§2023-08-20
¶ Stage 1 and 2 are Internal development tarballs
Note These tarballs are only usually used by Gentoo developers to bootstrap the system for release, and are generally not intended for end users.
¶ Stage 3
A stage3 tarball is an archive containing a profile-specific minimal Gentoo environment. Stage3 tarballs are used to install Gentoo.
Stage 3 tarballs offered in architecture specific versions are available on the downloads page; they are hosted on [distfiles.gentoo.org]http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/) (navigate to the
Downloading and decompressing a stage 3 tarball as described in Gentoo Handbook will install an almost-complete and almost-functional system (the most important parts still missing are a kernel and a bootloader).
Tip: The desktop profile stage 3 tarballs provide extra packages to help setup desktop systems more easily. If planning on installing a desktop system, using a desktop profile, choose the corresponding archive.
See also: See the handbook for more information about stage 3 tarballs:what are stages then, choosing a stage tarball.
¶Stage 4
Important: A "stage 4" tarball is a loosely defined term that generally just means a stage3 with 'extra bits'.
Official "stage 4" tarballs became available in January 2016 for the amd64 architecture, but are no longer available.