Hi! I just installed gentoo with xfce from the minimal CD. Is emerge the only way to install packages in gentoo? I read that gentoo can install binary packages, but couldn't find sufficient info in their wiki. It was confusing. Any help would be appreciated.
TIA

You can install binary packages - but you will usually need to make them before
meaning: compiling like you do with everything else in Gentoo - and then making an installable package from it, which you can use for different things.
...like installing it on another similar machine which may be too slow to compile stuff there,
...like keeping a backup of already compiled stuff in case ... who knows...

There are no binary packages being distributed - building yourself is how Gentoo works.

Sabayon is a similar distribution and it uses prebuilt binary packages - AFAIK.

Emerge is the only supported package manager in Gentoo. There are some unofficial attempts, like paludis, however if you want to try this, you are on your own.

Emerge supports binary packages, there are already several of them in portage (openoffice-bin, opera, mozilla-firefox-bin, adobe-flash, virtualbox-bin...). However, not everything is available in binary form, these are a minority. If you plan to install everything in binary form, what's the point in running Gentoo? I'd rather use arch or debian in that case.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <GENTOO> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

As mentioned, Sabayon handles binary packages from the Entropy package manager as well as source packages from Portage. I find that it's convenient when I'm feeling lazy.

I forgot about these - as mentioned these are usually only the larger ones or software which is only available in binary form because it is closed source.

Thanks for pointing to that.
As I red and answered it, lisa86 was looking for a way to install and expand her(?) Gentoo entirely from binary packages - just like almost all other Distributions like Debian...

Well it's not that I don't know about gentoo's compile everything policy, and it is certainly not the 1st distro I have tried. I just wanted to to know that after 14hours of setup, I still have to compile small things like firefox, pidgin, even they take a few minutes to compile. I just wonder what if I want to install a game like nexuiz or supertux, it's going to take forever! I guess that's gentoo's way. It's a bit of overkill imo. So I was looking for an alternative way of installing precompiled packages.
Thnx for ur replies.

Games usually don't take *that* long to compile. The package is big, but the biggest parts usually is the artwork, which just needs to be compied. The client, or core or whatever is usually a not-so-big program. Though it all depends on the game of course. In any case, I can't think of any game that will take as long as firefox+xulrunner to compile.

Of course it depends on your hardware, but most things are pretty quick (like my favorite game, Supertux ;-).
To get up and running on a new system you could install the bin packages for firefox, openoffice and such. Later all this isn't much of an issue. Just leave the machine to run larger updates over night. Gentoo is a very fast penguin though (ones its up and running)...

Mons