Downloads

Bootstrap Images (x86_64)

These images are the starting point for building GentOS RPM packages and will work on most Intel/AMD 64bit CPU based systems.

The build procees for them was executed in a Ubuntu 22.04 environment (chroot) following the LFS 12.4 guide to obtain a basic Linux image after which a few extra tools and libraries were added using instructions in the BLFS 12.4 guide and finishing up by adding the various dependencies for RPM and DNF with inspiration from the Fedora package sources. Keep in mind that the guilde was not followed to the letter in the sense that some tools and libraries may be newer or older and may or may not use different build options plus the kernel uses a generous .config file to include support for a lot of hardware.

You can download and test these in your environment to get a looksie but these cannot be updated from packages and provide limited functionality as they are for development purposes (they provide the core environment in which the official RPM packages can be built which will then be used to install the official GentOS Linux distribution).

The images are signed and to confirm everything is in order it is advised to download the signatures together with the images, import the GentOS public PGP key (or see below how to do this from the MIT servers) and validate like so:
gpg --verify [signature file] [image file]
(in the above example command, before running it, remember to replace [signature file] with the actual signature file name path and replace [image file] with the actual image file path)

The GPG key id is: F28B E259 4F50 9ADC 46A2 CC7B 848A 45CF 8626 39BD and you should be able to find it on the MIT keyserver like this:
gpg --keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu --search-keys F28BE2594F509ADC46A2CC7B848A45CF862639BD
The output of the commad will look like this:

gpg: data source: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371
(1)     Cristian Seceleanu (GentOS) 
          4096 bit RSA key 848A45CF862639BD, created: 2026-01-04
In case you prefer to import it from the MIT keyserver you would run this command:
gpg --keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys F28BE2594F509ADC46A2CC7B848A45CF862639BD

The following are the default credentials: root / gentos
(you should change the default password to something more appropriate)