Into.the.Void.

I really like the emerge tool that gentoo has. My only problem so far was the search option it had. It’s sometimes pretty slow, so I wanted an alternative. After some googling I came up with eix. It’s a powerfull search tool for the portage with indexing capabilities. So the search is really FAST!

Here’s an example of a search while emerging the latest gcc:

# time emerge -s doom >/dev/null

real 0m40.642s
user 0m0.768s
sys 0m0.210s
# time eix -s doom >/dev/null

real 0m1.140s
user 0m0.059s
sys 0m0.012s

I think that you can easily spot the “improvement”…right ?

What I also like about eix is that you can see all available versions when you search for something and not just the latest stable. Check this output when searching for gcc:

* sys-devel/gcc
Available versions: [P]2.95.3-r8 [P]3.1.1-r2 [P]3.2.3-r4 [P]3.3.2 [P]3.3.2-r5 [P]3.3.2-r7 3.3.5-r1 ~3.3.5.20050130 3.3.5.20050130-r1 ~3.3.5.20050130-r2 *~3.4.1-r3 *~3.4.3-r1 *~3.4.3.20050110-r1 *~3.4.3.20050110-r2 [M]4.0.0_beta20050402
Installed: 3.3.5.20050130-r1
Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html
Description: The GNU Compiler Collection. Includes C/C++, java compilers, pie+ssp extensions, Haj Ten Brugge runtime bounds checking

Well, after searching for doom I’ve decided to install it too 🙂 Doom3 to be exact using the pak files I had in my windows ntfs partition. I just needed to “ln -s” the pak files and my savegames to the proper dirs. I now enjoy doom3 on my gentoo and I get about the same fps I used to get at windows (maybe even just a bit better, but that could be because there were many things running concurrently at windows, e.g. antivirus, firewall, windows crappy services,etc) .

If you like openoffice and you use latex there’s a very nice macro that combines these 2 worlds: OOoLatexEquation. I think it’s just great when you want to have some nice looking math formulas on your documents (embedded as graphics of course). Check this screenshot.

Oh and something I don’t understand. I have emerge multitail some time ago and I saw that there’s an updated version out, but when I “emerge -uDpv world” I don’t see it listed. When I try “emerge -u multitail” it’s there:

[ebuild U ] app-text/multitail-3.4.8 [3.4.5] -debug 63 kB

any ideas why can this be happening ? Is it a bug ? If it is it could affect the whole system by not listing packages that have security problems and “must” be updated. I have never seen it happening before and I wish I won’t see it in the future again.

Filed by kargig at 03:31 under General,Linux
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