Difference between revisions of "Converting"

Latest revision as of 09:39, 29 December 2013

WIP: This article is currently a work in progress, additions and changes are still to be made. You should not consider this article stable.

Commands for Gentoo present here can be executed in Sabayon, but doing so isn't advised. If you know what you are doing, and in what it may result, use them. You've been warned.

Introduction

This page is supposed to show people coming from or going to a different distribution how some things compare. It's a pragmatic comparison and doesn't judge which one is better.

This is very incomplete. Please add anything you know about any distro you think is important. Please note, some distros are using another distro's CLI interface (for example, the same package manager), in that case, please use the name of the distribution which was the first to use it.

Package management

Where Gentoo has portage and emerge, Debian has, among others, apt. This is to show you how you use either to handle updates, installs, and so forth. Debian has mainly two package management tools: apt and aptitude ( the first with supercow powers, checkout apt-get moo; the second unfortunately not ). This TIP will show commands with both tools for the sake of clarity.

Be careful with the pacman commands for Arch Linux. The option -S means it'll try to synchronize, so every time the option -S is given, pacman will try to contact with the Arch repository servers.

Updating package database on your system

Sabayon

 equo update

or

 equo up

Gentoo

 emerge --sync  

Debian

 apt-get update

aptitude update Note: The use of aptitude is recommended over apt-get due to more intelligent dependency handling

Arch Linux

 pacman -Sy  

Updating packages on your system

Updating all packages, only pretending the operation:

Sabayon

 equo upgrade --pretend  

or

 equo u -p  

Gentoo

 emerge --deep --update --pretend world  

or

 emerge -Dupv world  

To keep the consistency of your system (with clean), it's better to type :

emerge -DNauv world
emerge --depclean -av
revdep-rebuild

Debian

 apt-get upgrade --simulate

aptitude upgrade --simulate

Arch Linux

 pacman -Qu  

Update a particular package

Sabayon

 equo install package1 package2  

or

 equo i package1 package2  

Gentoo

 emerge --update package1 package2  

or

 emerge -u package1 package2  

Debian

 apt-get upgrade package1 package2  

aptitude upgrade package1 package2

Arch Linux

 pacman -S package1 package2  

Installing packages

Sabayon

 equo install package1 package2  

or

 equo i package1 package2  

Gentoo

 emerge package1 package2  

Debian

apt-get install package1 package2
aptitude install package1 package2  

Debian source compile:

apt-get build-dep package1
apt-get source package1  

(optional: customize the build by modifying the debian/rules makefile) (or set environmental variables like DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS) (note that this will make your bug reports invalid to the maintainer)

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
dpkg -i generatedpackagename  

Simplified source compile:

apt-get build-dep package1
apt-get -b source package1  

(the packages are automatically generated using the -b switch above)

Apt-Build, clean and easy way ( install the package apt-build )

apt-build install package1 package2  

This process can be used to backport packages from testing and unstable by simply adding their respective source repositories to sources.list, which is similar to adding ~x86 to package.keywords in Gentoo. This is explored further in "arch and repositories" below.

Arch Linux

 pacman -S package1 package2  

Reinstall a particular package

Sabayon

 equo install package1 package2  

Gentoo

 emerge --oneshot package1 package2  

Debian

 apt-get install --reinstall package1 package2

aptitude reinstall package1 package2

You rarely need to reinstall a package on Debian

for those of us who tinker with things we should not, reinstalling does not always work, for those occasions we can use

 dpkg --purge --force-depends apache2-common  

and then

 apt-get install apache2-common  

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/176

Arch Linux

 pacman -Sf package1 package2  

Searching package database

Sabayon

 equo search searchword  

or

 equo s searchword  

To get even more information about package(s):

 equo search --verbose searchword  

or

 equo s -v searchword  

To get only list of matching packages:

 equo search --quiet searchword  

or

 equo s -q searchword  

To get list of matching packages, listing beside their names also version:

 equo search --quiet --verbose searchword  

or

 equo s -qv searchword  

Gentoo

To search the package names and descriptions:

 emerge --searchdesc searchword  

On Gentoo, it's actually much better to install and use either the esearch package or the eix package to do a search. You use them like this:

 eix searchword  

or

 esearch searchword  

Debian

 apt-cache search searchword

aptitude search searchword Both emerge, aptitude and apt-cache search support regular expressions. To get the long package information on Debian (searching only in package names):

 aptitude show searchword  

Arch Linux

 pacman -Ss searchword  

To get more information about a package in Arch Linux, run:

 pacman -Si packagename  

List of Packages Installed

Sabayon

 equo query list installed --quiet --verbose  

or

 equo q list installed -qv  

Gentoo

 equery list  

equery is part of the gentoolkit package. If you don't have it, emerge that first:

 emerge gentoolkit  

Debian

 dpkg -l  

Arch Linux

pacman -Qs  #This will list all packages with their descriptions
pacman -Q   #This lists all packages with their versions
pacman -Qq  #This lists just the package names

