“You won’t know Gentoo Linux 1.1a for its installer bells and
whistles. That’s not expected after all, not for an audience that’s
more concerned with what’s going on under the hood than the flashy
racing stripes and spoiler. What you do get is a distribution built
mostly from source code, optimized to your personal specifications,
and one killer tool for handling compiles and development: Portage
(a French word meaning “carrying,” often referring to carrying your
canoe across a stretch of land before putting it in the next
stretch of water).“Portage is best described by the Gentoo Linux team, themselves:
‘Portage is a true ports system in the tradition of BSD ports, but
is Python-based and sports a number of advanced features including
dependencies, fine-grained package management, “fake”
(OpenBSD-style) installs, path sandboxing, safe unmerging, system
profiles, virtual packages, config file management, and more.’“If I was a software developer, this is a distribution I’d
watch…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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