So I got my Linode last night (thanks for the quick setup, Chris!) and selected a Gentoo distro as its the most BSD-like in terms of installing new apps. I'm not sure if I need to do anything special after using the distro wizard to install it because neither apache nor any email programs seem to be installed.

So I'm assuming that I need to install them myself with this particular distro. I've tried emerge apache-2.0.48 but I get this error message:



I seem to get this when I try to emerge anything, although emerge sync did seem to work fine. Can someone point out to me what I'm doing incorrectly?

Drop the -2.0.48 and try

emerge -p apache

-p means pretend. Emerge will find 2.0.48-r1, which is the current unmasked version.

If you've emerged gentoolkit (highly recommended)

etcat versions apache

will show you what's available.

Oh, and I should ask, you've set the apache2 USE flag and any other flags that apache (or mod_php, mysql) might appreciate, right?

I eventually managed to figure out this. Heh.




Errrm...no. Sorry I'm totally new to Gentoo so this is a learning process. I've skimmed the FAQ on emerge over on Gentoo's website but maybe you can explain in clearer detail the purpose of USE?

Thanks for your help!

The USE flags basically turn on features. So if you emerge say php and want it to have gd support for drawing graphics, you'd add "gd" to your use flags. Your use flags are defined near the top of /etc/make.conf. There is a list on the gentoo web site in the documentation, or you could emerge ufed which is the use flag editor. It will let you go through and set all the flags appropriately.

So say I didn't have "gd" in my USE flags. Would it then compile PHP (and other apps) without gd support? So basically USE flags let the portage system know what options to compile apps with?

It might be that I didn't look hard enough but Gentoo's website did a fair job of explaining HOW to use USE, but not such a great job about what it is.

Again, thanks for your help.

Exactly. Did you see this doc, which is on the Gentoo documentation page?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/use-howto.xml

I think it covers most everything other than ufed, which should be self explanatory once you emerge it.

The first thing I did was read the descriptions of every USE flag and
turned off some that even Gentoo set as defaults.

Since I didn't want X or X-support for newly-emerged apps I turned
that off.

Oh, and watch out for any emerge which modifies make.conf, since
Gentoo will happily overwrite Caker's custom CFLAGS and you'll
find yourself compiling unoptimized apps. I did this for a long time.
(How long, I'm too embarassed to say).

Have fun!

Errm...how do I know which ones will overwrite the .conf files?

After you do an emerge that has updated config files, it should say so at the end, and suggest you update them. The easiest way to do that is to run etc-update, which will scan the system for updated config files and let you selectively replace or keep your originals.