Removing packages

Sabayon

 equo remove package1 package2</pre>

or

 equo rm package1 package2  

To ask for confirmation before removing packages:

 equo remove --ask package1 package2  

or

 equo rm -a package1 package2  

To remove wit all configuration files:

 equo remove --configfiles package1 package2  

Gentoo

 emerge --unmerge package1 package2  

or

 emerge -C package1 package2  

Debian

apt-get remove package1 package2
aptitude remove package1 package2  

or to remove along with all configuration files

apt-get remove --purge package1 package2
aptitude purge package1 package2

Arch Linux

 pacman -R package1 package2  

Only downloading packages

This can be useful e.g. if you're on a dial-up connection and want to download everything first and install later.

Sabyaon

 equo download package1 package2  

or

 equo fetch package1 package2  

Gentoo

 emerge --fetchonly package1 package2  

or

 emerge -f package1 package2  

Debian

apt-get install --download-only package1 package2
aptitude install --download-only package1 package2

Arch Linux

 pacman -Sw package1 package2  

Cleaning up downloaded packages

Compressed packages that were downloaded for installation can easily consume gigs of hdd space.

Sabayon

 equo cleanup  

Gentoo

 rm -rf /usr/portage/distfiles/*  

To only remove outdated packages you will need to install the gentoolkit package and use eclean:

 eclean distfiles  

Cleaning temporary files from emerging packages:

 rm -rf /var/tmp/portage/*  

Debian

apt-get clean
aptitude clean  

Only remove outdated packages:

apt-get autoclean
aptitude autoclean

Arch Linux

pacman -Scc #Removes ALL packages
pacman -Sc  #Only removes the packages that are not installed on the system and/or not the latest version of the package

GUI frontends for package management

Sabayon

rigo

Gentoo

himerge, kuroo, portato, porthole

Debian

aptitude, dselect (both ncurses based and a bit cryptic), synaptic (gtk), adept (qt)

Arch Linux

jacman, gtkpacman, alunn, guzuta, pacmon-svn, pacmanager-svn, kpacupdate, YAPG, shaman

Reverse dependencies

Gentoo

Reverse dependencies are a major drawback of Gentoo's current portage implementation: It does not take care of them at all at the moment. This means that you can uninstall packages needed by others without being warned about it. E.g. you can remove the x server package without portage warning you that kde (which you have installed as well) depends on it. This way you can actually break your entire system (e.g. by removing glibc).

revdep-rebuild

can fix broken dependencies broken by

emerge --depclean

Debian

In Debian, reverse dependencies are taken care of by dpkg.

Arch Linux

Also automatically removed when needed.

Runlevel & Initscripts

Runlevels work pretty conventionally on Debian. On Gentoo, they are a bit different.

Directories and files

In Debian runlevels are named conventionally (0-6 and S). They are represented by directories in /etc/ called rc*.d (when the default sysv-rc boot loader package is installed; file-rc can be installed instead, and then the relevant file is runlevel.conf).

• /etc/rc0.d
• /etc/rc1.d
• /etc/rcS.d
• /etc/rc2.d
• /etc/rc3.d
• /etc/rc4.d
• /etc/rc5.d
• /etc/rc6.d

In Gentoo, runlevels have the same names, but these are mapped to more self explanatory ones (in /etc/inittab): "boot", "default", "nonetwork", with the option to add more. The directories that represent them are in /etc/runlevels/:

• etc/runlevels/boot
• /etc/runlevels/default
• /etc/runlevels/nonetwork

In Gentoo, if a service is not explicitly started in a runlevel, it is stopped when switching to that runlevel! There is no explicit stopping of runlevels as in Debian (/etc/rc*.d/K**service).

