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!

image by worak

Of course the first step to being a successful Gentoo user should be to get to know the distro you’re using. This may seem self-evident, but the opposite human tendencies of curiosity and laziness may battle over this. You may dive into the handbook just enough to get the operating system installed and running, without grasping the finer points of Gentoo system administration. To really know how it works, and to get the most out of it, you should familiarize yourself with the various sources of documentation.

The Handbook really is the best start. It contains all the information you need for a normal installation. But apart from that, it also introduces you to the workings of portage, the package manager. That is important knowledge for system administration and daily usage. Furthermore, it has a “comprehensive guide to Networking in Gentoo.” What cannot be stressed enough, is that you really should get to know what is probably the single most powerful and defining feature of Gentoo: USE flags. Not grasping the concept of useflags, is like rowing a boat with a teaspoon.

Apart from the Handbook, there is a lot more documentation on the Gentoo website. You should take the time to go through that list, so that you have at least an idea of what is to be found there. It contains a wealth of information, so use that to your benefit! For example, for desktop users it has a guide on X configuration, nVidia and ATi guides, howtos for the most common desktop environments, the KDE Split Ebuilds howto (another important Gentoo feature), as well as guides for sound configuration, localization and using unicode. There are also introductions to vi and zsh, guides for databases, kernel configuration, security, and so on.

Do not forget you also have a lot of documentation right there on your system! Man pages are an important source of information, as is the documentation (in plain text or HTML form) installed by many packages in /usr/share/doc/. There are even manpages for configuration files, such as make.conf!

The forums are also a source of knowledge, as many problems have already been discussed there. Also, there is a “Documentation, Tips & Tricks” subforum, where users share their insights. And most subforums have stickies with important information on often recurring problems.

More user-generated documentation and tips can be found on the unofficial Gentoo Wiki. There is a lot of useful information on there, but you have to realize some of it is outdated. You could help by flagging such problems and possibly editing articles to bring them up to speed with the current realities. Sharing what you’ve learned is the life-blood of the free software movement.

Then there is also the friend of every online person: Google. Knowing how to use search engines is a very important skill, and one that you should continue to refine, as the wealth of information (as well as rubbish) online is growing explosively. Familiarize yourself with Google’s features and smart ways to refine your searches. I could probably devote a whole series on this topic alone. And indeed, books have been written on this. In this day and age, no education can be considered complete without learning how to find useful information. (Can you tell I’ve been a teacher?)

With these tools at hand, you should be well on your way now to become a successful Gentoo user. Please tell me if you’ve found this useful or if you have anything to add that is missing here.

Tomorrow we will continue on the subject of “Know Your Distro,” looking into some of the features and inner workings of Gentoo Linux. So come back for more, or subscribe if you haven’t already done so!