mkstage4 — Stage 4 Tarballs Made Easy

2014-05-18

Stage 4 tarballs are bootable, fully working, self-sufficient Gentoo Linux distributions. They include a complete Gento environment, which you can directly boot up and use. Stage 4 tarballs are very well suited for system backups or use cases where chrooting and emerging your basic system requirements can become very tedious. Situations in which stage 3 installation is difficult include: Installing Gentoo on machines with limited resources for compilation (e.g. many ARM family platforms) Installing Gentoo for machines which do not support standard live CD/USB distributions Background # Making a stage 4 tarball - while in principle as simple as tar-ing a Gentoo system - requires you to remember a long list of directories to exclude and a number of tar options. ...