In both Debian and Gentoo, which things are started (and stopped) in which runlevels is controlled by links in the runlevel directories to scripts in /etc/init.d/, e.g.:

 gentoo $ ls -l /etc/runlevels/boot/hostname
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 20 Mar 25  2004 /etc/runlevels/boot/hostname -> /etc/init.d/hostname

 debian $ ls -l rcS.d/S40hostname.sh
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 21 2004-11-07 00:19 rcS.d/S40hostname.sh -> ../init.d/hostname.sh

Runlevel management: rc-update, update-rc.d

To manage which things to start in which runlevels, use the following commands:

Gentoo

rc-update
rc-status --all  (To see the current status and other runlevels)

To add the cupsd to the default runlevel, do:

rc-update add cupsd default

To remove alsasound from the boot runlevel, do:

rc-update del alsasound boot

Debian

update-rc.d

Configure cupsd to be started in runlevels 2, 3, 4, 5, and stopped in 0, 1, 6, with sequence code 20:

update-rc.d cupsd start 20 2 3 4 5 . stop 20 0 1 6 . 

or simply:

update-rc.d cupsd defaults 

Remove cupsd from all runlevels:

update-rc.d -f cupsd remove

Config Files

/etc/make.conf and use flags

While in Gentoo there are a large number of configuration files which exist to control the behaviour of the package management system, there are comparatively fewer in Debian, as there is no need to dictate how to compile software which is downloaded and tweak/alter this purpose. In Gentoo, the file /etc/make.conf is used for much configuration; this includes USE flags, which influence which elements of packages are compiled, and which libraries to build support for - common USE flags (USE or -USE to specifically negate support) include 'gtk gnome' for gnome users (and a corresponding -qt -kde -arts) and 'qt kde arts' for kde users. A Gentoo user's complete set of use flags may look something like this:

USE="-kde -arts -qt xv truetype bluetooth crypt slang readline gpm berkdb mmx gdbm tcpd pam libwww ssl nls ethereal perl python esd gif imlib sdl oggvorbis mpeg gnome gtk X motif opengl avi png tiff nptl pcmcia nptl ldap eds"

arch and repositories

Gentoo

Also in /etc/make.conf is the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS setting, with (for an X86-based processor) two settings, x86 for stabler packages, and ~x86 for bleeding edge packages. It is however not recommended to make this change in /etc/make.conf. Rather configure this per-package in /etc/portage/package.keywords. It's enough to put a line into that file naming the package. That file might look like this:

  app-crypt/gpg-agent
  app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets
  =app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.3-r1

The last line says, that only version 4.3-r1 should be unmasked. Older and newer versions will still be ignored.

Debian

Setting this in Debian is slightly more complicated, and is accomplished by setting different 'repositories' in /etc/apt/sources.list - along with which 'tree' to use for packages; in debian, these are stable, testing, and unstable. An /etc/apt/sources.list file for a debian testing user may look something like this:

 deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian testing main non-free contrib
 deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main
 deb http://security.debian.org testing/updates main contrib non-free

Alternatively, /etc/apt/sources.list can contain any number of repositories for any trees, and a default tree (this can be overridden using the -t switch on the command line) in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

  APT::Default-Release "testing";

Per-package settings go in /etc/apt/preferences, somewhat like Gentoo's /etc/portage/package.keywords.

network

To configure your ethernet interfaces, take a look at:

Gentoo

config_eth0=( "192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0"
              "192.168.2.100 netmask 255.255.255.0" )
routes_eth0=( "default via 192.168.1.1" )

Note that this has changed recently. For more information please refer to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=4

Debian

 auto eth0
 iface eth0 inet static
  address 192.168.0.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  broadcast 192.168.0.255

 auto eth0:0
 iface eth0:0 inet static
  address 192.168.1.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  broadcast 192.168.1.255
 # etc.

X

To configure your X server, take a look at:

Gentoo

As root:

X --configure
cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Debian

Instructions below for Debian are for older releases, and thus they may no longer be useful. If you want to do anything according to them, use more actual source of information, to make sure that you can safely use them. Consider yourself warned.

To get a basic X configuration at /etc/X11/xorg.conf in Debian Stable (codenamed Etch) and unstable (codenamed sid):

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

In the older stable release (codenamed sarge) used XFree86 4.3, which uses /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

TODO

other configuration files; zh:TIP Converting from or to Debian

External Links

From Debian To Gentoo

Debian Restarting Services