Installation guide

Installation guide of Cambria Linux

Requirements

You will need the following for an hard install:

• A UEFI capable PC. No MBR BIOS support!
• Knowledge on how to use Gentoo. This is NOT Gentoo made easy, BUT Gentoo's installation process made easy!!
• A USB stick of at least 4 Gib
• A disk that you can use and modify as needed (that doesn't contain important data)
• 50 Gib of free disk space
• 8 Gib of RAM for Gentoo's compilation (SWAP needed)
• A powerful CPU that handle Gentoo's compilation without taking decades to install/upgrade software (any modern CPU with more than 4 CPU cores will make it)
• A smartphone/computer to follow the installation guide if needed, as well for asking help

Creating the bootable USB stick

Download the latest ISO file

We have the following ISO available:

• GNOME base (2428752kib)
• KDE base (2528216kib)

Choose the wanted desktop environment as well as the wanted version, and download it.

Create the bootable USB stick

On Windows

Note: This part of the guide needs improvements (pictures, more details, etc). Feel free to modify it, and send us a request to improve this guide.

1. Download Rufus. Rufus is a free and open-source app to create bootable USB drives easily.
2. Open it and select your USB stick.
3. Select the .iso file that you have download before.
4. And select "Flash"

On Linux

1. Open your terminal and find the correct device to use with lsblk. Should look like /dev/sdXy
2. Unmount the USB stick with root rights (usually with sudo)

umount /dev/sdXy

3. Write the .iso into the USB stick, again with root rights

dd if=path/to/iso/path/isoname.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress

Replace path/to/iso/path/isoname.iso with the path to your .iso (usually ~/Downloads/cambria-*.iso), and /dev/sdX with your actual USB stick's name (example: /dev/sdb) 4. Wait until it says everything is done. And it is done.

Boot on the USB stick

You should now reboot your computer, and access the boot entry selector (usually with F12 or ESC, but it depends on your mother board manufacturer) to boot into the USB stick.

Installing the system

You can now choose between auto, and manual mode. The automatic mode only do the partitioning for you, nothing else.

Automatic mode

Stage selection

There is only one stage per ISO, so just select it.

Disk selection

Select the disk you want Cambria to be install on. The automatic partitioning modify it like that:

sda    n:0    0  <disk size>   0 disk 
├─sda1 n:1    0  256M          0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 n:2    0  <swap size>   0 part [SWAP]
└─sda3 n:3    0  <left space>  0 part /

SWAP size guide

Note: This part of the guide need improvements (more details, etc). Feel free to modify it, and send us a request to improve this guide.

We recommend doing like this:

total swap = CPU threads - total RAM    Only if the result is positive

You can also search on the net as this part needs expansions.

Everything else

Every other install steps are pretty straight forward so they don't need explications.

Manual mode

Disk selection

Select the disk you want Cambria to be install on. You will be asked to partition it using cfdisk.

Disk partitioning

We recommand this layout:

sda    n:0    0  <disk size>   0 disk 
├─sda1 n:1    0  256M          0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 n:2    0  <swap size>   0 part [SWAP]
└─sda3 n:3    0  <left space>  0 part /

Feel free to modify it BUT those 3 parts are needed.

Everything else

Every other install steps are pretty straight forward so they don't need explanations.

Reboot to Cambria

Reboot by entering r and pressing [Enter].

Disconnect the installation device and you should reboot inside Cambria Linux!

Well done, you have now installed Gentoo in +/-10 min!

What to do next?

• Configure your install using cambria-center
• Configure things needed through Gentoo's Wiki
• Contribute to this guide or other Cambria related stuff ?