Making Sense of Gentoo’s USE Flags

Posted on June 21st, 2008 in Gentoo by admin

One of the best features of the Gentoo Linux Distribution is the fact that you can customize it to suit whatever needs your Operating System should provide. This stems from the fact that, because it is a “source-based” distribution, you can enable or disable different features in certain programs before the source code gets built into “binaries”.

For example, say you need to use Samba to connect to a Windows based computer, you probably do not need to have LDAP support built into Samba (which would be used as a database backend to hold user accounts, passwords, etc. if you want to use Samba as a Primary Domain Controller). So when you build Samba on a Gentoo Linux System, you “tell” it to build it without LDAP support to make the resultant binaries both smaller in size and possibly a little more robust.

Unfortunately, most Gentoo users don’t take the time to tackle various USE flags, which results in a very unorganized /etc/make.conf file, as well as a system that either has too much “bloat” or doesn’t provide all the features that are possibly available to the user.

How to use emerge in Gentoo

Posted on March 26th, 2008 in Gentoo by admin

Chances are if you have the know how to use Gentoo and made it thus far to get it installed you probably don’t need this tutorial, but it’s good to have as much documentation as possible. Emerge makes installing easy, just as apt-get would be Ubuntu, but in emerge we can install source built applications rather than binary applications, thus is the Gentoo way. And along with that is many more options for these packages. This tutorial will just cover the basics.

Emerge searches through the Portage Tree for applications. The Portage tree is a collection of ebuilds files that contain all information Portage needs to maintain software (install, search, query, …). These ebuilds reside in /usr/portage by default.

Whenever you ask Portage to perform some action regarding software titles, it will use the ebuilds on your system as a base. It is therefore important that you regularly update the ebuilds on your system so Portage knows about new software, security updates, etc.