[ale] Gentoo

[Joseph A. Knapka]

Hi folks,

This past weekend I installed Gentoo on a spare box, and
it's pretty groovy (hmm, I guess the digital-age analogue
of "groovy" would be, what, "pitty"? - for "pits" in CD
masters - or maybe "bitty"? Or perhaps just "discrete"...).
GRUB is way easier than LILO, and Portage is very nice
indeed.

Geoffrey, after doing a really minimal base install,
with no X (but including development tools for various
languages), I was using about 750MB of disk space.
After emerging vnc (which depends upon XFree86 for
some stupid reason), it's up to just a smidgen under
1G. So I think you really do need more disk space. I'm
pretty sure disk usage went above 1G while installing,
since some of these packages require hundreds of MB to
build. Interestingly, about 30% of the disk usage
is in /usr/portage, where we keep copies of all the
source tarballs used to build the system. That seems
unnecessary to me (though I guess it would be an
advantage if you were on a slow net link).

I did have one problem. I tend to use VNC heavily, so
I did an "emerge vnc", which died during the build of
vncviewer: "No rule to make target vncviewer.man, needed
by vncviewer._man." I correctly surmised that if I
simply touched /var/tmp/portage/.../vncviewer/vncviewer.man,
the build would complete successfully (and install a
bogus empty manpage, but who cares). I found it
quite difficult to actually accomplish that, however,
since emerge insists on blowing away the working
source tree each time, rather than using the
existing source that I, er, "fixed." What I
ended up doing was:

emerge vnc
...wait for source code to be unpacked...
^Z
touch /var/tmp/portage/.../vncviewer.man
fg

After which the build completed successfully.

The emerge docs don't seem to indicate a way of
forcing emerge to use the existing source tree,
if any. It seems to me this would be a very
useful feature.

Cheers,

-- Joe
"You know how many remote castles there are along the gorges? You
 can't MOVE for remote castles!" -- Lu Tze re. Uberwald

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