The following are the steps I used to create a gentoo filesystem image from scratch. Using an existing linux installation (could be colinux): # dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=1M > root_fs # mke2fs -j root_fs # mkdir gentoo # mount -t ext3 -o loop root_fs gentoo # cd gentoo # tar -xvjpf stage.tar.bz2 (eg. tar -xvjpf stage3-althon-xp-2004.02.tar.bz2) # tar -xvzpf vmlinux-modules.tar.gz # nano -w etc/fstab # cd .. # umount gentoo Then create colinux config file (see below for example config) and start colinux : colinux-daemon -c gentoo.colinux.xml