Install Gentoo Linux (Part 2) to the desktop

In this part 2 installation guide I'll continue with installing Gentoo starting with the Kernel, the bootloader, and the rest of the base system. After this, I install Xorg and the KDE Plasma desktop. There's still more to cover to install additional software and perform updates etc, so subscribe for more!
Part 1 is here : • How to install Gentoo ...
Support my channel on Patreon : / doriandotslash
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:24 Kernel
07:16 Configuring the system
14:54 Installing tools
17:56 Bootloader
22:30 Reboot into new installation
23:46 Fixing a network issue
26:15 Finalizing
27:28 Install KDE Plasma
32:04 Install Xorg
35:43 Continue Plasma install
39:56 Ensure SDDM is configured
42:05 Additional Plasma packages
43:30 Start display manager and login to Plasma
45:48 Install a package (konsole)
47:03 Flatpaks
48:13 Full KDE Plasma setup demo
50:46 The most important part...
#Linux #Gentoo

[@willianrichard7161]

Well, thanks to your tutorial I now have my Gentoo system up and running. Thank you a lot.

[@Doriandotslash]

Fantastic!

[@FilthyPitDog]

Nice

[@hadesagd8345]

Nice videos! First time I get to see the entire Gentoo installation. Gentoo has always been too daunting, but after these videos I will find some time to try it out on old hardware to see how it behaves. Thanks!

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you and I’m glad to hear you’ll give it a shot! You can also try doing it in a virtual machine as well. I think there’s quite a few Gentoo install videos out there but maybe not one that goes all the way to a desktop install. It takes quite a while to do it all, hence 2 videos instead of one really long one. Cheers and good luck!

[@dustinwatts9055]

Once again, I have to say, these videos you made were a god send. I've been wanting to get into the Gentoo world for a long time, but as you said, it was a bit intimidating at first. You explained things very very well, and I've successfully built 2 physical systems - the second of which with LVM and full disk encryption, using your vids as a guide. Awesome work. Any plans to make some other videos about some gentoo basics maybe, optimization or package management? Anything really XD

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks Dustin! I'm glad you were able to get the install finished. And yes there will be more Gentoo in the future once I circle my way back to it :) I do still have it install on one of my hard drives in my test machine.

[@user-tb5pf9tw6i]

Hi Dorian, Thanks for your Vídeos. Part 1 has helped me to install live cd on Qemu. After trying more than 10 times I nearly gave up until I watched your video. I'm very very happy about this.

[@frankmandato7628]

I ran across your video while looking for help installing Gentoo. Yours is the most informative and in-depth one currently on youtube, imho. Thank you for making it easy, even though I made it harder on myself since I do prefer systemd over openrc. It took a few tries, but I have it running. I first tried Gentoo 20 years ago, but my equipment certainly was not up to the task back then. Again a big Thank You.

[@abhinavchavali1443]

Thank you so much! This helped me get a Gentoo install in less than 12 hours my first time without any errors. The especially long times because I was running on a really weak machine and what took you 14 minutes to compile took me 6 hours lol

[@Doriandotslash]

Oh wow that's a long compile time, but I'm happy to hear it was successful! Congrats and enjoy :)

[@urmom-wb5my]

@@Doriandotslash mine is stuck at compiling kernel modules

[@1988mib]

Watched both of Gentoo videos. Very nice and user friendly

[@FrankieVasquez-yt6gy]

I'm installing from my ubuntu mate, with chroot. Thank you for this smart video gift of life.

[@johanb.7869]

A master at work;) Not using Gentoo, but was interesting to watch anyway.

[@Doriandotslash]

You're too kind Johan, thank you! Doing this or even watching it is a good way to learn linux under the hood since Gentoo doesn't really do anything for you automatically.

[@cc8070]

I want to say thank you! It was a long hard process by you made it easy! Thank you ❤

[@MtnTechie]

installed gentoo long time ago, your videos are great. thanks for making them.

[@GuyPipili]

Great job! I have installed Gentoo right along with you. Glad I did since you showed the pitfalls to look out for or it would have taken longer to fix the install. I installed konsole before entering the desktop because you had pointed out that it isn't automatically installed, for instance.

