Congratulations! You now have a working Gentoo system. But where to go from here? What are your options now? What to explore first? Gentoo provides its users with lots of possibilities, and therefore lots of documented (and less documented) features.

You should definitely take a look at the next part of the Gentoo Handbook entitled Working with Gentoo which explains how to keep your software up to date, how to install more software, what USE flags are, how the Gentoo Init system works, etc.

If you are interested in optimizing your system for desktop-use, or you want to learn how to configure your system to be a full working desktop system, consult our extensive Gentoo Desktop Documentation Resources.

We also have a large document on Gentoo Security which is worth reading.

For a full listing of all our available documentation check out our Documentation Resources page.

Gentoo is a fast-moving target. The following sections describe important changes that affect a Gentoo installation. We only list those that have anything in common with the installation, not with package changes that did not occur during the installation.

The following changes need to happen right after having updated your system (and before rebooting).

The functionality of hotplug, used by genkernel users, has been split over two packages: coldplug and hotplug. Users of hotplug need to install coldplug as well, remove hotplug from the default runlevel, and replace it with coldplug:

# emerge coldplug
# rc-update del hotplug default
# rc-update add coldplug default

For more information, please read the Hotplug Change Announcement.

In order to keep our kernel packages manageable, we have removed some of the older and unmaintained packages from the tree. All information about the changes are available in the Kernel Change Announcement.