jude pereira's blog

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Law #1: If anyone tells you that, “To administer a Gentoo Build is easy”, tell him/her to go f*** off. Ofcourse, if your an expert at it, then it’ll be an exception for you. Yes, it really is easy if you understand what you are doing, unlike pulling your hair out.

Gentoo offers the most that you can think of getting out of any GNU/Linux box, and that is the very fact why administering it often becomes a headache. You will at first curse portage(the package manager), but eventually will realize that it’s the most superior one out there. Okay, I hate introductions, let’s get to work.

Required Gears:

• Gentoo Build from stage3(stage3 is the best method to install Gentoo)
• Some patience for reading

Package Managing and Tune-Ups:

You’ve probably noticed that compile time is long, so, if you have like >1GB RAM, you can opt to compile in RAM. Here’s how you do this in /etc/fstab. Add this line there and do a “# mount /var/tmp/portage”.

none /var/tmp/portage tmpfs nr_inodes=1M,size=900M 0 0


Portage does all its compiling in /var/tmp/portage, so if we have that in RAM, read/write speeds would be better. Again, you may also try out ccache, but it will cause some build to fail. For me, it failed to compile mono as it had some error in the cached libs. Now we have faster build time. Let’s make the searching and “Calculating dependencies…” happen a lot faster. For this, we’ll create a reiser4 loopback filesystem which will also compress the huge tree into only 220MB max. This is just done by making the blocksize a bit smaller. I prefer reiser4 as it’s extremely good with small files(you will have to patch your kernel for reiser4fs, so head out here: Patching the Linux Kernel for reiser4 support).

# dd if=/dev/zero of=s-port bs=1M count=250
# mkfs.reiser4 ./s-port
# mv ./s-port /usr
# mount -o loop /usr/s-port /usr/portage/
# emerge-webrsync

Note: You’ll have to relocate your distfiles, as this images is only 250MB and you cannot store distfiles in this image. Refer to the make.conf

You can add the following line to /etc/fstab to make it mount on every boot.

/usr/s-port /usr/portage reiser4 loop,noatime 0 0


Now, we should have a faster portage. In case you have a lower bandwidth, I suggest you to use the delta method of patching the tree. The package is called “app-portage/emerge-delta-webrsync”. Go ahead and install it. It will not download the whole tree everytime you want to sync, but only fetch patches(usually less than 2MB) and patch up the tree. It may hit your head that emerge –search is a bit slow. So then install “app-portage/eix”. It’s a common tool for searching as it displays results in less than 10 seconds.

Putting the next thing bluntly, many users are often very frustrated when portage complains about “masked” packages. For this, install “app-portage/autounmask”. The syntax for autounmask goes like this: autounmask category/package-version
# autounmask x11-wm/compiz-fusion-0.6.0
.
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