Yenya's World

Fri, 23 Feb 2007

Gentoo Linux

I use J-Pilot as a desktop PIM application for synchronizing with my Palm. Few days ago I found that it apparently leaks memory (J-Pilot bug entry, Fedora bug entry). The response to the J-Pilot bug entry was that the bug cannot be reproduced on the author's Gentoo, so it has to be a Fedora bug. So I have decided to install Gentoo in a virtual machine to test J-Pilot under it.

So far the installation was pretty straightforward, I created a virtual disk image, created a filesystem on it, mounted, unpacked the stage3 tarball and Portage snapshot to this filesystem, and in the rest I have followed the Gentoo Handbook pretty closely (omitting steps which are not necessary for chroot or virtual machine environment, such as building my own kernel). In fact, since the Gentoo install runs in the chroot environment, the virtual machine is not necessary when everything you want to do is to compile and test a single GUI application. So I am compiling the packages in chroot instead of the virtual machine (it is faster that way).

We have some Gentoo servers here, so I am already somewhat familiar with the emerge command and USE flags. So far I did not ran into bigger problems, just few annoyances (some of which may definitely be an user error, as I am new to Gentoo):

Now I am waiting for the compile to finish. When I am at it, I want to explore the inner workings of their startup scripts (rc-update and friends) and other Gentoo specialities as well. I also wonder how they do SELinux and how their default security policy look like.

Section: /computers (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 6 writebacks

About:

Yenya's World: Linux and beyond - Yenya's blog.

Links:

RSS feed

Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak

The main page of this blog

Categories:

Archive:

Blog roll:

alphabetically :-)