Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Thu, 06 Aug 2015 09:17:45 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote: On Wednesday 05 August 2015 17:52:28 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:26:02 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote: Oh, and do you know why the handbook now says to include a tiny grub partition before the boot partition, even on an MBR system? If you use GPT on a motherboard with BIOS, you need that partition. It's on UEFI systems that you don't need it. Yes, I know that. It's why I asked. I see what you're saying now, they are recommending it even if you don't use GPT, using a DOS partition table instead? I don't see the sense in that because you cannot set the appropriate partition type anyway with a DOS partition table? I suppose it could make switching to GPT at a later date less painful. -- Neil Bothwick BBS: (n.) a system for connecting computers and exchanging gossip, facts, and uninformed speculation under false names. pgpCNVPRXN97x.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wednesday 05 August 2015 17:52:28 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:26:02 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote: Oh, and do you know why the handbook now says to include a tiny grub partition before the boot partition, even on an MBR system? If you use GPT on a motherboard with BIOS, you need that partition. It's on UEFI systems that you don't need it. Yes, I know that. It's why I asked. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wed, 5 Aug 2015 00:39:56 + (UTC), James wrote: Um, we can think out of the box for a new and cool installation semantic. Just look at blueness's posting (Gentoo Reference System) on www.gentoo.org as a new, and useful approach to installs for established gentoo admins. That's interesting, but not an installer. It's a means to building a standard reference system repeatedly that then needs installing. I see one major problem with a pointy-clicky YaST/Ananconda type installer: who is going to write it? Who has that particular itch bad enough to scratch it? An automated installer is another matter, write a config file and point it at some bare metal using something like Ansible, to allow sysadmins to roll out systems with less fiddling. -- Neil Bothwick But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses. -- Jerome K. Jerome pgpcWY45rQxh6.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 7:57 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Rich0 said he'd modify the handbook into an experimental prose that leads to a raid-1 btrfs baseline system, if enough folks liked the ideas. Just to clarify - I intend to do it, full stop. I don't want to generate some kind of please do it campaign - I was just saying that there seems to be interest so it is worth doing. I've just been travelling for the last few days. There really shouldn't be too much to this. -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On 05/08/2015 16:27, Grant Edwards wrote: On 2015-08-05, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 04/08/2015 20:30, Felix Miata wrote: Seriously, more than a day? Bwahahahaha! You are too funny! THREE WEEKS is not uncommon for this. I am not joking. Remember, I have done it, and so have many others here. It was fun the first time, now it is just a major PITA Mostly it just provides an opportunity to prove you're too stubborn for your own good. About 20% of the way through, it's pretty apparent that giving up and installing from scratch will be a lot faster. At this point, you've learned most of what you're going to learn, and it's just a long hard slog the rest of the way. But do you give up and do a fresh install? No, you keep going because it's there. But of course! Pig-headedness trumping sane rational thought is a hallmark of typical Gentoo users ( or at least a not-insignificant subset of them) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 10:18 AM, Grant Edwards grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com wrote: On 2015-08-05, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Tue, 04 Aug 2015 23:28:25 -0400, Felix Miata wrote: The Gentoo instructions look competent enough to do well for most of the people it's designed for, if only they aren't trying to do as currently I, avoid systemd. Eh? The Handbook is for an OpenRC install, it's the systemd users that have to jump through extra hoops. That's a relief. I was panicking for a minute there that somehow Gentoo had turned on me since that last time I did an install (several months ago) and was now trying to shove systemd down everybody's throat. Just to humor you I'll include an OpenRC version of my raid1 btrfs install walkthrough. :) It has been a while since I've done one of those... -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wednesday 05 August 2015 10:43:28 Rich Freeman wrote: Just to humor you I'll include an OpenRC version of my raid1 btrfs install walkthrough. :) It has been a while since I've done one of those... Me too please, Rich. I still haven't got this six-year-old MBR box to boot raid1 btrfs. Oh, and do you know why the handbook now says to include a tiny grub partition before the boot partition, even on an MBR system? -- Rgds Peter -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:26:02 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote: Oh, and do you know why the handbook now says to include a tiny grub partition before the boot partition, even on an MBR system? If you use GPT on a motherboard with BIOS, you need that partition. It's on UEFI systems that you don't need it. -- Neil Bothwick Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you can't find them. pgpOz0hxNsmMb.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wed, 5 Aug 2015 14:27:08 + (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote: THREE WEEKS is not uncommon for this. I am not joking. Remember, I have done it, and so have many others here. It was fun the first time, now it is just a major PITA Mostly it just provides an opportunity to prove you're too stubborn for your own good. About 20% of the way through, it's pretty apparent that giving up and installing from scratch will be a lot faster. At this point, you've learned most of what you're going to learn, and it's just a long hard slog the rest of the way. But do you give up and do a fresh install? No, you keep going because it's there. But of course, otherwise you would have wasted that 20% of the time, just don't think about the other 80% you're about to waste. You just need to make it to 50% and you can justify the rest. This reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. -- Neil Bothwick When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said... Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket And sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket. pgpJQnOJPNhQd.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Peter Humphrey pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk wrote: On Wednesday 05 August 2015 10:43:28 Rich Freeman wrote: Just to humor you I'll include an OpenRC version of my raid1 btrfs install walkthrough. :) It has been a while since I've done one of those... Me too please, Rich. I still haven't got this six-year-old MBR box to boot raid1 btrfs. FWIW, my notes are at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VJlJyYLTZScta9a81xgKOIBjYsG3_VfxxmUSxG23Uxg/edit?usp=sharing I plan to clean this up for a blog and perhaps wiki article. However, anybody should be able to just follow those notes and get a bootable system. Note that I skipped some stuff like network setup, but I did install everything you should need to configure the network. I've worked through the openrc install, and I'm working through the systemd install now. Really the only thing you do different for systemd is select a different profile, pick the right kernel config, and enable system in the grub configuration. For non-systemd you again pick the non-systemd profile you want, pick the openrc kernel config, and don't mess with grub. For UEFI it would need a tiny bit more work, and a FAT32 boot partition (which I left off - I just did a simple MBR install here). Feel free to comment on the notes if you want to contibute, or think that a particular point needs clarification. Again, these are just notes and I do plan to wikify it, but I don't necessarily plan to recreate the entire handbook with these steps thrown in - if anything it would probably make more sense to just add a few notes to the existing handbook. Really the only thing that is btrfs-specific here is using grub2 (which is the default anyway), the btrfs setup at the start, the fstab, and installing btrfs-progs. The kernel is also overkill, being based on the install CD (which obviously got you that far already, but probably includes a lot of modules you don't need). Being an initramfs install the kernel is modular, so you're only sacrificing kernel build time, not kernel memory at runtime. -- Rich
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
James wrote: Felix Miata mrmazda at earthlink.net writes: 1-I just find upgrade processes more enjoyable than inital installations and their follow-up tedium getting from defaults back to the way I like things to work. Now that I've seen several thread responses subsequent to this one, I'm leaning towared just doing a fresh installation, but I'm curious about what would happen by trying, and how long it really would take. Interesting choice:: how do you like your choices, Felix? To the wider list of gentoo hacks:: Still think we do not need an easier installation semantic? If he decides to 'upgrade' there will be tons of man-hours spent on this effort. If we had a mostly unattended basic installation semantic (proceedure/install) I bet he (Felix) would choose that pathway. Felix, care to comment? If we (gentoo) had a simple installation semantic, this sort of problem would most likely disappear; so the wider community could delve into other technical support issues.. YMMV. James For me, it wouldn't matter if Gentoo had a installer or not. It still would be faster to do a fresh install even without a installer. So, it doesn't matter really. Most of the install time is waiting on a compile, especially on a older and slower machine. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Tue, 4 Aug 2015 20:59:47 + (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote: No way on 32-bit Athlon. I have Athlon-XP. Even with distcc to Core2Duo it takes about 10 days of compilation time to build all stuff, I'm not counting time to fix all failures here. Well, I have 3000 packages installed... He's going to have to compile all the user-space stuff either way (upgrade or fresh install), so how long that takes is moot. Except that with an upgrade the old versions are still there and, usually, usable while compiling the new. -- Neil Bothwick Adolescence, n.: The stage between puberty and adultery. pgplWKRcfs5S7.pgp Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Tuesday 04 Aug 2015 18:20:40 Grant Edwards wrote: On 2015-08-04, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote: That's right, May 2011, my first and only Gentoo installation, 32 bit on an old Athlon, which means no sse2, and kernel 2.6.37. It coexists in multiboot on one HD with 12 installations of Fedora and openSUSE. I'd like to upgrade it rather than installing fresh, Can we ask why? if it's doable. It probably is (for some degnerate value of doable). My gut feeling is that a fresh install is going to be a _lot_ easier and faster. A fresh install will take a couple hours. An upgrade will take somewhere between a couple days and a couple weeks. +1 Back up your /var/lib/portage/world and /etc, then use a LiveCD to follow the Gentoo handbook. After you download and untar a stage 3 filesystem you can copy back your /var/lib/portage/world, build a new kernel and emerge -uaDv world You can use your old config files in your /etc back up to make any quick edits necessary on your new installation. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: want to upgrade 50 month old installation
On Tue, 4 Aug 2015 17:20:40 + (UTC) Grant Edwards wrote: On 2015-08-04, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote: That's right, May 2011, my first and only Gentoo installation, 32 bit on an old Athlon, which means no sse2, and kernel 2.6.37. It coexists in multiboot on one HD with 12 installations of Fedora and openSUSE. I'd like to upgrade it rather than installing fresh, Can we ask why? if it's doable. It probably is (for some degnerate value of doable). My gut feeling is that a fresh install is going to be a _lot_ easier and faster. A fresh install will take a couple hours. With all userspace software? No way on 32-bit Athlon. I have Athlon-XP. Even with distcc to Core2Duo it takes about 10 days of compilation time to build all stuff, I'm not counting time to fix all failures here. Well, I have 3000 packages installed... An upgrade will take somewhere between a couple days and a couple weeks. Best regards, Andrew Savchenko pgpIgLqQq7xXs.pgp Description: PGP signature
