Gentoo Linux Snapshots

I'm a big Gentoo Linux fan, but over the years, I've gotten irritated about how much time I have to spend compiling during the installation process--and I'm not not talking about a stage1 install either. Theoretically, I could use GRP to get going a little faster, but I've never had much success with it and I'm not willing to stick with its list of USE flags and slower release cycle.

What I want is a Gentoo installation tarball that is already up-to-date, includes a *working*, generic kernel, and takes almost no-time to install. So, I setup a build machine at my house to do this very thing. Below are tarballs of various formulations that were completely up-to-date as of the time I rolled them.

Everything has been pre-compiled and "tuned" for the i686 (a.k.a. "generic") architecture. A working kernel is included and ready to run. Each of the different "releases" has instructions on how to get the system up and rolling.

Important Notes:

I'm assuming you already know how to boot of the CD, partition, etc. Read the basic steps for getting started.
For space reasons, none of the snapshots include the portage tree, so if you need one:
```
emerge --sync
qsearch dummy   # if you like "portage-utils"
```

Base System

Last Updated: March 14, 2006
Installation Notes
Torrent

This is the basic Gentoo distribution that has simply been upgraded to use the latest and greatest versions in portage at the time I rolled the tar. I have only added essential utilities such as "vim", "screen", "gentoolkit", etc, and had to choose specific things such as the kernel version, "syslog-ng", "vixie-cron", etc.

Xen Enabled System

Last Updated: March 14, 2006
Installation Notes
Torrent

Xen is an open source hypervisor for Linux, FreeBSD, etc. A Xen machine will run a number of virtual machines (a xen "domain") on one system. "Domain 0" is a special instance and controlls all other domains (start, stop, pause). Domain 0 is the only domain that has access to the real hardware. All other domains are within virtualized environments (featuring virtual hardware, memory, cpus, etc).