[@Doriandotslash]

Nice, that's great to hear! Enjoy your new distro! :)

[@manethpirisyala2545]

Thank you for the effort you put into these videos. it's really well done and I watched the whole thing. (I'm not actually planning to switch to Gentoo any sooner. I'm already having enough trouble with arch) But really cool video and well explained. Thank you.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! Perhaps once you're comfortable with Arch you can give this one a try :)

[@manethpirisyala2545]

@@Doriandotslash yeah I mean I was pretty comfortable with arch until I installed it in my new two in one laptop. it's two days I'm trying to figure out how to activate the headphone jack :) (not a kernel error. I tried almost every kernel)

[@hunterdapenguin]

Really helped me alot with how to read the dox correctly and get everything up and running thanks alot

[@urmom-wb5my]

Thank you! Now i finally have a working Gentoo install on EFI!

[@user-di8ib3rk9s]

Thanks so much for the video, great video!!! Very interesting to see the installation video of Gentoo with the XFCE desktop environment. Maybe you would like to make a video installing Gentoo+ XFCE for novice Gentoo users. Thanks!!!

[@Doriandotslash]

Glad you enjoyed it! Xfce isn't that different than a Plasma install. There's a similar guide with instructions just like I did with Plasma. You simply install xfce4-meta instead. It's also a little quicker to compile.

[@aaronryder4008]

This was amazing! Thank you for doing this! It's quite interesting how similar to installing arch it gets as you get closer to finishing the complete installation. I really like the idea of gentoo and everything but if installing packages can take anywhere from a minute to an hour then it's definitely not for me. I am very impatient lol but I would definitely love to give this a shot!

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! You can do this in a virtual machine too. This way you can just save the current state and shut it down and then resume right where you left off another day. The flatpaks are also an option for quickly getting software installed once you have your base system in place.

[@vitinho2702]

Thank you so much man, it worked very well

[@FilthyPitDog]

Pretty good guide!

[@jr_Linux]

holy crap dude you saved me. first time using gentoo "trying redcore" linux i was used to doing sudo dude the --ask is so much easier. just gotta remember that now lol thanks alot

[@allusio]

Thank you for such amazing videos! Is there next episode about intalling and uninstalling software?

[@yashwardhanchavan6153]

Really great videos :)

[@Steels-hj6cl]

thanks for the great videos. I took a COMPtia linux+ in my last year of college so I don't have very much experience and with the videos install was easy. Running Dell_server>>Esxi 6.7>>Gentoo VM no issues with any hardware or software. Couple of spots where the files are in a different location then video but easy to fix. Just moved the files or change the path. Cheers! I might try this on my pi4.

[@elai_harmony]

Installed. Thanks.

[@nikhiljohnjose6739]

Hey Dorian, as a starter to Gentoo I must say this was an amazing video to get started. I have a doubt regarding the KDE installation part... for the video driver installation what driver should I install as I also installed on a VM but used virtualbox for it... so dunno if I have to use qxl too Thanks in advance :3

[@user-vn6ql7eb6d]

I think you made a mistake in the network configuration, you used enps03 instead of enp0s3 (from 10:56 onward)

[@db336]

Thank you for another great video series! Is emerge a package manager? I'm used to using apt in debian.

[@Doriandotslash]

Glad you liked it! The package manager is actually called Portage, but emerge is the Portage command you'll use most often. I'll be discussing it more in a future video. With these 2 videos I just wanted to get the base system down before going further with Portage.

[@db336]

@@Doriandotslash awesome! Thank you sir!

[@suleymankaya5192]

Thank you for great content! I need this video nowadays. Do you upload a video about installing gentoo on hardware, please?

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! I thought about it, but the procedure is pretty much the same as a VM. The only differences would be changing the VIDEO_CARDS in the make.conf file like I did for my real machine. I put "amdgpu". Other than that, unless you need special drivers loaded for anything, it's the same.

[@ytytiuiu2590]

@@Doriandotslash The real hardware is way much different, the strong hold of having distro like Gentoo is compiling your own kernel and customize it, this is super helpful recognizing some weird hardware that's other pre build Distro can't run. I know it's exhausting works, but it's will be uniquid we don't want to ask to much just do the experience/record it if you think it worth it edit/upload .

[@jasonheesch609]

I tried install gnome but I learned it requires systemd, I am not a gentoo expert so I switched back to Plasma KDE thank you so much!

