Installing Gentoo 2008.0 amd64 on a Linode VPS
February 9th, 2009
Today I signed up for a Linode VPS. Linode appeared to have great reviews and very reasonable prices. I had originally looked at Host Virtual, primarily because they are planning to offer native ipv6 (something I’ve been wanting to play with) later this month. I ended up with Linode because they have a Dallas datacenter which makes my connections from Austin pretty fast.
One advantage that Host Virtual provided was a more recent Gentoo image. Linode only offers a Gentoo 2007.0 install, which it doesn’t even list as a current distribution. No worries, in this post I describe the steps I took to install a fresh Gentoo 2008.0 amd64 image on my new Linode!
Update: On April 4 2009, Linode released a Gentoo 2008.0 x86_64 image, which somewhat obsoletes this post. I haven’t tried it, but if your looking to try 64-bit Gentoo on a Linode, try that image instead of these instructions.
Before we get started, some of the things I wanted on my system: