Thanks Mark for the short introduction on how to merge (install) packages in Gentoo. There are two more specialities people will likely encounter while doing basic package management:
1.) Installing a package that is "masked" : Packages can be masked (prevented from installing) for various reasons (like incompatible architecture, conflict with other packages), the most common reason is that a package is marked as unstable on a given architecture (KEYWORD: ~i386 , ~arm64...). Currently a lot of packages for arm64 have that flag. The emerge command will complain and tell you what to do then (add the particular package to the package.accept_keywords file mostly) to make an exception. You can globally accept ~arm64 packages, but that is usually not recommended (add ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arm64" in make.conf).
2.) If a configuration file in /etc/... is updated by a package, emerge will tell you about that and ask you to merge the changes. This is different compared to most other distros. You can either merge the config files manually or use one of the tools provided, mainly running dispatch-conf or etc-update. Those tools will in most cases automatically merge the changes, but in case of conflicts you have to do it manually.
Refer to the Gentoo handbook for configuring the system and working with the portage package system:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...stallation
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...ll/Working
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...ll/Portage
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...Networking
The next step for me is finding out what sane CFLAGS for arm64 / Cortex A53 are, at the moment I use:
CFLAGS="-march=armv8-a+crc -mtune=cortex-a53 -ftree-vectorize -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
1.) Installing a package that is "masked" : Packages can be masked (prevented from installing) for various reasons (like incompatible architecture, conflict with other packages), the most common reason is that a package is marked as unstable on a given architecture (KEYWORD: ~i386 , ~arm64...). Currently a lot of packages for arm64 have that flag. The emerge command will complain and tell you what to do then (add the particular package to the package.accept_keywords file mostly) to make an exception. You can globally accept ~arm64 packages, but that is usually not recommended (add ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arm64" in make.conf).
2.) If a configuration file in /etc/... is updated by a package, emerge will tell you about that and ask you to merge the changes. This is different compared to most other distros. You can either merge the config files manually or use one of the tools provided, mainly running dispatch-conf or etc-update. Those tools will in most cases automatically merge the changes, but in case of conflicts you have to do it manually.
Refer to the Gentoo handbook for configuring the system and working with the portage package system:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...stallation
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...ll/Working
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...ll/Portage
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AM...Networking
The next step for me is finding out what sane CFLAGS for arm64 / Cortex A53 are, at the moment I use:
CFLAGS="-march=armv8-a+crc -mtune=cortex-a53 -ftree-vectorize -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
Come have a chat in the Pine IRC channel >>