this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I successfully installed Gentoo for the first time today! (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Gentoo probably doesn't have all packages. One of the reasons I love Arch is because it almost always has any package in the AUR. It's a lot more work to try and get something installed on Ubuntu related distros. They try to keep up by using snaps and stuff but it's still no comparison. Arch has everything.

Still it's gets a bit boring now since I know it so well, so want to try Gentoo at some point also.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nix has entered the chat.

And one day I'll figure out how to use it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Lol I am on the same train

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gentoo has overlays which are similar to AUR, I haven't felt like I'm missing packages compared to when I ran arch

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Ok cool, even more interested in trying it now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also sounds really cool.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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)
}
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try lfs

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah I did when I was new to Linux, several times. It was an awesome learning experience.