1.  Gentoo Documentation Resources

Available Languages

Our documentation is also available in the following languages:

Czech | English | French | German | Italian | Japanese | Polish | Simplified Chinese | Spanish

Introduction

Welcome to the Gentoo Documentation Resources. This page will give you a quick overview on the documentation we provide. Most documentation is released under the Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license, an open documentation license. All documentation should also be available in a printer-friendly format. To view this document, append ?style=printable to the URL. You'll also find a "Print" link on the top-right corner of each document.

If you find bugs in our documentation or have proposals, please use our Bugtracking System and fill in a bug report for "Documentation" or "Doc Other". These bug reports will then be handled by the Gentoo Documentation Project.

Documentation Repository

Our documentation is categorized and hierarchically navigable. If you want a quick overview of all available documentation without the additional information, please use our Documentation Listing page. We also have a full listing of all our documents with their descriptions.

2.  Gentoo System Documentation

Portage and Related Documentation

A Portage Introduction: This chapter explains the "simple" steps a user definitely needs to know to maintain the software on his system.

Portage Features: Discover the features Portage has, such as support for distributed compiling, ccache and more.

Working with Portage: "Working with Portage" provides an in-depth coverage of Portage, Gentoo's Software Management Tool.

USE flags: USE flags are a very important aspect of Gentoo. In this chapter, you learn to work with USE flags and understand how USE flags interact with your system.

Gentoolkit: Gentoolkit is a suite of tools to ease the administration of a Gentoo system. This document covers the basics of some of the tools present in Gentoolkit.

Portage-utils: This guide covers some common uses of portage-utils, a set of fast Portage helper applications written in C.

Manually fixing broken portage installations: This document attempts to help people to manually fix a broken sys-apps/portage installation.

Gentoo Overlays: Users' Guide: This guide helps users understand how to use the Gentoo Overlays service.

Configuring Gentoo

Environment Variables: With Gentoo you can easily manage the environment variables for your system. This chapter explains how you do that, and also describes frequently used variables.

Initscripts: Gentoo uses a special initscript format which, amongst other features, allows dependency-driven decisions and virtual initscripts. This chapter explains all these aspects and explains how to deal with these scripts.

Gentoo Choices

Gentoo Linux Kernel Guide: This document gives you an overview on all kernel sources that Gentoo provides through Portage.