To configure many features of Porthole, select "Configure Porthole" from the "Settings" menu. Click on one of the tabs on the left-hand side of the window to access specific settings. If you're not sure what a particular setting will do, hover the mouse cursor over it for an explanatory tool-tip.
This tab holds settings applicable to more than one part of Porthole, or those that don't fit in any of the other tabs.
Your current CPU architecture will be displayed at the top, for reference. This is determined by Portage and cannot be changed.
Below this is the "Enable Archlist" setting. There are some parts of Porthole where it is possible to see information displayed for CPU architectures other than your own (such as in the version table in the package summary). Enable this, and select which architectures to display information for if you wish to see this extra information. This setting is disabled by default.
If Porthole is not opening your preferred web browser when you click on the help buttons, or the home page link in the package summary, then you can either set your BROWSER environment variable or set it here. Select the "Use Custom Browser" radio button, then type the command used to start your browser in the text box below it. It will usualy be sufficient to simply type the name of your browser (for example, "firefox") into this box. If you want to specify the exact command to open the browser, use "%s" where you want the webpage or help-file location to be substituted in as well as any other options you desire. In most cases simply entering 'firefox' will will get the pre-defined python Firefox webbrowser module with its default options. If it does not find a pre-configured webbrowser module it will create a generic module with the '%s' url parameter added for you.
If you want to use the emerge-webrsync command to sync your portage tree, select "emerge-webrsync" from the list box labelled "Sync Method".
Here you can select the colours used to indicate packages that Portage recommends upgrading or downgrading.
Here you can choose which items will be displayed in the summary view. There is be a small amount of redundancy in the information presented by default.
The emerge options selected at the top will be passed onto emerge whenever you emerge or unmerge a package with Porthole. Hover the mouse cursor over the options to get a quick explanation of what they do.
Under advanced emerge options, you can enable the "Commit to make.conf" button in the Advanced Emerge dialog. WARNING! This will allow Porthole to directly modify your make.conf file, which is very important for the continued operation of your Gentoo system. Make sure you back up this file (usually /etc/make.conf) before letting Porthole modify it! This feature has not been fully tested, and we cannot accept any responsibility if Porthole somehow messes your system up :).
The remaining text boxes are the first five commands that will be offered as options in the run custom command dialog. If you use this feature regularly, consider changing some of these to make your life easier.
Here you can modify the font used for Porthole's terminal (a good choice is "monospace" to retain the intended formatting of emerge's output, but it's not generally the most satisfying), and the highlighting colours used in the terminal. Note that the colours you select will only be applied in the "Process" tab of the terminal window, not the "Warning" or "Summary" tabs. The exception is the "Caution" colour, which is also used in the Sumamry tab to bring your attention to lines where it looks like emerge is telling you to perform some important action, and the "Line Number" colour, which is used in all tabs.
Even more colours! If you want you can change the colours used for emerge output, you can do it here. The defaults are set to be readable on a white background, but they're not very stylish.