Gentoo goes Binary

I was genuinely excited as I read the latest Gentoo news regarding their commitment to providing more binary packages for Gentoo stable.

Gentoo is often referred to as the non-binary distribution, where everything must be compiled from source code. For me, this aspect has always been Gentoo’s greatest strength and, simultaneously, its most significant weakness. Despite being a fervent Gentoo fan, I find myself resorting to Arch in certain environments because, I must admit, compile times on Gentoo, especially on older hardware, can be quite painful.

This is precisely why Gentoo is now expanding its offering of binary packages on their (mirror) servers. While, for most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates, it’s a different story for amd64 and arm64. There, they boast an impressive >20 GByte of packages on their mirrors, ranging from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable is updated daily!

Despite the newfound convenience, you still retain the flexibility of Gentoo’s USE flags. However, if you find yourself running Gentoo on older hardware or simply wish to avoid lengthy builds, such as with qtwebengine, you have the option to expedite the installation process using binaries on a base system. Later, you can switch back to a non-binary installation, although the installation process with binaries is considerably faster, as illustrated in the screenshot I captured during a fresh installation using emerge, which predominantly utilized binary packages:

I’m using a modded version of dwm as my windowmanager and st as my terminal emulator.

The only modifications I made in this fresh installation were to edit the contents of this new file here:

/etc/portage/binrepos.conf/gentoobinhost.conf

So that the priority is 9999 and to ensure I’m utilizing the nearest mirror:

[gentoobinhost]
priority = 9999
sync-uri = https://mirror.netcologne.de/gentoo/releases/amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64/

Also, make.conf should have the following entry to enforce verification of GPG signatures:

FEATURES="${FEATURES} binpkg-request-signature"

emerge -avuDUg @world will now handle the rest.

If you wish to install a package like neovim using emerge, you can do so by employing the “-g” parameter alongside the emerge command to install neovim from the binaries:

emerge -g --ask neovim

If you desire to set the “-g” parameter as the default for your system, modify your make.conf file to ensure that EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS reflects your preferred default settings:

EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="-g"

Installation in an virtual environment

If I have to set up a virtual machine, I typically do so using qemu. For me, this is the most versatile and lightweight way to spin up virtual machines.

First, I created a qemu image of 15GB:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 gentoo.qcow2 15g

For this machine, I created this simple shell startup file:

    qemu-system-x86_64 \
      -m 2G \
      -vga virtio \
      -display default,show-cursor=on \
      -usb \
      -device usb-tablet \
      -smp 2 \
      -cdrom install.iso -boot menu=on \
      -drive file=gentoo.qcow2,if=virtio \
      -device e1000,netdev=net0 \
      -netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22  \
      -cpu Nehalem

and made it executable via chmod +x start.sh.

Now, I downloaded the latest minimal install image from Gentoo and started the VM via ./start.sh.

After the machine was booted up, I started the SSH daemon, assigned a password to root, and was able to SSH into it from a proper terminal emulator.

/etc/init.d/sshd start
passwd root

ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

Gentoo

I did the usual steps for installing Gentoo without any frills. If you don’t have any idea of what you are doing, please read the Gentoo Handbook. It’s awesome.

livecd /etc/portage/binrepos.conf # lsblk
NAME  MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
fd0     2:0    1     4K  0 disk
loop0   7:0    0 424.5M  1 loop /mnt/livecd
sr0    11:0    1 466.7M  0 rom  /mnt/cdrom
vda   252:0    0    15G  0 disk
zram0 253:0    0     0B  0 disk

livecd /etc/portage/binrepos.conf # parted /dev/vda
GNU Parted 3.6
Using /dev/vda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary ext4 1MiB 100%
(parted) set 1 boot on
(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

livecd /etc/portage/binrepos.conf # blkid /dev/vda1
/dev/vda1: UUID="2e7bc77b-40ff-46c2-8d13-3f34cf03742a" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="primary" PARTUUID="e28d6e8d-bb87-427e-818b-198d60e23ddb"

livecd /etc/portage/binrepos.conf # mount /dev/vda1 /mnt/gentoo/
livecd /etc/portage/binrepos.conf # cd /mnt/gentoo/
livecd /mnt/gentoo # ls
lost+found
livecd /mnt/gentoo # wget https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/20240114T164819Z/stage3-amd64-systemd-mergedusr-20240114T164819Z.tar.xz
--2024-01-18 13:45:33--  https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/20240114T164819Z/stage3-amd64-systemd-mergedusr-20240114T164819Z.tar.xz
Resolving distfiles.gentoo.org... 195.181.170.18, 212.102.56.182, 195.181.175.15, ...
Connecting to distfiles.gentoo.org|195.181.170.18|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 309232792 (295M) [application/x-xz]
Saving to: ‘stage3-amd64-systemd-mergedusr-20240114T164819Z.tar.xz’

stage3-amd64-systemd-mergedusr-20240114T164819Z 100%[======================================================================================================>] 294.91M  11.1MB/s    in 29s

2024-01-18 13:46:03 (10.3 MB/s) - ‘stage3-amd64-systemd-mergedusr-20240114T164819Z.tar.xz’ saved [309232792/309232792]

livecd /mnt/gentoo # tar xpvf stage3-*.tar.xz --xattrs-include='*.*' --numeric-owner