Portage

Portage is the package manager of Gentoo.

A lot of problems during emerge come from dependencies. Portage developpers are not perfect and can make errors when defining dependencies.

If emerge fails you can try :

• if you see that the error message is related to something, try to install this package before (eg opengl)
• install manually some of the dependencies before, it changes the order and can work
• if nothing works, unmerge all packages related to what you want (eg x11), or remove them from /usr/portage to force portage to reinstall them, and reinstall everything (that's what I had to do to install modular xorg).

ebuild fluxbox fetch   ; to download the package
ebuild fluxbox unpack  ; to uncompress the sources
; here you can modify sources
ebuild fluxbox compile ; to compile
ebuild fluxbox install ; to install (first part)
ebuild fluxbox qmerge  ; to install (second part)
ebuild fluxbox clean   ; to clean temporary folders

This is exactly equivalent to :

emerge fluxbox

To save your package as it is installed :

quickpkg xorg-x11

(you need to emerge portage-tools to use it)

To restore it (obliges emerge to use local binaries) :

emerge -K xorg-x11
#OR
emerge --usepkgonly -a xorg-x11-6.8.2-r8

After an emerge, there is often a warning telling you that some config files need to be updated. The tool called etc-update can help you to do this, by merging automatically what it can and asking your for the rest :

sudo etc-update

If you do anything about it, your portage folder will grow along time. This is due to the distfiles folder, where are stored all source tarballs of packages you have installed.

There is a portage tool called eclean which can remove all useless tarballs while keeping interesting ones :

eclean --destructive distfiles

You can add the -p option (pretend) if you just want to see what will be removed.

If you have enough memory, it can be faster to compile directly in the memory instead of on the hard disk. For that, mount /tmp/portage in a ram disk.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~karltk/package-index/category_index.html

eix is a portage tool which can search faster in your portage tree :

eix-sync # to do an emerge --sync and synchronize its database
eix <package-name>