Custom Gentoo ebuilds

Introduction

Gentoo is a source-based Linux distribution. This means its packages are downloaded in source form, patched and compiled on the target computer. The way this is done, using bash scripts called ebuilds, is transparent to the geek, which makes it easy to customise. For that and other reasons I regard it as one of the best Linux distros for computer literates. This page presents ebuilds I have customised or created.

Very concise instructions on how to enable custom ebuilds are as follows:

• Create an overlay directory for storing custom ebuilds. I use /usr/local/portage.
• Create a subdirectory profiles containing two files: repo_name which contains the name of the overlay (arbitrary but unique if you have several overlays), and categories containing all package categories of the overlay, which may be a copy of /usr/portage/profiles/categories.
• Tell the package manager about the overlay by adding the line PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" (or analogous) to /etc/make.conf.

My ebuilds are gzipped tar archives to be unpacked in the overlay direcory, i.e. their paths include the category directory.

Cursory information on overlays is available here and here. In order to fully understand ebuilds, read the Gentoo Development Guide.

Ebuilds

gladTeX

Martin Gulbrandsen's gladTeX is a preprocessor that converts TeX formulas in HTML documents to images. This is a comfortable way to put formulas in HTML. My ebuild downloads it from its home page and applies a small patch to use libgif instead of obsolete libungif. Depending on the gif USE flag, GIF support is enabled or disabled completely. A troff manual page of my creation, with the same content as the official README but nicer looking, is also in the ebuild.

Download ebuild

Gnu bool

Gnu bool can search plain text and HTML documents for phrases and print the results with some context. Boolean operators between phrases and proximity search are supported.

Download ebuild

bbe, the binary block editor

bbe is a binary stream editor similar to sed for text. Among others, it can perform logical function on the data, print out parts of it, and convert to and from BCD (binary coded decimal).

Download ebuild

hexedit with advanced search

This page presents a patch for advanced search in Pascal Rigaux's hexadecimal editor. A Gentoo ebuild that contains the patch is also provided.