[@Doriandotslash]

Nice! You can do Gnome without systemd, but it takes a bit of tweaking and using overlays. Instructions are here : wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME_Without_systemd/Gentoo

[@greenstaraz]

Thank You

[@ytytiuiu2590]

for everyone who want to try it in real hardware, you can make keynote of important command, either save it or email it tour email and read it via your phone, this will make things much easier since the online guide is too big

[@johnnypepperonii]

Nice Video, i was using Gentoo on my 2010 MB but compiling was just giving me pain so i switched back to a binary distro. I am currently thinking about installing it on my dual core thinkpad, do you know if the cpu can manage that or if it's just to weak for the moment?

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! Well that depends on what you want to install. It WILL work, the only issue is how long it will take to compile. So if you want Plasma or Gnome, that will takes quite some time to compile, but using Xfce or a TWM like i3 will be much faster.

[@hjde-jg7ho]

I too pronounce portage in french! made me chuckle

[@sazk4000]

amazing

[@astrolul]

im gonna use genkernel like u did cuz configuring my own kernel seems a bit daunting right now and this is my first gentoo install, but ill probably switch in the future!!

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes I'm probably never going to configure it all from every option because genkernel works fine for me, and it only takes 14 minutes to compile the kernel so no big deal. Good luck on your build!

[@astrolul]

@@Doriandotslash O btw, I installed it on my laptop that I barely use a few days ago with a custom kernel and I'm liking it, I might switch on my main machine because sometimes arch just gets boring xD

[@tuxi04]

@@astrolul From someone who has Manjaro, and "just works", yes, it's very boring

[@astrolul]

@@tuxi04 yup it gets boring after u have configured everything to ur liking and i was getting bored of reinstalling because i was bored xD

[@tylermurphy2231]

@@astrolul i use vanilla arch for ages in my main system did u manjari for a while and there seems to be Gentoo is a lot more stable

[@ygjt76v0-----]

Thanks 🙏

[@turbonium999]

Your length is just fine since you have chapters!

[@herrmitbusen228]

Right before reboot if i type the umount -l command it errors with: umount: /mnt/gentoo/dev{/shm,: no mount point specified, and the same for pts EDIT: nvm i umount -R then force reboot by holding down the power key on my laptop and i can boot up fine, thanks for the guide!

[@dukenukem9781]

Great, thx. 🙂👍

[@thiagohenrique916]

In 44:00 Select session, your session shows plasma and plasma wayland, here on mine it doesn't show, it shows only Xsession. I put the password to log in and then it comes back asking again

[@reasonmath]

Nice vid sir... How do you get the spice vdagent guest tools to work in Gentoo?? I'm trying to get a full screen... And to make it stay on reboot...

[@Doriandotslash]

I haven't tried the tools. But the only DE that has issues with resolution in a VM is Plasma. But I just disabled kscreen and manually set the resolution to bypass that annoyance.

[@tuxi04]

8:05 Yeah, that just happened on my computer when I removed my WIndows partition, and the computer weren't able of booting.

[@TheCynysterMind]

You did a great job getting me through part 1 But sadly part 2 seems to be missing some significant parts The first divergence is @36:20 I do not get the "USE" changes warning and @41:30 the "/etc/conf.d/xdm" file does not exist for me I have a booting Genoo Linux machine that can get to the internet and that is no small feat! Thank you for the great video. Hopefully I can figure out what the hell I screwed up

[@AleVZero]

hey i have the same situation, did u fix?

[@TheCynysterMind]

@@AleVZero Yes I did... apparently during my starts and stops I missed several steps 1st was make sure you are in /mnt/gentoo before you unpack the stage 3 . and I seem to have missed half the step in the grub install

[@TheCynysterMind]

Also going through.. I discovered after you emerge gentoo sources the directory will be /usr/src/linux-someversionnumber and you will have to rename it to /usr/src/linux for genkernel to work

[@nico1337]

If you go under the Video device in virt-manager and set the Model to "Virtio" you don't have to disable KScreen, the resolution doesn't jump back and also remembers it on reboot

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes this is true. But I find qxl has the better performance of the 3 options and I prefer to use that. There's screen settings with Xorg you can set so that you get the resolution you want right from the login screen. That will be in the next video.

[@nico1337]

@@Doriandotslash I didn't notice a difference in performance between QXL and Virtio but I'm on pretty good hardware so maybe that's why

[@greenstaraz]

/usr/src/linux no such file or directory Do eselect kernel list to view available kernels and then set one of your choosing with eselect kernel set .

