Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Alan McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 26 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Thanks Alan, Sorry for top posting. I noticed these very old machine have only 8GB drives in them. Looks like I'm actually going to replace the drives and then do new installs from scratch. 8G drives!! Wow, that comes from the previous millenium Today I worked on a machine with a 40G 7200rpm Barracuda (the office sounded like it had a Boeing in it taking off!) and I thought they were old. Now it looks like a young spring chicken in comparison... -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list I obtained, free of charge, an iMac G3 (400 mhz?) with a 1 GB of RAM installed about 6 months ago. About a year ago, I got a free Compaq mini tower with a regular cd-rom, 64 MB of PC100 RAM (1 stick), but 4 MB had to be dedicated to video (could dedicate 2, 4, or 8). I took it to my work for a project (my manager couldn't get approved to use a PC for this manner), installed 2 256 MB PC133 sticks a coworker gave me that he had in the trunk of his car from cleaning out his storage. It's running Gentoo with a 10 GB hard drive. No GUI, but eh, who needs that? Runs like a champ. -- - Mark Shields
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Friday 25 April 2008, Alan McKinnon wrote: On Saturday 26 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Thanks Alan, Sorry for top posting. I noticed these very old machine have only 8GB drives in them. Looks like I'm actually going to replace the drives and then do new installs from scratch. 8G drives!! Wow, that comes from the previous millenium I still have a DEC Alpha 500 with 3 x 4GB SCSI drives standing around here. ;-) It doesn't do anything, and I should have thrown it way long ago. But at one point in the development cycle of KDE 1, it was the fastest box within the KDE community. Somehow I can't bring myself to dump it. Uwe -- Informal Linux Group Namibia: http://www.linux.org.na/ SysEx (Pty) Ltd.: http://www.SysEx.com.na/ -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:11:41 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: Yeah, it's pretty insane. We were using these machines only as MythTV frontend boxes so basically they boot, start mythfrontend, spin down the drive and then talk to the backend over the network. They didn't need much space so I probably bought the smallest thing I could find 4 years ago when I first built them. I've given up on hard drives for MythTV frontends, too much noise, heat, power and space. I tried flash storage for a while but now network boot. -- Neil Bothwick All generalizations are false, including this one. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:11:41 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: Yeah, it's pretty insane. We were using these machines only as MythTV frontend boxes so basically they boot, start mythfrontend, spin down the drive and then talk to the backend over the network. They didn't need much space so I probably bought the smallest thing I could find 4 years ago when I first built them. I've given up on hard drives for MythTV frontends, too much noise, heat, power and space. I tried flash storage for a while but now network boot. -- Neil Bothwick On these Pundit-R machines I tried to get network booting working but never did. Actually that whole idea still eludes me. I did spin the drives down to reduce noise as these old 8GB drives are actually *very* noisy and it's a really ugly high-pitched whine. The worst part of noise from these little boxes now turns out to be the processor fan and since it's a non-standard form factor I haven't found a quiet fan to do a replacement. - Mark -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
The machine I'm typing this on has 2 of these (Barracuda 7200.7's)- they are absolutely silent...so that machine's one might be ready to throw its bearings! Cheers Mark Alan McKinnon wrote: Today I worked on a machine with a 40G 7200rpm Barracuda (the office sounded like it had a Boeing in it taking off!) and I thought they were old. Now it looks like a young spring chicken in comparison... -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Friday 25 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Hi, OK, so this machine I Was speaking of earlier seems ot have a number of issues created by a profile update. I'm attempting to move from 2005.0 to 2007.0. I'm using these documents as reference: Ooooh, this is gonna be fun! http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml#doc_chap3 http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/portage/doc/manually-fixing-portage.xml The second document is referenced because no version of portage in the library matches up with the version of python on this system. I've followed the instructions and now portage seems to work except I see this message which looks more like a warning than anything. Can I safely ignore it? myth11 ~ # emerge -pv system EmergeSystem.txt !!! Problem with sandbox binary. Disabling... !!! Problem with sandbox binary. Disabling... Yeah, I think you can disable it for long enough so that you can remerge sandbox. Or just take it out of FEATURES till the upgrade is complete myth11 ~ # More important are some blocking issues. From the text file I saved in the step above I have these blocks: These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating system dependencies .^H^H... done! [blocks B ] dev-lang/python-2.3.6-r2 (is blocking app-admin/python-updater-0.2) [blocks B ] sys-apps/util-linux-2.13 (is blocking sys-apps/coreutils-6.10-r2) [blocks B ] sys-apps/pam-login (is blocking sys-apps/shadow-4.0.18.2) Are these blocks safe to remove? I assume they are system stuff and hence the system might break. Here's a mail I sent to my colleagues about the python blocks. I'm sure there's any easier way, I just didn't find it at the time: = Upgrading python on stable x86 boxes is a pain in the you know what. This time it is worse than usual. Just like the usual bootstrap problem of you need a compiled compiler to compile a compiler so how do you compile a compiler? on Gentoo portage is written in python so if you unmerge python to resolve a blocker, how do you then update python? Most of our boxes will have python in SLOTS 2.2 and 2.3 and 2.4 This is a waste, you only need one. Hence the existence of python-updater. It works like revdep-rebuild, and finds stuff using python then rebuilds then to link to the most recent version. Latest python DEPENDS on python-updater. However, python-updater blocks =python-2.3.something, so portage is going to bitch about those SLOTS. I can think of 2 procedures to resolve this, only one is tested (credit to Stef for this) run 'emerge --nodeps python-updater' run 'python-updater' This will take a while usually. Use eix to find all merged versions of python. Unmerge all