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.
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.
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)
}
