Updating gentoo after 9 months

alamuru420123 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 82

Hi everyone,

Used to be quite crazy about gentoo back in college, but now I'm working and just don't seem to be getting enough time to do what I really want to.

Anyways, my apologies if this question has been asked already, but I searched and I couldn't find a topic similar to this.

Is it advisable to try to update gentoo now after leaving it alone for 9 months. So far, X is working (old X, not modular X) without the nvidia drivers... I've done an emerge --sync without any problems and have emerged portage to the new version without much of an issue. Something about ARCH not being set, but that got fixed by changing the symlink to make.profile.

But that's when I started thinking that GCC is probly outdated as well, forget X. So, will there be any issue if I continue using the same GCC, with the same flags and options in make.conf and try to update all the other packages?

The thing is, I don't want to reinstall the whole thing because I've got fluxbox just the way I want it ... Apache, PHP, MySQL set up just the way I like it ... 3ddesk, xscreensaver .... I spent a lot of time customising and I doubt my job will allow me for the time to install AND customise gentoo all over again. I might have to go with Kubuntu or some other click and install distro.

Has anyone been able to successfully update their system after leaving it idle for a very long time? Have there been issues after updating?

Thanks, and if this topic has already been discussed, I would appreciate it a lot if someone would post me a link to the old topics.

nixnut · Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:57 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.
Not about installing gentoo, so moved here.

Do an emerge -pvuDN world to see what the candidates for updating are. For modular xorg, glibc, gcc and mysql there are upgrade guides. Read those first and decide what you want to upgrade.
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BitJam · Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:46 pm Post subject:

If you have a spare partition so you can re-install from within your existing setup then I think re-installing is the path of least pain. Almost all of your personal config will stay unchanged if you just copy over all of the hidden files and folders from your home directory. The system-wide config is almost all under /etc. As long as you have the old /etc available, getting the same configuration on a new system is pretty trivial.

Two weeks ago I did a fresh install on a new desktop system after using Gentoo on a laptop for many years. The personal configuration copied over almost seamlessly but some of the system config took a little work mostly because I was using totally new hardware. Since you will be on the same hardware it should all be pretty easy.

If you don't have a spare partition, perhaps you should buy an extra hard drive so you can re-install without wiping out your existing, working system. A re-install on a fresh partition/drive from within your working system is really the way to go. You've got X available for reading documentation and posting to the forums and you've got a completely working system with all of your personal configs that you can copy off of. I did this on my laptop about a year ago and it was very easy and painless. Just make sure you never try to start any of the /etc/init.d services from inside the chroot.

alamuru420123 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 82

@NixNut: I did an emerge, but it looks a bit scary. Too many of the apps I have are outdated. It requires approx. 1.6GB of downloads.

@BitJam: Thanks for the reply. Your advice seems good. I don't have a spare partition, but I've got plenty of FAT space to copy stuff over into from ext3 that I've been using. I guess I'll make a note of all the programs that I've installed as well (flux, 3ddesk, gkrellm), /etc folder and also the kernel config options.

BitJam · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 5:03 am Post subject:

The file /var/lib/portage/world contains a list of all packages you explicitly emerged. I try to put all my personal modifications under /usr/local so they are all on one place when I re-install.

Is there any chance you can buy another disk drive to put into your machine? It is so much easier to re-install from an existing system instead of overwriting it. It is safer too because often you don't know what you've got until after it is erased.

Hypnos · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 5:53 am Post subject:

I did something similar -- except that my gap was 4 years. The gcc-4.x upgrade forced my hand. Went smoothly enough, since I had to rebuild everything anyway.
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alamuru420123 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 82

@BitJam: Hmm ... I never thought about that. I'm pretty sure I'll end up losing something that I wish I hadn't. I've already got 2 hard drives and a dvd-rw (which is currently under repair). I guess I can just plug in one more IDE drive (no SATA). I think I'll head out this week and see if I can get a new disk.

Is there any way to make a backup by creating a tarball and backing up on a DVD or something? i mean backing up the entire installation, the important folders?

BitJam · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:41 am Post subject:

Take a look at the dar program. It's in portage. But I usually just "cp -a".