Enter the Working Environment

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The working environment is where the bulk of the steps in this tutorial will be performed. It must meet the following criteria:

  • A Linux-based system where the kernel has dm-crypt support and the cryptsetup program has been installed.
  • If an existing Gentoo installation is being encrypted, then the working environment must be another operating system on a different partition, because some following steps require the existing Gentoo installation to be not running.

The easiest way to get access to such an environment is to create a bootable drive from one of the following medias, then restart the computer and boot into this drive:

  • Gentoo minimal installation CD, which has a small size and provides a pure command-line environment
  • The fairly new Gentoo LiveGUI USB image, which provides a live Gentoo system with a desktop environment
  • Most GNU/Linux distributions’ live ISO image, which usually provides a desktop environment too

The Gentoo medias can be obtained from the Downloads page on the Gentoo website. A bootable USB drive can be created using instructions on the Gentoo Wiki.