Many articles and books assume that Linux users run the popular distributions, such as Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Debian, or Ubuntu. A few Linux distributions, though, are perfectly capable of filling the same roles as the more popular distributions, but provide unusual features. Knowing about the smaller distributions and the peculiarities can be useful as a point of comparison even if you use another distribution, much like knowing French can help your understanding of English, even if you’ve lived in the United States your whole life.
For these reasons, this month’s column is devoted to Portage, Gentoo’s package management system.
Red Hat originated the RPM Package Manager (RPM) and Debian uses its own, eponymous package system. Rather than use either of these systems, though, Gentoo’s designers created their own package management system, Portage. Portage is similar to FreeBSD’s Ports system; both enable you to easily compile source code and install it on the computer in a way that also makes it easy to track dependencies and uninstall the software at a later date. Gentoo’s Portage helps define the distribution’s strengths and weaknesses compared to other distributions.
A Portage Overview
Portage is designed to help you easily compile and install source code without the tedious mucking about with configure scripts, the make utility, and so on. To some users, compiling everything locally is a sort of spiritual purification. To others, though, it’s got a real advantage over installing precompiled binaries,…
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