Re: [gentoo-user] Switching to Gentoo

[Bo Andresen]

On Thursday 09 March 2006 20:16, Jim wrote:
> I have now been using Gentoo for a few days and I am running into some
> issues I hope this group can help with.  At first emerge was trying to
> merge some really old packages.  For example I wanted mysql 5.x, php 5.x
> and Apache 2.x and Gentoo was only going to install mysql 4.x.  I did
> find out about ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" which has helped with getting more
> recent versions of software installed.

In Debian/Ubuntu etc. you can choose between stable and testing. The 
equivalent of testing in Gentoo is enabled by putting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~ARCH" 
in /etc/make.conf (in your case ARCH=x86). If like me you choose to run 
generally stable and only choose testing (~ARCH) for some packages, then you 
should never use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS when emerging something. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS may 
on rare occasions be interesting with emerge --pretend to see what a testing 
package requires. Instead when installing a testing package you should put it 
in /etc/portage/package.keywords. If you do emerge something with 
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS on the command line then portage will downgrade the package 
next time you try to upgrade world (emerge --update --verbose --deep world). 
Also never emerge something without first trying with --pretend or --ask to 
see what it will do.

> Some tasks I could do in Fedora/Ubuntu that I want to know how to do on
> Gentoo:
>
> See list of all *installed* software.

I would use (it's a capital i):
#eix --installed --compact

This provides a list of all installed packages including all dependencies. 
In /var/lib/portage/world there is a list of all of all software that you 
have explicitly installed. The rest of what is installed should be depencies 
of packages in the world file. So to get a list of packages that I installed 
I would use (this is only one line):
#while read pkg; do eix --force-color --compact ^${pkg}$ | head -n 1; done 
< /var/lib/portage/world

> Browse available software that can be installed.

Others have mentioned kuroo which is by far the best gui that I have ever seen 
for portage (not that I ever use a gui ;) ). The most recent version of kuroo 
in portage i.e. kuroo 0.7* does not support portage 2.1* (~ARCH) so if you 
use that you need kuroo 0.8.0_rc1. There is an ebuild available from the 
project page [1] that you can easily use through a local overlay [2].

[1] http://tux.myftp.org/installation.html
[2] http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Installing_3rd_Party_Ebuilds

> See what version of a particular software package is installed.

#eix package

> See if any new versions of *installed* software are available.

To do a sync I always use eix-sync rather than emerge --sync. This provides a 
much better overview of what was changed during that particular sync. To see 
all versions of a particular package
#eix package

To see if there are newer versions of anything in world:
#emerge --update --verbose --deep --pretend world

Important packages to install for portage are as others have mentioned eix and 
gentoolkit.

HtH

-- 
Bo Andresen
-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list