Know your distro: Gentoo features
image by David Barrie
Gentoo has a number of features you should familiarize yourself with, if you want to use and administer it successfully. In today’s part of this series, I am not going to explain everything, but I’m sending you back to the resources we covered yesterday. (I’m mean like that.)
The first place is taken by portage, the package manager. You should read the Portage Introduction in the Handbook, man emerge, /etc/make.conf.example and man make.conf. Also, for a more in-depth write-up, read the Working with Portage part of the Handbook. You should get an understanding of the used files and directories, such as /etc/portage/ for overriding keywords, setting per-package useflags and masking unwanted versions. This means you need to understand what keywords are, what useflags are, and what valid package atoms are. Just take a couple of small packages, such as bashburn and htop, and play around with masking/unmasking and package atoms, to get a feel for how things work.
Besides those, you should also get to know etc-update and rc-update. Another handy tool is eselect. When you just type in eselect, you will get an overview of available modules. If you then choose one module and type for example eselect binutils, you will then get usage options for that module. If you have read the documentation I suggested, you should know what a profile is. You can use eselect profile to switch to a desktop profile for example. This will affect the useflags used by default, so have a look at emerge --info and see if you maybe want to disable some useflags set by the profile.
Another important feature is elog. When emerging packages, you will get messages, for example about post-install configuration. The elog system offers various ways to deliver these messages to you. You can view the options in /etc/make.conf.example. If you choose to save the elog messages, you can then later review them with the elogv utility (which has an ncurses interface), or the graphical frontends elogviewer (GTK+) and kelogviewer (KDE).
If there is anything unclear, after consulting the documentation, then don’t hesitate to ask! Next time: how to get better help. Stay in touch!
20 Mar 08 at 02:24 | documentation, eselect, Gentoo
Your blog is in my Favorites now :)