Gentoo Software Management

[Audax321]

Hello,

I've been wanting to give Gentoo a try, but I'm just confused about one thing. How does installing/removing software work. The only Linux distributions I've really had experience with are all RPM-based like SuSE and Mandrake and I like the idea of being able to installing/uninstalling software cleanly...is there a way to do this in Gentoo or is everything done using configure, make, make install commands from source?

Thanks.

[lordnothing]

portage handles the configuring/making/installing of software.. mostly through the 'emerge' script (portage is all python (it used to be C (don't know why they changed, though)))... emerge also handles uninstalling... if you dig around on the gentoo site (http://www.gentoo.org) you should be able to find some info on portage

[Jell-O-Fishi]

some basic examples of how things work in gentoo:

to install gimp (any any dependencies it may need that are not yet installed):
emerge gimp

this will download the source, configure, compile and install the files

to upgrade all installed software :
emerge world

to uninstall gimp :
emerge unmerge gimp

to remove the dependencies that were needed by software that isn't installed any more :
emerge depclean

this is just the tip of the iceberg though

i personally love the portage system and refuse to live without it

other useful command are equery, genlop and revdep-rebuild (read the man pages for them)

[loft306]

just a cautionary depclean can be a dangerous beast to use....be cautious with it

[johnniemccarthy]

Somebody help me. Im trying to install a network printer on Gentoo KDE3.3, any idea's folks

[kkubasik]

You will need to give a little more detail, what is the printer make and model, what steps have you taken etc. Also, p[lease start a new thread for a new question

[boombastic]

I would like to ask this:
i've got no internet connection,don't ask me why please,that's it!
I've got a lot of software in some dvds in bz2 format,can i use it with portage?
I know i can install it with ./configure,make and make install but i would like to keep trace of the software i install so i can remove it if i want.
So,is there a way to use bz2 file with portage?

[Stormblazer]

1. Are those the gentoo DVDs? If they are, then you should be able to simply copy them over to /usr/portage/distfiles

2. Sometimes you can use them, sometimes not, because often portage maintainers add in patches to fix bugs that aren't yet solved in the main releases yet. I suppose you could remove the patch sections in the ebuild files, but that would get tedious fast. I guess the easiest way would be to copy them over to /usr/portage/distfiles and see if it works.

3. Optionally, you could use another computer to download the files from portage (like maybe use the gentoo liveCD and copy them to an FAT32 drive or something) and then copy them from there to /usr/portage/distfiles