At certain times while using Gentoo you are going to have to perform a large emerge, for example when you do an update world. It can be challenging to keep track of the status of this emerge with all the output flying by on the screen. It can also become a problem if you want [...]

To run Java code on a Gentoo system you must have a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed. The JRE will install a 32-bit browser plugin, among other things, which is necessary to take advantage of Java applets in Firefox.
Before we go any further, it must be noted that this will only work with the 32-bit [...]

Gentoo Portage makes it fairly easy to update all the installed packages on your system. The emerge and revdep-rebuild tools are powerful and make the process of recompiling everything much less painful than it sounds.
The emerge and revdep-rebuild commands require root privileges so switch to root or use sudo.
The first step is to synchronize your [...]

By default when you emerge a long list of packages in Gentoo you have to download each package completely before the build process can begin. This can be a large bottleneck, especially if your internet connection is not very fast.
Luckily Portage has a great solution.
Go to the file /etc/make.conf and add “parallel-fetch” to the [...]