Installing portage on other distros, easier than ever

provicemo · Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004 3:51 am Post subject:

For some reason saying something like 'if you want to use portage, then get gentoo' feels as wrong to be as 'if you want to use MS Office, then get windows'. That just doesnt seem fair to me, it seems greedy.

I rather share portage than force Gentoo onto someone. but i dunno, maybe i'm crazy or something

uglyb0b · Apprentice Joined: 07 Sep 2003 Posts: 280

sirro · Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004 12:25 pm Post subject:

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

hulk2nd · Posted: Mon Apr 05, 2004 7:08 pm Post subject:

the interesting thing in the whole idea is, to combine the package system of a big binary distro with the package system of a big distro that uses sources.

two advantages: packages can be installed fast AND you can always be up to date.

and if both package systems could use the same backend (database ...) this would be dreamlike

greets,
hulk
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Aurora · l33t Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 658 Location: Classified

Hmmm...I read about 2.5 pages of this thread (sry, too lazy to read the whole thing) and I just don't see why someone would be willing to invest the time to install portage but not Gentoo...

I guess there are reasons why, though, as the original poster wouldn't have posted if he didn't feel portage could be useful in another distro.

However, although portage is absolutely wonderful, one other huge reason I use Gentoo is choice, flexibility, and it's streamlined! Fedora is utterly bloated (yeah, I know someone might chime in and argue about this one; there are like 50,000 deamons running when you first boot that distro! -- maybe a slight exaggeration, but still, it gets my point across nonetheless).

Anyways... Gentoo's heart is portage...but, hey, that's OSS -- you gotta take the pros with the cons. If they want it, it's free (and openly available). I think Gentoo (the real definition of Gentoo -- the whole package) is indeed for those willing to build a system from the ground up the way they want to (okay, it's not LFS, but whatever -- it's flexible and "built for me" in many different ways). If someone just wants an easy way to compile something onto their Fedora system, oh well, their loss! They're missing out on Larry and all the cool Gentoo stuff that comes along with it

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devsk · Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2004 5:49 am Post subject:

portage is a package mgmt system for compiling from source, and for unix systems like solaris etc. it is perfect for getting the best of "open" world. one may not have the option of re-installing another OS on the system. fedora may not be a good example...after fedora, I ported portage to solaris and it works well after some patching. go here for screenshot of kde3.2 on solaris 2.6:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=113387&start=100

axxackall · Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2004 9:38 pm Post subject:

has anyone succeeded with Portage on OS X? I found fink so boerken (comparing to Portage on Gentoo), but I have several reason still to stick to OSX on that Mac (instead of going with Gentoo/PPC there). If anyone succeeded with Portage/OSX then I'll give it a shot (instead of fink).
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Epcylon · n00b Joined: 24 Nov 2002 Posts: 34 Location: Oslo, Norway

First I'd like to make one point regarding the last page or so of this thread, before I ask my own question...

You could also think of it like this... once you install portage on a box running some other distro, and use it as the primary way of installing software. Haven't you in fact turned the box into a gentoo box? :roll:

Now on to my question..

I have the dubious honour of being allowed to install software on a shared location on our uni network. This is for so-called unsupported software that the sysadmins doesn't want to bother with. I'd like to use portage for it, but there are a few problems I don't know if we could get around.

First of all. I can't touch *anything* outside the location given to me (namely /site/hacks ... don't ask

) so anything installed would have to live happily in that location. Second, I don't have root access or any kind of elevated access beyond being able to write to that location. So any changes to files in /etc are out, and placing of files in /etc are out, placing anything in /usr or /var is out.

Is it possible to get portage working under these conditions, and what would I have to do to get it done?
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devsk · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 10:47 pm Post subject:

you should try to follow the thread for portaris posted two posts above this post by me. On solaris, I completely installed it in /home/<user>/portage/ as ROOT, hence pkges install in /home/<user>/portage/usr. There are quite a few changes(most documented in that thread) required but it can be done.

jhoh · n00b Joined: 01 Aug 2002 Posts: 23

Everyone,

I have successfully used this script on Fedora. Great work. My real question, however is if this script can be used without a local compiler. Follow me:

My idea is to use a central Gentoo server to build packages in .tbz2 format under /usr/portage/packages/<cpu> where <cpu> is p3, p2, p4, etc. With the packages built with an appropriate make.conf for the targeted platform.