[@yyrteien]

10:54 Let's go-go ahead :D

[@degrtm]

Hey, I know it might be a long shot but I've followed your video and the wiki and managed to get a working gentoo installation all but KDE plasma, after i log in with sddm I get a black screen with nothing but my mouse cursor. I've looked everywhere and nothing I found helped

[@CrazyKiLL3R44]

Hi, did you found a solution to this ? I'm having the same issue

[@ChRiSLiEnAuOne]

Can anyone help me? I followed all of the instructions, but obviously screwed up somewhere because when I reboot, the only thing I have is an ugly login prompt that says "Welcome to Gentoo-Linux" and a "Console log for Gentoo-Linux box in the lower right part of the screen. When I login, a box shows up in the upper left of the screen with 4 options: "Client List, Session Log, Checkpoint, and Shutdown" and in the lower right there is still the "Console log dialog box" But that's it. I can do nothing else. I am unable to get to a command prompt to even try to troubleshoot or fix something. I really hate to give up at this point because it has taken me several days to get to this point! Argghhh. Thanks in advance for any help at all on this. Also, when I reboot, it comes to this login screen no matter what option I select . . . :(

[@CrazyKiLL3R44]

Hi, I'm sorry to ask but i've been stuck on a blackscreen after i logged on.. Did anyone else got this issue (i'm on a VM on VirtualBox) Thanks ! :)

[@bcoon2000]

Hey when I did /etc/init.d/xdm it wouldn't start, and I did alot to try to fix it to make the desktop appear but now it doesnt and it doesnt show any errors

[@MohamedAhmed-fw6pp]

hey did you find the soulation, i have the same problem

[@bcoon2000]

@@MohamedAhmed-fw6pp I had to do sddm and rebuild my kernel to the newest and fiddle around xinitrc file on my user (not root) and do startx as user and enable a driver from my kernel to get it to start

[@luisdelrio256]

I followed along exactly but when i rebooted i got a "no boot device found" How do i remount the drives from the live cd?

[@Doriandotslash]

Just follow the same mounting steps from the first video where you started off until you get into the chroot part. Then you can try and reinstall the bootloader. Before doing that, just check your motherboard settings and see if the option is there and just not selected. On some systems you have to manually setup which bootloader to use after you've installed an OS.

[@nnjabighacker6437]

Hello Im getting [blocks B ] sys-apps/sysvinit ("sys-apps/sysvinit" is blocking sys-apps/systemd-247.2-r4) This error after writing emerge --ask --noreplace net-misc/netifrc

[@serge5046]

You have this error because you try to install netifrc while you chose either a systemd Gentoo tarball or a systemd profile. netifrc depends on OpenRC. So either don't install it or install it with OpenRC (which means no systemd) !

[@nnjabighacker6437]

@@serge5046 Ok, thank you

[@Dealbreaker351]

Literally did everything you did as and my pc got booted to windows can you please help

[@alexalexios8816]

kde password when i try to connect to wifi no one in KZbin is talking about this issue

[@deusexaethera]

I wish someone would provide a preconfigured fully-functional install image that I could then modify as I see fit, instead of having to start completely from scratch. It's _SO_ tedious.

[@Doriandotslash]

You could always setup a basic install and then take an image backup of your drive that you can reuse later. But then you’ll have lots of updates anyways. Or, you can use a Gentoo-based distro like Calculate or Red Core.

[@rlenclub]

I can't use genkernel after installing it. I've gone too far to quit now, please help.

[@rlenclub]

Upon further investigation, it appears a required package is being masked by "|| () linux-fw-redistributable no-source-code licenses(s), missing keyword."

[@rlenclub]

After even more googling, it turns out that the default licenses apparently blocked linux-firmware. Why or how that happened is a complete mystery to me, I thought Linux was FOSS but I guess Gentoo would beg to differ?

[@Doriandotslash]

@@rlenclub Genkernel may do something or use something that falls under a specific license. This is why I didn't want to mess around with any licensing issues and just set it to "*".

[@johnsonman6261]

Ok so I set up XDM probably incorrectly so now I get a janky lookin log in screen that is nothing like yours, how do I disable this as a runtime thingy and fix it? is there a command so I can go back to the terminal? Edit: Ok so I chrooted in and disabled it, not sure why KDE isn't really working, but!!! I will look around Edit2: I decided to use xfce and it works fine thanks a lot for the great tutorial series!

