LGL minimal can be installed in three different ways:

• From a CD or USB stick on a computer with a graphic computer screen
• From a CD or USB stick on a computer with a serial console
• Via PXE on a computer that supports booting from PXE

Please consult the LGL installer page to download and set up your chosen way of installing LGL.

After then booting from the chosen install media, you will then be asked what you want to do:

Option 1) will simply try to boot from the first harddisk on your computer, while 2) and 3) then will boot into the memory-based installer system, Gaia.

Gaia is a simple text-based installer running on top of a simple memory-based linux system that allows you to enter all basic information needed to install LGL on your computer. It is implemented as a collection of shell-scripts using dialog as its text-based user interface.

In order to install LGL on your computer, Gaia needs to learn the following things:

• The console keyboard settings
• The desktop keyboard settings, if you choose to install the desktop
• Your Timezone and your current date and time
• The disk partitions you want to install LGL on
• Name, userid and password of the inital admin user
• Optionally, a root password
• The hostname of the computer
• The network configuration of the computer. This can be skipped, especially on desktop computers.

While most configuration is quite simple, Gaia does not bring along its own disk partitioner, so you have to create any partitions you want to use for LGL yourself.

If you are installing on a fresh harddisk, you can initialize the disk from the menu with a gpt label and a suitable BIOS boot partition.

You can then drop to a shell in order to set-up all your needed partitions, using fdisk, cfdisk or parted.