Can't emerge lilo -- fails to download the file

[evossler]

Hi all, and thanks in advance for the enlightenment that someone will hopefully bestow on this lowly newb, who is switching over from slackware.

I've been working through the installation of Gentoo, starting from stage 1, and throughout the process I've had several packages that couldn't be downloaded when I tried to emerge them. So far, I've just been using Google to find an alternate location to download them from and editing the appropriate ebuild, which has worked fine.

Now I am to the point of trying to emerge lilo, and again, the server that emerge tries to retrieve it from gives a 404 error. It can't seem to find lilo-22.5.1.tar.gz, and I can't seem to find it either. Seems like that is a pretty old version of lilo.

So what I don't understand is this -- the directory that the ebuild for lilo-22.5.1 is sitting in also contains ebuilds for other versions, up to and including 22.5.8. So why is it that when I type "emerge -k lilo" it tries to retrieve and install 22.5.1? How do I make it use 22.5.8?

My portage tree is freshly synced.

Regards,
Eric

[Vanquirius]

download lilo from ibiblio.org

Gentoo uses a special package system which masks unstable packages according to what architecture you have in /etc/make.conf (for example, if you're a x86, and want to run the unstable tree, switch it ~x86). You can 'force' emerging a package regardless of what you have in /etc/make.conf by going to the portage dir and executing "emerge name-of-the-ebuild-version.ebuild".

Most mirrors should most certainly have basic system packages such as lilo. If you're struggling with finding files, try the mirrorselect tool (emerge mirrorselect).
Try browsing ibiblio.org's /pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/distfiles if you need a place to download mirrorselect.
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