Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
If you’ve done arch, it’s like long arch
Gentoo probably doesn’t have all packages. One of the reasons I love Arch is because it almost always has any package in the AUR. It’s a lot more work to try and get something installed on Ubuntu related distros. They try to keep up by using snaps and stuff but it’s still no comparison. Arch has everything.
Still it’s gets a bit boring now since I know it so well, so want to try Gentoo at some point also.
Nix has entered the chat.
And one day I’ll figure out how to use it.
Lol I am on the same train
Gentoo has overlays which are similar to AUR, I haven’t felt like I’m missing packages compared to when I ran arch
Ok cool, even more interested in trying it now.
one of the reasons I love gentoo is how easy it is to package things for it.
You know how for pkgbuilds you have to explictly write out the whole configure make make install stuff that pretty much every package uses some variation on? Gentoo abstracts that out to libraries (eclasses) that handle that sort of thing for each build system so you can focus down on anything unique to the package, like build system options.
Also sounds really cool.
Heres an example, ebuilds are named package-version.ebuild and that version in the filename is used to define variables (such as $P here which is the name-version) to make new versions as simple as copying the ebuild with the new version in the filename.
use_enable is used to generate the --enable-(option) or --disable-(option) as set by the user.
For more info, see the devmanual. They’re nice relatively straightforward bash like PKGBUILDs, but with the repetitious stuff taken out.
# Copyright 1999-2022 Gentoo Authors # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 EAPI=8 DESCRIPTION="GNU charset conversion library for libc which doesn't implement it" HOMEPAGE="https://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/" SRC_URI="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/${P}.tar.gz" LICENSE="LGPL-2+ GPL-3+" SLOT="0" KEYWORDS="~amd64 ~ppc ~sparc ~x86" IUSE="nls" RDEPEND="!sys-libs/glibc" DEPEND="${RDEPEND}" src_configure() { econf $(use_enable nls) }Try lfs
Yeah I did when I was new to Linux, several times. It was an awesome learning experience.
I’ve done Arch a couple of times but don’t care to ever do it again to be honest. Maybe I’ll try Gentoo one day.