page_title: Gentoo Linux
section_title: Portage
hierarchical_section_title: Gentoo Linux / Features / Portage
caption_attribution_description: English: Gentoo linux: installing Darktable.
context_page_description: Gentoo Linux is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the specific type of computer. Precompiled binaries are available for some larger packages or those with no available source code.
  Gentoo Linux was named after the fast-swimming gentoo penguin. The name was chosen to reflect the potential speed improvements of machine-specific optimization, which is a major feature of Gentoo. Gentoo package management is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, and flexible. Gentoo describes itself as a meta-distribution because of its adaptability, in that the majority of users have configurations and sets of installed programs which are unique to the system and the applications they use.
context_section_description: Portage is Gentoo's software distribution and package management system. The original design was based on the ports system used by the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating systems. The Gentoo repository contains over 19,000 packages ready for installation in a Gentoo system.
  A single invocation of portage's emerge command can update the local copy of the Gentoo repository, search for a package, or download, compile, and install one or more packages and their dependencies. The built-in features can be set for individual packages, or globally, with so-called "USE flags".
  Pre-compiled binaries are provided for some applications with long build times, such as LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox, but users lose the ability to customize optional features. There are configuration options to reduce compilation times, such as by enabling parallel compilation or using pipes instead of temporary files. Package compilation may also be distributed over multiple computers. Additionally, the user may be able to mount a large filesystem in memory to further speed up the process of building packages. Some approaches have drawbacks and are not enabled by default. When installing the same package on multiple computers with sufficiently similar hardware, the package may be compiled once and a binary package created for quick installation on the other computers.
caption: Installing software. For example here we see that Darktable will build with Flickr and geolocation support.
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