Kuroo

Kuroo - Kuroo is a KDE frontend to portage. It allows you to do common software maintainance tasks on gentoo and gentoo based systems.

It can perform tasks like install software, remove software, update software, update system, handle dependancy, help in editing updated files under /etc. It is a frontend to softwares like emerge and etc-update. So, it would be nice to read up on emerge, eix, etc-update and dispatch-conf before getting started with Kuroo. You need not go into the details of the above mentioned tools, just understanding those tools will help you to ease software management on your system.

When you first start Kuroo, it asks if you want to create a back-up of all the user editabled files, keep that checkbox checked.

In it's first run Kuroo offers to update the database. Let, it do so to get all the updated packages. It will sync with the nearest gentoo mirror.

Kuroo has 5 important sections
 * 1) Packages
 * 2) Queue
 * 3) History
 * 4) Etc-update
 * 5) Log

These should be quite self explanatory still but I will go a bit deeper and explain them.


 * Packages

This section lists all the packages in the portage tree, whether installed or not.

You can use the search box on the top right to search for the needed packages. There's also category and sub-category on the left hand side, which can make searching packages easier. [|Gentoo Portage Website] can also be used to search whether the package you want is available or not, if available then in which category. eix can also be used to search the package, from CLI.

You can use these categories to make it easier to search for packages, like say you want gcc. Then, you can type gcc in the search box. But it will give you too many results. So, if you know that gcc belongs to sys-devel then you can search under category sys and sub-category devel.

The packages marked in green are already installed.

The package with a globe icon next to it, means that the package is included in [world|world profile]. Rocket icon shows if the package is queued for update/install. The update column shows the version no. of the update. The last column describes the software in brief.

You can add the button 'Add to queue to queue the software for update/install. This software will be then shown in the next section 'Queue'.

The detail button gives more detail about the software. If you want to know more about this check **Advanced**, at the bottom.


 * Queue

This lists all the softwares queued for install/update.

Once the packages are queued, click on 'Step 1: Check Installation". At this point you can check the Log section, it will provide you the information about what is going on.

There are a few check boxes at the bottom, you can enable/disable them as per your liking.

Now you can click on "Step 2: Start Installation". Again, you can check the Log tab to see what is going on.