[TAG] [LG 106] Installing Gentoo

[Frank Rodolf]

Hi all (and especially Mike),

A few little additions to the article:

> Now say you want to install links but you haven't installed X
> yet. That's a problem because links has X11 extensions, and
> since the "X" USE flag is on by default, "emerge links" will
> install all of X if you don't watch what you're doing. So you
> set an environment variable to override the USE flag this one
> time: 

> USE="-X" emerge links

> Later, after you've installed X, you simply "emerge links"
> again, and it will rebuild itself with the X support.

I realize you are using an example where you only temporarily set $USE,
but it might be worth noting that one can also set specific options for
separate packages, in a more permanent way, using
/etc/portage/package.use.

In this file, one can put lines like these:

net-www/links -X
net-p2p/amule stats
x11-base/xorg-x11 -pie

Some other interesting files in that directory are package.mask,
package.unmask and package.keywords. The last one is, btw, the preferred
way to add experimental packages, while running stable mostly.

> Gentoo's package query tools (equery and qpkg) aren't complete.
> They'll list the files a package contains but several other
> features are marked "not implemented". There didn't seem to be
> a way to quickly see which version of a package is installed:
> something equivalent to "rpm PACKAGE" or "dpkg -l PACKAGE".
> "emerge search PACKAGE" does it, but it takes several seconds,
> and you have to page through other information and entries for
> any other packages the substring matches.

You might want to emerge app-portage/esearch - it provides about the
same functionality as emerge search, but uses a search-index, which
makes it a lot faster. (Of course, the index has to be built, which
takes time, but can be done with a cronjob.)

Btw, Gentoo does have a page where you can search for packages
(http://packages.gentoo.org/), but I am the first to admit, it is not
nearly as powerful as the Debian site.

Grtz,

Frodo