This is the most minimal stage3 installation of Gentoo (amd64, nomultilib) that is possible to package into a Vagrant box file. VirtualBox and VMWare versions are provided.

It is based on the official Quick Install guide, but avoids completing any of the optional steps.

Note: Currently the VMWare Fusion version has no vmware-tools installed, but NFS mounts should work fine.

Vagrant Cloud: d11wtq/gentoo

or

VirtualBox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/khura7ni0b6thx8/gentoo-amd64-stage3-virtualbox.box

or

VMWare: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/w6ncyj98a31o5jd/gentoo-amd64-stage3-vmware.box

(230MB, Updated as new stage3 tarballs are published)

This is a Packer template. Install the latest version of Packer, then:

packer build virtualbox.json

This will chew for a bit and finally output a Vagrant box file.

If you have Vagrant installed, you can use the scripts provided here to build a stage3 installation manually.

The following instructions are for VirtualBox, but are easy to translate for VMWare.

1. Download the amd64 stage3 ISO from http://distfiles.gentoo.org/
2. Create a new "Gentoo64" virtual machine in VirtualBox, named "GentooBuild" - Memory 1024MB - Disk, 60GB dynamically allocated - Everything else default (unless you know what you're doing)
3. Attach the downloaded ISO to the CD drive in the virtual machine settings
4. Boot the virtual machine using "gentoo-nofb" and the default keymap.
5. wget https://github.com/d11wtq/gentoo-packer/archive/master.zip - From the livecd prompt in the VM
6. unzip master.zip - From the livecd prompt in the VM
7. cd gentoo-packer - From the livecd prompt in the VM
8. export STAGE3=20140227 - From the livecd prompt in the VM - Change to whichever stage3 you want to use
9. ./provision.sh - From the livecd prompt in the VM - This does the heavy lifting
10. shutdown -hP now - From the livecd prompt in the VM
11. Back on the host machine, remove the ISO from the CD drive in the virtual machine settings.
12. vagrant package --base GentooBuild - This will emit a package.box file.

Because keeping the portage tree in the image would be costly in terms of file size, and because it gets out of date quickly, it is not present in the image. Perform an initial emerge-webrsync to generate the portage tree.

emerge-webrsync

Do not run emerge --sync before you do this, because you will add unnecessary strain on the portage mirror and may even get yourself banned by the mirror.

The disk is a 60GB sparse disk. You do not need 60GB of free space initially. The disk will grow as disk usage increases.

Short answer, nothing that's not in the stage3, with the exception of the following things that are needed for Vagrant to work:

• app-emulation/virtualbox-guest-additions
• net-fs/nfs-utils
• app-admin/sudo

Everything is left as the defaults. The time zone is set to UTC.