Is there a command to install binary instead of source?

[xt600]

Is there a command to automaticaly install binary instead of source? Does the emerge command do that if binary is available? I did find anytrhing in the docs about this. if we can not do this automaicaly then how do we search to find out if there is a binary for that program. Flight Gear for example.

Thanks in advance!

[wolfden]

you have to tell emerge the package name of the bin file

example:

emerge mozilla-firefox
or
emerge mozilla-firefox-bin

the bin files are very limited in portage, a bin file defeats the purpose of this distro as you want to build stuff to your hardware.


Entropy is the bin system that lxnay is working on:

instead of emerge you will

equo install foo

it will get the binary and install it, the amount of packages in that system are limited too as it's still alpha yet. You can try out equo as it is in the Sabayon overlay. Just equo --help for the commands

[Fitzcarraldo]

It's down at the moment until the Gentoo devs can sort out a security flaw, but the online Gentoo packages database Web page (http://packages.gentoo.org/) will be back online at some point in the future. When it is, one can use wildcards in the search box, such as "*-bin" to find binary packages (all have the "-bin" suffix, as wolfden stated) in the Gentoo repository. Having found a binary package -- and there aren't that many -- you emerge them as wolfden has described. Mind you, if one is using Kuroo one can use part words to search, so one could find any binary packages in the Portage tree that way too. (I'm not on my SL PC at the moment, so cannot check if is also the case for Portato, but someone will no doubt confirm if it is.)