Gentoo Prefix is still alive and going strong. In my opinion, Gentoo Prefix remains a strong point of Gentoo Linux and really establishes that Gentoo Linux is a metadistribution. In this post I want to focus on the numbers. The number of packages in the Gentoo Prefix tree, specifically. But first, a history lesson. It wasn’t until EAPI3 in Gentoo that “allowed” Gentoo Prefix variables into the main Gentoo Linux tree.

The Gentoo Prefix project is still alive and still kicking. There has not been any major noteworthy highlights so you may not heard from us in some time. The number of users increases and the number of active contributors seems to stay the same or increase much more slowly. Gentoo Prefix was the reason I become a Gentoo Linux developer, so get involved..it is an easy gateway to being a Gentoo Developer if you are interested.

Target Audience: Gentoo Linux developers or people otherwise interested in trying out Gentoo Prefix on a Gentoo Linux host. The most often asked questions I hear are either: What is Gentoo Prefix about? or How is this Gentoo Prefix change going to work on normal Gentoo Linux hosts? As such, I have taken the time to put together a small, concise instruction document, [here][1]. If you have 20 minutes and 600M of free disk space, I encourage you to try out Gentoo Prefix on your Gentoo Linux host.

It is no surprise that Gentoo Prefix works fine on arm-linux given the great work being done in Gentoo Linux by the ARM team (armin76, maekke, et al). For the Genesi Efika MX (unboxing), I now have a binpkg repo setup (for Gentoo Prefix only). This was mainly a fun proof-of-concept that I did. I went from installing 70 packages in about 18 hours, to about 30 minutes using binpkgs. What does this mean: Given the relatively small set of arm users and the highly specific use cases for arm hardware, well, there isn’t a very big percentage of users that will keep Ubuntu on their Efika MX when they get it.

As Dan writes, I too survive work by using [Gentoo Prefix][2]. %% uname -a HP-UX localhost B.11.31 U 9000/800 HP-UX %% gcc --version gcc (GCC) 4.2.4 (Gentoo 4.2.4-r01.2 p1.1) %% bash --version GNU bash, version 4.0.35(1)-release (hppa2.0n-hp-hpux11.31) %% ls --version ls (GNU coreutils) 8.1 Packaged by Gentoo (8.1 (p1)) Thanks to haubi for putting effort into the necessary upstream changes/patches for hppa-hpux support! [2]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/

Markus Duft [writes][1]: I’m preparing to conquer the world (again) ;). To achieve my goal, I have prepared a new Gentoo Prefix on Windows Setup, and the according documentation. Video demonstrating the installation of Gentoo Prefix/Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az1RR60s5n4 Grab the latest iso’s from: http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/prefix/x86-interix/20090826/ Docs: http://dev.gentoo.org/~mduft/gpx-installation-20090820.pdf (also available on the DVD installer) [1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.alt/5064

If you happen to be on an AIX 5.x host using [Gentoo Prefix][1]. Then you might see something like this eventually: /bin/sh[3]: /home/jolexa/portage/aix-5.3/bin/chmod: arg list too long This is caused by build systems that use wildcards or even ebuilds that have no issues on a normal GNU/Linux system. To work around this, you need to change the ARG/ENV list size in 4K byte blocks. The default value in AIX 5.x is 6.

(I write this because I have talked quite a few times about the subject but never offered any use cases for it.) We have a core group of Gentoo Prefix users in #gentoo-prefix on freenode. I took a poll and gathered up all the use cases for Gentoo Prefix. They are in somewhat of an order: Bringing a Gentoo userland to your MacBook (macos/darwin) – without modifying the eye-candy host OS.

[Gentoo Prefix][1] now supports Itanium Linux and AIX-6.1 (with caveats). ia64-linux mostly works out of the box. There is one small issue with scanelf which I would like to fix if I ever find the time. (‘scanelf(9292): unaligned access to …’ – low priority because everything still appears to work). We previously supported ia64-linux but it was removed because we didn’t think anyone used it – and no one responded when we asked.

So..what does this mean? In a nutshell..Gentoo Prefix works on the OS that runs on an Atari. Cool, eh? We owe this to the hard work of AlanH, as seen here and here. As always, we are at [#gentoo-prefix][6] and the gentoo-alt mailing list if you are interested. [6]: irc://irc.gentoo.org/gentoo-prefix

It has been awhile since I last wrote about the Gentoo Prefix project. I will update the inquiring minds that want to know… Gentoo Prefix’s irc channel is now #gentoo-prefix. We use to inhabit #gentoo-alt but had some reports that new users were looking for us in -prefix. Also no one involved with the Prefix project had administrative powers over the old channel either. Since we were the only users of the -alt channel, I also had a redirect set up from there to the new channel.

[Gentoo Prefix][1] allows you to place a “prefixed environment” wherever you would like. So, if you want to be able to access your prefix on a NFS network it would make sense to put the prefix in /home for example. I don’t have any solid numbers but I can imagine that the IO for the nfs server is pretty high when emerging. I would rather not suffer the penalties of compile on NFS but also I WOULD like to access PORTAGE_TMPDIR from any host.

Yesterday, zmedico wrote about building multiple packages in parallel with Portage-2.2_rc2. In Gentoo Prefix, we had a sneak peak to this feature, so I have had some time to play with it on my dual-quad core box. Some timing results that you may like: emerge -e system (excluding sys-devel/gcc) As a baseline: With --jobs=1 and MAKEOPTS=16, load-average=9:<br /> real 77m54.290s<br /> user 41m46.086s<br /> sys 29m14.598s Because I was skeptical of what --jobs could really do, I decided to start with small number of parallel jobs: With --jobs=3, MAKEOPTS=16, load-average=9:<br /> real 61m30.181s<br /> user 42m23.398s<br /> sys 32m32.009s While that was running, I noticed a very significant amount of time where my cores were idle, thanks to the handy little xfce-extra/xfce4-cpugraph widget.

All Gentoo Prefix users can now install [gnome-light.]2 I just imported it last night and it works! =) My WM of choice is xfce4, which is the first WM I ported to Prefix. However, if I ever choose to use GNOME, the prefix version will be nicer than the version 2.8.0 (!) that is installed on this OS. 😉 Maybe I will import “gnome-heavy” next. [2]: http://www.gentoo-portage.com/gnome-base/gnome-light