Installing Stage4 Linux

Installing a Stage4 Image is easy 1) prepare a system; 2) customise image; 3) reboot. The steps are here very closely related to the Gentoo Quick Install guide.

Preparing the System

Boot from a Live CD, such as SystemRescueCd, and prepare the target disk. Raid and other advanced setup features are not covered here.

Set the system date accurate to an accurate time. This is important for the file ctime and mtime values on the new system.

root@host # ntpdate -b pool.ntp.org

Partition the disk using cfdisk. A reasonable, but not absolutely required configuration, is 256MiB for boot (/dev/sda1), 2GiB swap (/dev/sda2) and 16GiB root (/dev/sda3). The rest of the disk can be broken into logical partitions as necessary for the environment.

root@host # export DEV=/dev/sda
root@host # cfdisk /dev/sda

Or use the following steps to automatically partition with sfdisk. 256MiB Boot, 2GiB Swap and 16GiB Root.

root@host # export DEV=/dev/sda
root@host # dd if=/dev/zero of=${DEV} bs=512 count=4
root@host # dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=${DEV} bs=512 count=1
root@host # echo -n ",256,0x83,*\n,2048,0x82\n,16384,0x83\n" | sfdisk -uM ${DEV}
root@host # sfdisk --re-read ${DEV}
root@host # sfdisk --verify ${DEV}

Make some file systems.

root@host # mke2fs -L'boot' ${DEV}1
root@host # mkswap -L'swap' ${DEV}2 && swapon ${DEV}2
root@host # mke2fs -L'root' -j ${DEV}3

Many system engineers create logical paritions for various purposes. Some uses include /home for user directories, /var/lib/{mysql,pgsql} for a database or /var/www for some web-root.

Mount these newly created file-systems in the target location.

root@host # mkdir -p /mnt/target
root@host # mount ${DEV}3 /mnt/target
root@host # mkdir -p /mnt/target/boot
root@host # mount ${DEV}1 /mnt/target/boot

Download & Extract Image

root@host # cd /mnt/target
root@host # wget -O/mnt/target/stage4.tgz http://stage4.org/stage4/image/get/nucleus
root@host # tar -pxz -f stage4.tgz