SLOTS 2.4. DO NOT UNMERGE PYTHON-2.4 Now run any portage tool. It will fail with /usr/bin/python - no such file. Mwahahaha. Relax, python is not borked. The last unmerge will have deleted a symlink. Put it back: ln -s /usr/bin/python2.4 /usr/bin/python Portage will now work again. = util-linux needs to be removed to build coreutils as there is duplicate functionality. DO NOT UNMERGE COREUTILS Just don't even try emerge -C util-linux ; emerge coreutils ; emerge util-linux I prefer to get these done and out of the way asap, rather than unmerging a blocker and hoping emerge world will fix stuff as it runs it's course. What is it doesn't and the box is left inconsistent? pam-login no longer exists and it's functionality is replaced by shadow: emerge -C pam-login ; emerge shadow While doing this, keep a second root shell open. After the merge, confirm you can log out of the original shell and correctly log back in. If the shadow merged went wrong somehow, or your pam is funny, you still have a working shell running to fix it. Otherwise, time to fetch the trusty LiveCD thanks in advance, Mark -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
Thanks Alan, Sorry for top posting. I noticed these very old machine have only 8GB drives in them. Looks like I'm actually going to replace the drives and then do new installs from scratch. Thanks for your help! Cheers, Mark On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 2:59 PM, Alan McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 25 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Hi, OK, so this machine I Was speaking of earlier seems ot have a number of issues created by a profile update. I'm attempting to move from 2005.0 to 2007.0. I'm using these documents as reference: Ooooh, this is gonna be fun! http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml#doc_chap3 http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/portage/doc/manually-fixing-portage.xml The second document is referenced because no version of portage in the library matches up with the version of python on this system. I've followed the instructions and now portage seems to work except I see this message which looks more like a warning than anything. Can I safely ignore it? myth11 ~ # emerge -pv system EmergeSystem.txt !!! Problem with sandbox binary. Disabling... !!! Problem with sandbox binary. Disabling... Yeah, I think you can disable it for long enough so that you can remerge sandbox. Or just take it out of FEATURES till the upgrade is complete myth11 ~ # More important are some blocking issues. From the text file I saved in the step above I have these blocks: These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating system dependencies .^H^H... done! [blocks B ] dev-lang/python-2.3.6-r2 (is blocking app-admin/python-updater-0.2) [blocks B ] sys-apps/util-linux-2.13 (is blocking sys-apps/coreutils-6.10-r2) [blocks B ] sys-apps/pam-login (is blocking sys-apps/shadow-4.0.18.2) Are these blocks safe to remove? I assume they are system stuff and hence the system might break. Here's a mail I sent to my colleagues about the python blocks. I'm sure there's any easier way, I just didn't find it at the time: = Upgrading python on stable x86 boxes is a pain in the you know what. This time it is worse than usual. Just like the usual bootstrap problem of you need a compiled compiler to compile a compiler so how do you compile a compiler? on Gentoo portage is written in python so if you unmerge python to resolve a blocker, how do you then update python? Most of our boxes will have python in SLOTS 2.2 and 2.3 and 2.4 This is a waste, you only need one. Hence the existence of python-updater. It works like revdep-rebuild, and finds stuff using python then rebuilds then to link to the most recent version. Latest python DEPENDS on python-updater. However, python-updater blocks =python-2.3.something, so portage is going to bitch about those SLOTS. I can think of 2 procedures to resolve this, only one is tested (credit to Stef for this) run 'emerge --nodeps python-updater' run 'python-updater' This will take a while usually. Use eix to find all merged versions of python. Unmerge all SLOTS 2.4. DO NOT UNMERGE PYTHON-2.4 Now run any portage tool. It will fail with /usr/bin/python - no such file. Mwahahaha. Relax, python is not borked. The last unmerge will have deleted a symlink. Put it back: ln -s /usr/bin/python2.4 /usr/bin/python Portage will now work again. = util-linux needs to be removed to build coreutils as there is duplicate functionality. DO NOT UNMERGE COREUTILS Just don't even try emerge -C util-linux ; emerge coreutils ; emerge util-linux I prefer to get these done and out of the way asap, rather than unmerging a blocker and hoping emerge world will fix stuff as it runs it's course. What is it doesn't and the box is left inconsistent? pam-login no longer exists and it's functionality is replaced by shadow: emerge -C pam-login ; emerge shadow While doing this, keep a second root shell open. After the merge, confirm you can log out of the original shell and correctly log back in. If the shadow merged went wrong somehow, or your pam is funny, you still have a working shell running to fix it. Otherwise, time to fetch the trusty LiveCD thanks in advance, Mark -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Saturday 26 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Thanks Alan, Sorry for top posting. I noticed these very old machine have only 8GB drives in them. Looks like I'm actually going to replace the drives and then do new installs from scratch. 8G drives!! Wow, that comes from the previous millenium Today I worked on a machine with a 40G 7200rpm Barracuda (the office sounded like it had a Boeing in it taking off!) and I thought they were old. Now it looks like a young spring chicken in comparison... -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 3:28 PM, Alan McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 26 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Thanks Alan, Sorry for top posting. I noticed these very old machine have only 8GB drives in them. Looks like I'm actually going to replace the drives and then do new installs from scratch. 8G drives!! Wow, that comes from the previous millenium Today I worked on a machine with a 40G 7200rpm Barracuda (the office sounded like it had a Boeing in it taking off!) and I thought they were old. Now it looks like a young spring chicken in comparison... Yeah, it's pretty insane. We were using these machines only as MythTV frontend boxes so basically they boot, start mythfrontend, spin down the drive and then talk to the backend over the network. They didn't need much space so I probably bought the smallest thing I could find 4 years ago when I first built them. As with everything, technology marches forward. A terabyte for a couple hundred bucks now... Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
