Installing Gentoo Beta 1 on the Kuro Box
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7. Setting up the File System

7. a. Configuring fstab

This is a very important step, but also a very easy one. If you have some Linux experience, it should be pretty straightforward. If you don't, just google for some doc about this file, it is described in any beginner guide.

The goal here is to tell Gentoo how and where we want our hard disk partitions mounted. Linux reads the /etc/fstab file at every boot to determine how to mount our partitions.

The important lines are the ones which begin with /dev/hdaX (where X is a number). We are telling Gentoo that on every boot, it should mount the hard disk partitions represented by /dev/hdaX at a certain spot in the Linux file system. In this guide, we want /dev/hda3 to mount at /datafiles.

We need to open the file /etc/fstab in our text editor:

/etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information. # $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.14 2003/10/13 20:03:38 azarah Exp $ # # noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't # needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage # efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to # switch between notail and tail freely. # <fs>         <mountpoint>    <type>      <opts>             <dump/pass> # NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts. /dev/hda1      /               ext3        noatime            0 1 /dev/hda2      none            swap        sw                 0 0 /dev/hda3      /datafiles      ext3        noatime            0 2 # NOTE: The next line is critical for boot! none           /proc           proc        defaults           0 0 # glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for # POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). # (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will # use almost no memory if not populated with files) # Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this: none           /dev/shm       tmpfs        defaults           0 0
Notes: The most important lines are marked in blue.

7. b. Creating mount points

Now we need to create the mount point so that our /dev/hda3 partition will show up in the file system:

Making the directory
KURO-BOX-EM etc # mkdir /datafiles
Notes:

Now we are ready to go to the next section.