General Destruction of My Gentoo Install?

[Ian]

I've used Gentoo on and off now for about a year, but recently (about a month ago) I "took the plunge" and used it full time, partially cause windows decided to die, and partially cause i wanted to see how i'd make out. The system itself works great, but many of the apps I've emerged seem to be failing. XMMS randomly crashes. GAIM randomly crashes. Gnome stopped working. KDE is nice but way too bloated. My workstation (AMD 800 Mhz, 320 MB of RAM) runs slower than my server (Pentium 3 600 Mhz, 256 MB of RAM), even with distcc to the server.

I'm willing to be it's something stupid i did at the beginning of the installation, like forgetting a use flag or something. I've been toying around with the idea of completely redoing the system, as a learning experience and to maybe finally get that final working one.

My question, is it worth it to dump everything and redo it? I have no important data on it now, and it'd be a couple of days of my time. The alternative is finding problems and fixing them, but is that more worthwhile? I'm very close to breaking my monitor in fustration as GAIM dies for the 10th time in as many minutes. So, yeah, i'd like to do something soon, cause it's getting really annoying.

[guero61]

Once you've got your system installed, there's no need to _completely_ reinstall, unless you just want to.

I'd recommend using qpkg/emerge/dep-clean to find out what you have on there you don't need -- clean out duplicate libraries, software that's not depended on that you don't want/never use/don't need, and so on. (I just did that in a matter of an hour or so this afternoon, for the first time). Next, make sure all your config files are what you want them to be -- CFLAGS, USE, and so on. Next, to be safe, "init 1" to get you to a clean state, and start your NIC/networking. Execute "emerge -e --deep world" and sit back and watch your system reinstall itself! Everything in the "world" file (which should be everything on the system, since you just cleaned up) will be re-compiled. You now have an essentially new system!

[Ian]

Ok, so this rebuilds everything but the compiler and such that's built in bootstrap (and i know i can rerun bootstrap, but i dont' know why i would ever want to)? now the only problem is picking a few days where i have nothing else to do, or where i'll be away, as i don't think that recomipling everything is a trivial task :p.

that qpkg thing, how do i run it? i've seen references to it around, but no actual commands. also, "init 1" is refering to the runlevel, i believe?

apart from that, thanks for the help, now just to wait for my zaurus to get here so i'll have something to do while my computer recompiles everything...

[hook]

gaim and xmms (and gnome) both depend on gtk ...maybe you've got a problem with it... just an idea

try unmerging and remerginig these apps that crash on you ...and if it's still no good, try to emerge -e them ...if they still crash try emerge -e --deep (but be warned: i did it with --deep and i got myself into some trouble - solvable, but still not fun ...maybe it was just me or my PC, but still) ...anyhow remerging the apps that fail you (even with -e --deep) is safer still then reinstalling the whole system ...you don't lose your settings this way
_________________
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(deep inside i'm still a tux's little helper)

[guero61]

Actually, emerge -e will most certainly re-compile your compiler and everything else that was compiled during bootstrap.


qpkg is in the package "gentoolkit" (as well as dep-clean the standalone script). It's a great little tool, and the manpage is always helpful! A short overview --

qpkg -q <pkg_name> gets you what packages depend on package X
qpkg -f <file_name> finds you the package that owns file X
qpkg -l <pkg_name> lists the files belonging to package X.

Good luck!