Figure 1. Porthole Main Window
A word about GUI interfaces: depending on the windowing system and theme you have installed, the colours and icons used by Porthole may differ radically from this help manual. So if the illustrations in this manual don't look EXACTLY like yours, try to be open minded about it. Also continuing development may outpace the updates to the pictures used.
Some of the built-in features include:
The main window is divided into a menu bar, a tool bar, package tree view, package list view and a tabbed package info.
The menu bar has three sub-menues: Action, Settings and Help. Each menu item has a hot key combo to select it from the keyboard.
The tool bar provides an alternative to the menu bar and can save you a click or two.
The view selector let's you choose between the following views:
Enter a fragment of text in the input box next to the find button. Clicking the find button or pressing enter will start the search. The system will automatically switch to the Search results view when the search is complete. The search engine will find any occurrence of the selected text even if it is in the middle or end of a word.
This pane hold the portage library tree. The categories and subcategories are sorted alphabetically. Clicking on the device beside the package category will expand the tree to reveal the sub levels. Selecting the sub category will cause the package view pane to be populated with the individual packages.
In the All and Installed Packages views, the short name of the packages in the selected category is displayed. In the Search and Upgradable views, the full package name is displayed. The icon preceding the package name indicates it is currently installed. This icon is not shown in the Upgradable view because it must be installed to be upgradable. Instead there is a checkbox so you can select which packages you want to upgrade. The packages that are checked are ones in your /var/cache/edb/world file (i.e. packages you explicitly emerged). It's the same list that would show up when you run 'emerge -Up world' but it allows you to deselect ones you don't need or want, and select other installed packages that aren't in your world file (i.e. dependencies of those packages in the world file). Selecting all the packages in the upgrades list would be the equivalent of running 'emerge -UDp world'
The summary tab gives you a quick overview of the selected packages latest version only. Note this may vary from what you have installed or want installed. The summary includes:
This tab lists a treeview of all the packages needed to build the selected package. Like the package list view, packages already installed have an icon beside them. Note that not all dependencies have to be installed for the package to work. Use flags play a big part in deciding what is or is not installed.
If available, the change log text is included in here. This is a good resource to use if you can't decide if you need to upgrade or not. Look here for information on bug fixes and new features.
A list of all the files this version installed. This can be useful for a number of reasons. For example: the name of the executable binary file of that cool sounding utility you just installed which is completely different from the package name and was not mentioned in the release notes.