Emerge System Utilities

Installing Gentoo - Emerge System Utilities

Now that your make.conf file is ready to go, you can emerge some of the utilities necessary for every Linux system.

Before we begin, we'll need to emerge the kernel sources. This is because some of the packages we'll be installing will need to access the kernel source directory.

# emerge -av gentoo-sources

Make a note of the version that is emerged, which will usually be in the format 2.6.x-gentoo-ry. Here x represents the kernel version, and y represents the Gentoo release version of that particular kernel version.

Here is a brief description of what we are installing and what each package does.

sys-apps/pciutils: A diagnostic utility, used to identify the hardware components in your system.

app-portage/gentoolkit: A collection of useful tools for portage, such as revdep-rebuild.

app-admin/syslog-ng: A system logger, which records your system events to the file /var/log/messages.

sys-process/vixie-cron: A cron daemon, used for scheduling tasks. This is the Linux equivalent of the Windows Task Scheduler.

net-misc/dhcpcd: A DHCP client, capable of interfacing with your network hardware.

sys-apps/ifplugd: A daemon to detect when your network cable is plugged or unplugged.

net-misc/ntp: A network time protocol daemon, ensuring your system time is accurate.

sys-fs/ntfs3g: Utilities in order to read devices containing data formatted with Microsoft's NTFS filesystem.

net-fs/cifs-utils: Utilities in order to mount Microsoft Windows based network shares.

app-portage/portage-utils: Utilities for running queries such as which portage atom owns which file.

# emerge -av pciutils gentoolkit syslog-ng vixie-cron dhcpcd ifplugd ntp ntfs3g cifs-utils portage-utils

Once the emerge has completed, you can move on to Configure System Services.