Editing Portage Question

[elboricua]

I have read through the Portage Menu and through the Guide to USE flags, and I can't seem to come up with the answer to this question. I installed Gentoo on one of my boxes to be a server. Once I am finished writing the script it will be a firewall. I do not want X to be installed on this machine.

How can i set it so that when I emerge certain things like say nmap it doesn't try to download X along with it? So to get around this I have been downloading certain things like nmap and installing from source. I am sure that there is a way that I can configure portage to not install X, or any of the X libraries. I just can't figure it out.

(maybe I need to get more sleep at night to get a better comprehension of what I read )
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Boricua Hasta La Muerte

[stroke]

The file /etc/make.profile/make.defaults contains defaults flag that are used in addiction to the use flags you set in the /etc/make.conf file.

What I suggest you is to put a "-*" at the very beginning of your USE variable in make.conf.
This way all the flag set in the /etc/make.profile/make.defaults file are not taken in consideration.

You can then add what you really need after the -* .

Example:
USE="-* ssl"

Hope this helps a little.

[Guest]

Specifically you need to specify "-X" (capital x) in your USE variable.

I copied all the USE variable definitions from the make.defaults file into my /etc/make.conf file. I find it much easier to have them all together. The list of what I have changed may not be as obvious, but I can see how what I just changed might relate to other stuff much more easily.

The other reason I prefer having them all in the file I edit is that that way I have a clue that they exist. The current method of "pick up the fact that there's a USE variable related to what you want to do out of thin air" doesn't suit me well. (Personal problem, I know.)

I also recommend doing an "emerge --pretend" before anything. One of the very first things I did in Gentoo was to say "emerge vim", because I type "vi xxxxx" without thinking about it, and nano was starting to drive me nuts.

Since I didn't know about USE variables then, it emerged the X version of vim also, which meant all of XFree86. (Not a big deal in my case, because I DID plan to have X, but I hadn't planned on it taking 12 hours to get "vi".)

[elboricua]

Lol, VIM is on my list of things to install on my system Thanks for the tips.

BTW I do use --pretend. That is how I saw that x was going to be downloaded with nmap. Pretend is great. you can see if you are going to screw up a package, what the deps are.......
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Boricua Hasta La Muerte

[stroke]

Yeah, nmap comes with a X window frontend as well (nmapfe if I'm not wrong) so if X is in the USE variable, well you know already