Making Sense of Gentoo’s USE Flags
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
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.