how to break the cycle?

ferdish · n00b Joined: 11 Jun 2024 Posts: 2

PC hadn't executed

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2024 8:46 am Post subject:

ferdish,

Welcome to the forums.

It looks like you have been a user for some time but your install has been a bit neglected.
There are two or three ways to fix this.

1. HOWTO Update Old Gentoo
2. Get an old portage snapshot from https://distfiles.gentoo.org/snapshots/squashfs. Add squashfs support to your kernel and update to that.
Essentially, you update in baby steps until your install is current.
3. Install a newer python and portage in /root, so that they understand EAPI8 and call them directly. Upgrading Portage.

Lastly, you could reinstall but that would rob you of a wonderful learning opportunity.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21924

To expand on Neddy's welcome, could you tell us a bit about your experience level? There are two ways people bring us this problem:

The user installs Gentoo, sets it aside for some time, then comes back and hits this problem.
User A installs Gentoo, neglects it, and eventually user B inherits the neglected system. User B then comes to us with this problem. (This problem is particularly likely in corporate environments, where user A left the company.)

In the first case, you probably know your way around Gentoo, and just need us to help with some of the more exotic points. In the second case, user B may be a complete novice to Gentoo, and will need guidance even for managing a system that is relatively current. Throwing such a user into a badly outdated system is a recipe for frustration, so if you are the second case, please tell us up front so that we do not gloss over points that a veteran user would just know. We can help you in either case, but we can better tailor our advice if we know how much you already know.

ferdish · n00b Joined: 11 Jun 2024 Posts: 2

Thank you NeddySeagoon for the warm welcome.

You provided great links - exactly what I was looking for (and even more).

Third suggestion looked interesting until I realized that EAPI 8 requires bash v5 (which I don't have yet) and most likely some other packages/utilities updated.

Currently I'm trying second approach (I didn't know there were portage snapshots out there. Nice finding for me). Some packages (distfiles) from them aren't available though. Doing a lot of manual work and having progress here. Basically I want to get bash v5, python 3.10+ and then I should be able to use the current portage snapshot and current portage package.

Reinstall suggestion is kind of troublesome as this system is so old that it cannot boot from USB. And I agree with you on this option - a lot of opportunities to learn would be missed.

Thank you very much for the options and links. Learning a lot from them and related pages.

Hu, I think I'm in the first category. This is my old system, that was put aside for a long time but now I think it could be useful and trying to bring it up to life.
I'm having some progress already - options from this topic are very useful.

If I hit some wall or have some good progress - I'll share it with you guys. Back to burning CPU for now ;-)

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2024 7:25 am Post subject:

ferdish,

All my distfiles from mid 2006 are at https://bloodnoc.org/~roy/olde-distfiles/ This is about 600G of stuff there so the page is very slow to autoindex.

Try