Cron is a daemon/service that executes shell commands periodically on a given schedule. Cron is driven by a crontab, a configuration file that holds details of what commands are to be run along with a timetable of when to run them.
You can create a crontab file by entering the following terminal command:
crontab -e
Now you’ve done pretty good for yourself. From here, it is a major matter of time, lots of emerging, and some config changes.
Emerge Beginning
The first thing to do is:
"emerge sync"
What this does is updates all the files for your tarball assuring they are all up to date. Releases are common, so emerge sync should be done for every install. Next, I recommend typing:
"emerge nano"
Nano is a simple text editor, which I prefer over things like VI, as it is easier to operate. Once you have merged nano, type in:
"nano /etc/make.conf"
This will open up the make.conf file. In this file, it allows you to modify the CFlags, and compiling options for emerge. CFlags help optimise the source to your cpu standards, making it faster than other stock code. For help on CFLAGS, check out this website for your cpu. I also recommend modifying the USE flags under make.conf, as they will also help build the code better for your computer. For information on USE Flags, look here for the entries you can use. After this, we need to emerge the kernel for the system. I prefer using the 2.6.x kernel as of now, so I use:
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Doug Swain takes a look at the Gentoo Linux installation and offers a quicker guide than the available online documentation of the distro.
Any Gentoo user knows how great this distro is. Any Gentoo user also knows the amount of time it takes to install this distro, and to damage your partition is just not an affordable option. I’ve managed to take the standard 20-30 hour installation and bring it down to about 2-3 hours of time. This guide will try and lead you into the correct direction of the Gentoo installation. It will NOT give you all the apps, Window Managers and so on you are looking for in the distro, but it will get you to the point where it will be very easy to have an operating computer while getting those things.
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