Gentoo weblinks and information.

Gentoo is a distribution that is distributed as a Stage3 tarball and the Portage tarball. The Stage3 tarball is simply extracted in a bootable Linux partition you could create with Gparted or cfdisk. Then the user extracts the Portage tarball under /usr in the Gentoo directory tree and the rest of the installation is carried out in a chroot. this can be performed with your Ubuntu terminal and the emerge command pulls source code from the Internet and compiles the rest of the software you install from source according to the settings that the user has defined. This gives the user total control over how the system is installed and compiler flags can be set to tweak the speed of the resulting system. You need to make sure that if you are building a 64Bit Gentoo system that the Live CD or Linux installation you are using the chroot from is also 64Bit so that you will be successful. Building the all of the packages from source to install a customised system as described above is what makes the Gentoo distribution so popular.

That is how I have always built my Gentoo installations and it works very well. You could use a Ubuntu or Linux Mint Live CD or install Gentoo alongside another Linux installation. That would be quicker to boot back up if you needed to fix something with Gentoo. It is easier to use Linux Mint/Ubuntu to build Gentoo in a chroot as you can have Firefox open at the same time to read the Gentoo installation manual whilst Gentoo is busily running emerge and compiling your packages. In my correspondence with Richard Stallman, he called Gentoo a non-free Linux distribution, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to build their own system from source. It gives a great sense of accomplishment when you finish building the Gentoo system and you finally get to use your Linux desktop.

There is a Gentoo minimal installation CD ISO that can be used to install Gentoo, but I prefer to do it the chroot way.

Gentoo handbook. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/.

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Main_Page The main Gentoo Wiki page with many categories of technical support.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-tipsntricks.xml Gentoo installation tips & tricks. partitioning and setting up.

First impressions of Gnome 3 in Gentoo. http://blog.calindora.com/2011/04/gnome-3-first-impressions/.