[@Doriandotslash]

Great! If you still want to use SDDM, just have a look at the SDDM and XDM pages to make sure it's configured properly. It's possible that something in the packages have changed since this video came out.

[@johnsonman6261]

@@Doriandotslash yeah I'll try GreetD instead, it seems nice

[@maxliu4992]

yeah, I had the same issue. Apparently the xdm init script was deprecated and the gentoo wiki tells you to display-manager instead.

[@Doriandotslash]

@@maxliu4992 Yep. It seems that changed shortly after I made the video.

[@parallel_00]

it keeps giving me "ls: cannot access '/usr/src/linux' no such file or directory"

[@YoThePro]

I'm probably late but my fix is to type 'eselect kernel list' to view your available kernels, you probably only have one then type 'eselect kernel set (your kernel number here)' . Example, eselect kernel set 1

[@YoThePro]

@Eviscerate yeah, guess i thought it was helpful at the time (:

[@willianrichard7161]

One last note.... /etc/init.d/xdm was replaced by /etc/init.d/display-manager.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks. Haven’t noticed that yet. Must have just changed very recently. Even the guides haven’t been updated yet.

[@kittbennts]

Hi ds, I think that Willian Richard comment is very important to add into your great Video (or instead, to put the comment at the top). Thank you for your Video :-)

[@wayneferguson14]

What do thank of slackware

[@Doriandotslash]

I think it’s great. It was the first distro I used back in the 90’s when it was really the only one around. Not a whole lot seems to have changed. Gentoo is like Slackware but with extra tools to centralize your optimizations and make everything work well together, and includes tools to fix any conflicts. With Slackware you’re kinda on your own. I’ll admit that I haven’t used Slackware in a long time, but perhaps I’ll revisit it just to see what’s changed and how it compares to gentoo.

[@wayneferguson14]

@@Doriandotslash i live in slackware current all the time i have been using slackware since 1999 i have never installed gentoo

[@CPTcopium]

Gentoo: "Run the following command which takes 3 hours to compile" ... (3 pages later) - "...by the way, that command you ran, if you're a human you need to run a different command..."

[@cosmicvoid2207]

You have an Epyc CPU! Well, that explains the desktop choice. Still, I'd go minimal with Gentoo.

[@Doriandotslash]

Plasma works well on less powerful CPU's as well. I even used it on my Pinebook Pro's ARM processor and it was snappy. Compiling it is a different story though. Xfce is also a great choice and much lighter to build. What do you use for a desktop? Or are you running a WM?

[@cosmicvoid2207]

@@Doriandotslash I have Plasma on Arch and both Gnome and Sway WM (separately) on openSUSE. Also, have plans to add Xmonad on Arch. I like Gentoo but it's very tricky. I've been distrohopping a lot lately ... Hope this setup stays around 😄

[@nintendowiids12]

Now install Linux from Scratch. 😏

[@aaronryder4008]

Now that would be fun to watch

[@napapuridoktora7717]

But why to do this ? Calamares and Calculate & Redcore Linux due this with 3 to 5 clicks ... The Gentoo linux install is ...I like a Pain :)

[@unaquetzadilla]

Hahahaha, I tried using wpa_supplicant beucase i'm installing is on a test-object laptop, but 68 dependencies was needed oh hell :( Another 5 hours with this pentium :(

[@Doriandotslash]

Oops lol

[@deathmetal10line]

Ghost02 /home/test # dumpe2fs /dev/nvme1n1p6 | grep "Filesystem created" dumpe2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023) Filesystem created: Thu Mar 21 18:08:09 2024 Ghost02 /home/test # neofetch test@Ghost02 OS: Gentoo Linux x86_64 Host: 82K1 IdeaPad Gaming 3 Kernel: 6.6.21-gentoo-dist Uptime: 12 hours, 59 mins Packages: 864 (emerge) Shell: bash 5.1.16 Resolution: 1920x1080 Terminal: /dev/pts/1 CPU: 11th Gen Intel i7-11370 GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 Memory: 352MiB / 31881MiB thank you, just installed a fresh KDE with your help. :)

[@harb1911]

emerge -avuND @world, emerge -av package_folder/package_name, avoid global USE flags as much as you can if you don't plan to rebuild large portions of system in the future.