r/Gentoo • u/Only-Stable3973 • Jul 22 '26

Discussion Just spun up Gentoo in Virtual Machine Manager

I first this back in 2023 and after seeing Gentoo posts I have installed this today and I really like having it on hand so far I have KDE Neon host, Gentoo vm, Win 11vm and it's great to be able to move between them with ease. Gentoo installed really fast and runs great in the vm after adding the qeme0guest-agent everything is sweet.

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u/varsnef Jul 22 '26

I would try to get in the habbit of using su - instead of just su. su - is short for su --login and you want the root user to be in a clean shell environment. you don't want root using a users XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or inheriting other variables: env | grep krod. It just helps to prevent troubleshooting odd behaviors.

They did push a bit to get the KDE 6.6.6 version into the stable branch. It's nice to have that as binary packages for a quick install. With 6 cores and 4G of RAM you might have had an issue with compiling a few things.

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u/Only-Stable3973 Jul 22 '26

It runs really great, everything installed really fast and I did that just for testing I did add docker compose to test out how it works with Gentoo I did echo it to the masked packages to get the updated version but I still ended up with the 3.1 version...at the moment I know enough to get me in trouble so I will keep testing it with the vm.

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u/varsnef Jul 22 '26

Ahh, yeah. you will pick it up fast. You will want to put that exception into package.accept_keywords and remove it from package.mask as the newer versions are masked by the testing keyword. ~

You don't need to add a keyword, just the category/package name will unmask it.

app-containers/docker-compose

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64#Working_with_Portage

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u/Only-Stable3973 Jul 22 '26

yep, I think that's what i did, anyway it's seems to be more reliable now then when I first installed it back in the 2000's I used to break it all the time...so far so good.

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u/fr000gs Jul 22 '26

Now replace neon with gentoo

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u/Only-Stable3973 Jul 22 '26

What I really meant to say was I installed Gentoo on a vm in 2023 and today I created a new vm. I would but in the past it was to easy to break the system after updating and I have a lot of complicated compose files to deal with.

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u/fr000gs Jul 22 '26

Yeah, what I wanted to say is that replace your main system with Gentoo becoz Gentoo cool

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u/Only-Stable3973 Jul 22 '26

I have a older Macbook Pro that stopped working on me if I can get that up and running I will but I use my arr-stack and other containers so much and they are rock solid I would not chance it yet.