Just installed Gentoo successfully and cannot wait to customize and use it by installing various applications? Hold on. Read this article and find out about a few incredibly useful applications which will make your Gentoo experience a breeze!
Getting to grips with Gentoo
Most of the Linux distros available today are similar to quite an extent. You run a package manager, tick a few boxes, click a button and it downloads and installs the latest versions of your favorite packages. Or say, you want to change a few settings in Linux. You open up a graphical application, type in the new values and off you go. However, there are a few Linux distributions which do their work in a completely different way. Either the package manager works differently, or the default behavior and syntax of commands and files is different, and in certain cases, managing the install is done quite differently. Gentoo is one of those distributions which, although is just like any other distribution at the core, has certain philosophies which put it in a different category from the usual Linux distributions popular today.
In this article, we'll take a look at many applications, some of which are just for Gentoo, and others which are distro-agnostic and will make a big difference in the way you work with and use Linux everyday.
Gentoo-specific applications
Since managing and working with Gentoo requires a different set of procedures and methods, let's have a look at a few applications which will help you work with Gentoo efficiently.
Eix: If you've searched for packages in Gentoo, you will have noticed that Portage takes quite a bit of time to search through its package-list to find the relevant packages. Eix (EbuildIndeX) comes to the rescue by cutting down the time required to perform searches by a huge magnitude. It builds a cache of the Portage package-data and searches through it when you use it. So instead of typing "emerge -s foo", you will now have to type "eix foo". To install Eix, just type "emerge eix", and run "update-eix" to build the Eix cache. From the next time, you can directly run "eix-sync" to sync Portage and rebuild the eix cache.
Ufed: Gentoo's Use flags offer a level of customization not offered by any other popular distribution and the ability to fine-tune each package before it gets installed. But the full list of Use flags supported by Gentoo is huge, with a few package-specific flags and many other less-known ones. Ufed (Use flags editor) comes to the rescue with an ncurses interface which lists each Use flag that the distribution supports, a short description of what it affects and the ability to mark/unmark it. By the time you're done, you will have tuned the use flags list perfectly. To install, just type "emerge ufed". To run the application, just type "ufed" in the command line.
Applications for the Internet
Xchat: Before you start compiling and installing dozens of applications for various purposes, it helps to have an IRC client installed which can get you connected to the Gentoo support channel (Freenode, #gentoo) immediately. It also helps to idle in the channel regularly, since any show-stopping bugs will be brought to your notice before you decide to update your Portage cache. Another alternative for command-line people is irssi, a very popular IRC client.
Mozilla Firefox (mozilla-firefox-bin): Gentoo supplies 2 seperate packages of Firefox for each architecture, an pre-compiled binary version and a source-code distribution. Since compiling Mozilla Firefox from source-code takes quite a bit of time, you're better off installing the binary version available. To install, just type "emerge mozilla-firefox-bin".