compile options, rpms

guerilla · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 7

Being pretty thrilled about Gentoo Linux, since it seems to offer to me exactly what I was searching for (a Linux distro that can be kept and upgraded for years to come, without having to reinstall for a major upgrade), there are some questions that mainly appeared during installation:
* compile option -march: I understand that I break at least backwards compatibility when I set this. But what about upwards compatibility? I have an athlon thunderbird, and estimate that I may upgrade to amd64 in maybe 2 years. Since I'm doing a stage 1 install, I don't want to have to start all over when I upgrade. Now I don't expect to be able to run my installation on a itanium, but when I set '-march athlon-tb', will it run on the amd64 architecture?
* compile options -march and -mcpu: I noticed that projects like mplayer set _both_. Should I do that here as well?
* Is there a way to dump my current installation to a text file so that I can (should I need to do a re-install) simply feed that to gentoo and it will download and compile all packages that I previously had? I'm not talking about actual configurations (like X, kde, whatever), just the packages that I had before.
* Is it possible to install rpms? I know that Debian has a tool to import rpms (alien), is something like that available for gentoo as well? Some packages are only available as rpms, so it would be nice if that would be possible.

think4urs11 · Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2003 7:37 am Post subject:

for q4
* app-arch/rpm
Latest version available: 4.2_pre069
Latest version installed: 4.2_pre069
Size of downloaded files: 8,508 kB
Homepage: http://www.rpm.org/
Description: Red Hat Package Management Utils

for q3
/var/cache/edb/world
this file contains all packages you installed via emerge 'packetname'
'Feeding' this into a fresh install should resolve all needed dependencies

for q1
it is hard to look into the future plans of AMD/Intel, but in general - yes, this should be perfectly valid
of course you will have to recompile to get the new features e.g. the AMD64 architecture gives

T.
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guerilla · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 7

Thank you for your fast reply!
So I figure it is possible to install rpms native in a gentoo install? Terrific!