gentoo - notes

Gentoo is a linux distribution that can be "automatically optimised and customised for just about any application or need. This blog contains information on my experiences upgrading my installation of Gentoo to 1.4, after not doing much emerging for 9 months. Much of this points to documentation the gentoo website so that I can find the information at a later date.

The place to start is with the Gentoo Linux Installation Instructions. After running emerge, the command find /etc -iname '._cfg????_*' is very useful for finding configuration files that need to be updated as the result of running emerge. For updating files I:

• run diff ._cfg0000_make.conf make.conf
• if I prefer the new version then ^diff^mv replaces the original file with the new file.
• otherwise I run emacs ^diff^emacs and use ediff-buffer to merge the two buffers (often merge into the new buffer to reduce differences for next time I upgrade the package).

make.conf controls the way emerge builds software, so here are a couple of my key settings:

• USE="aalib apache2 bonobo directfb doc emacs evo fbcon gtkhtml imap innodb odbc postgres qtmt radeon samba sse xinerama"
• CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
• CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -falign-functions=4"
• CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

Note that Gentoo Linux USE flags editor (ufed) can be used to set the use variable.