High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Portage is a package management system used by Gentoo Linux, based on the concept of ports collections. Gentoo is sometimes referred to as a meta-distribution due to the extreme flexibility of Portage, which makes it operating-system-independent. The Gentoo/Alt project is concerned with using Portage to manage other operating systems, such as BSDs, Mac OS X and Solaris. The most notable of these implementations is the Gentoo/FreeBSD project.