Building and Installing Gibbon Under Gentoo

02/11/2012 — Gentoo users can now automatically build and install Gibbon on their system. Activating the unofficial portage overlay that contains the ebuild for Gibbon is easy.

Enable Portage Overlays

If you want to use packages outside of the official portage tree of Gentoo you have to enable overlays. The easiest way to do this is with the program layman. Please see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/userguide.xml for an overview of how to use layman.

Adding the Overlay “gflohr”

Gibbon is contained in the private overlay of the author of the software Guido Flohr. You have to add that overlay to the list that layman uses. Open the file “/etc/layman/layman.cfg” and search for a line starting with the word “overlay”. It should read:

overlays  : http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/repositories.xml
            http://guido-flohr.net/gentoo/overlay.xml

Next you have to add that overlay to your local portage tree:

localhost ~ # layman -a gflohr
* Running... # /usr/bin/git clone git://git.guido-flohr.net/gentoo/overlay /var/lib/layman/gflohr
Cloning into /var/lib/layman/gflohr...
remote: Counting objects: 59, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (38/38), done.
remote: Total 59 (delta 17), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (59/59), 6.83 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (17/17), done.
* Successfully added overlay "gflohr".

Emerge Gibbon

Gibbon is now available as a regular Gentoo ebuild on your system and can be emerged like any other package:

localhost ~ # emerge -av games-board/gibbon

Updating Gibbon

Overlays are not automatically synchronized, when you run “emerge --sync” or “eix-sync”. You have to do that manually:

localhost ~ # layman -s gflohr

Alternatively, you can synchronize all your overlays at once with the command layman -s ALL. In either case, after a successful synchronization you can get the latest stable version with emerge -av games-board/gibbon or just emerge -av gibbon.