/usr/portage would be an NFS mount containing the portage tree and the .tbz2itized (sp?) packages.

I can then uncomment the "emerge sync" line from the script, copy over the make.conf from the server that created the .tbz2's (from the <cpu> directory), and change the "emerge -O portage" and "emerge -O gawk" lines to "emerge --usepkg -O portage/gawk".

Wouldn't this allow me continue on with "emerge --usepkg <package>" and, assuming .tbz2's existed for all dependencies in /usr/portage/packages/<cpu>..., then the Fedora machine would never need to compile a thing...right?

cork · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2004 Posts: 1

I'm currently a total linux noob who is running a Mandrake 10 dual boot with WInXP. I've been having a lot of trouble installing software using rpm's because of missing various dependancies. I heard that their are ways that the dependancies can be worked out automatically but am unsure of how to install the program to do this. I've been reading your thread but am totally lost with what to do. I uncompress the portage tarball for my arch(x86) and then tried to run your script. The script seemed to run fine but then i looked and their is no /etc/portage folder and though i can use emerge nothing goes through succesfully. Please tell me what other i need to provide if neccessary. I"ve tried to emerge a few programs now and i notice that this comes up from time to time

/usr/sbin/ebuild.sh: line 238: einfo: command not found

and things of that nature

devsk · Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2004 5:53 am Post subject:

read the post fully, its just four pages, I remember its been dealt with. in mozilla, on each of these four pages, press '/' and then type "einfo". If I remember correctly, file /sbin/functions.sh should be present and /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions.sh should link to it, but make sure to double check.

MasquedAvenger · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 9:25 am Post subject:

I should bite my tongue, and I apologize for coming into the thread so late and I understand that i cannot understand the entire context of this discussion. That being said, I must respond to the following:

someguy · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 8:17 pm Post subject:

cant get it to work on damnsmall linux (debian based)

devsk · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 9:40 pm Post subject:

you probably have python 2.3 and older version of file /usr/lib/portage/bin/emerge which refers to python2.2. easiest solution is to edit that file and replace python2.2 with python

skyfolly · Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 6:07 pm Post subject:

cool!!!!!!!! finally got it running on my Fedora Core 2 box, thanks a lot! I hope you could write a complete howto on this topic and post it upon www.tldp.org, so all linuxers can benetfit from your efforts.
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woolsherpahat · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 347

Hello.

I'm trying to get this to work on a default install of Mandrake 10.0. I used your script to install portage and it works... for the most part. Your script was able to update portage to the most recent version (2.0.50-r8 ) but during the same runtime it failed to emerge gawk.

devsk · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 2:59 am Post subject:

woolsherpahat · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 347

Wow, thanks for the quick response. patch emerged just fine however gawk still provides some errors.

devsk · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 5:11 am Post subject:

you should have yacc ebuild in the portage tree somewhere. try:

woolsherpahat · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 347

Alright. Yacc was merged sucessfuly but bison failed due to not having "GNU M4 1.4". I was trying to emerge bison without dependencies. Should I just go ahead and emerge bison and it's dependecies and see if that helps it install? I did use your handy little script to prune all the "dangerous" packages out of the portage tree so I am safe to just use emerge normally?

Thanks for your time and paitence.

UPDATE:
Sweet, I got gawk to emerge! That was the only thing that failed when I ran your script so I'm assuming I'm good to go. Portage is update to date and everything. I used your package.mask to prune my portage tree of anything "dangerous" so can I now use portage like I would on a normal gentoo system? Can I just go ahead an emerge gnome?

devsk · Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2004 2:44 am Post subject:

geforce · l33t Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 654 Location: Canada

Will I have the EMERGE command if I install Gentoo's portage on RedHat for example ?
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