Venkat’s Views

Essential Gentoo Linux Tools

I have been running Gentoo Linux for the past couple of years and I like it for a lot of reasons. I had it very easily customized and optimized for my now decommissioned Dell Dimension L600r (Pentium III 600MHz) server. I also have it installed, optimized and customized for my new self assembled Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor based PC/server (that is running this blog among other things). The package management system combined with USE flags in Gentoo Linux make it easy to install and maintain only the packages that I absolutely need (with only the features that I absolutely need for each one of them).

Due to this reason (of having only the packages that I need), I sometimes find that a command or a tool that I always took for granted (to be available) in other Linux distributions is not available in Gentoo Linux. As fans of Gentoo Linux often say, such commands are just one “emerge” away. Given below are some of the packages that I have found useful and installed as part of my Gentoo Linux installs:

• app-editors/vim (Editor)
• app-text/aspell (Spell checker)
• app-misc/colordiff (Colors in diff output)
• app-misc/screen (Virtual terminals)
• sys-devel/bc (Who needs a GUI calculator when you have this)
• sci-calculators/units (For unit conversions)
• sys-apps/pciutils (PCI bus utilities like lspci)
• sys-apps/usbutils (USB enumeration utilities like lsusb)
• sys-power/cpufrequtils (Set and retrieve CPU frequency settings - cpufreq-set, cpufreq-info)
• sys-apps/smartmontools (SMART related disk tools - smartd, smartctl)
• sys-apps/lm_sensors (Hardware monitoring utilities)
• app-admin/hddtemp (Hard disk temperature monitoring utility)
• app-admin/sysstat (System performance tools - sar, iostat, mpstat, sadf)
• sys-process/lsof (For process or file level debugging)
• dev-util/strace (For process level diagnostics)
• net-analyzer/nmap (Network snooping tool)
• net-analyzer/netcat (Versatile network connection level utility - nc)
• net-analyzer/traceroute (Trace the network route to a host)
• net-dns/bind-tools (BIND tools - dig, host, nslookup, nsupdate)
• net-ftp/ncftp (FTP client for those few times it might be required)
• net-misc/whois (Whois domain registration information lookup client)
• www-client/lynx (Text based web browser)
• media-gfx/jhead (JPEG EXIF information tool)

I have only included tools that I found were missing after a basic stage 3 install of Gentoo Linux 2007.0. I have also not listed packages that are already mentioned in the Gentoo Handbook.

Share This

Tags: gentoo, linux

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.