname.domain.foo    my-hostname    localhost
::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
```
- Set system timezone, eg. to Copenhagen in Danmark, Europe
```
# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Copenhagen /etc/localtime
```
- Reboot
```
# reboot && sacrifice a goat && pray
```
Post-installation Tasks
- Remove the stage tarball
  
  The stage tarball is no longer needed and can be safely removed.
- Clean up packages
  
  The installation images (stages) contain additional tools which are useful for the installation process but are not part of the system nor world sets.
  
  You can identify the additional packages using cave purge:
```
  # cave purge
```
  If you wish to remove them, you can simply execute the resolution:
```
  # cave purge -x
```
  Alternatively, you can add packages you wish to retain to the world set by using the update-world command. As an example, the following adds gptfdisk to the world set.
```
  # cave update-world sys-apps/gptfdisk
```
- Add a new user for daily use.
  
  Some useful groups with a brief description:
```
  - Administrative Groups:
      + adm   used for system monitoring tasks (e.g. journalctl)
      + users traditional group for identifying user accounts (versus system/daemon accounts)
      + wheel used to indicate permission to perform certain restricted operations (e.g.  su)

   - Device Access Groups:
      + disk  allows access to various disk device nodes
      + usb   allows access to usb device nodes
      + video allows access to video device nodes (for accelerated video)


  # useradd -m -G adm,disk,wheel,cdrom,video,usb,users ${username}
```

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