I actually do this rather often (at least quarterly) across three machines. What I normally do is:
1. /home is a separate partition that never gets touched. If you aren't set up this way now, it isn't difficult to do with "parted" if your partitions are ext2 or ext3 and you have enough free space to work in. Most Knoppix derivatives will boot up and let you do this. If your partitions are reiserfs, you're out of luck. "parted" won't touch them, and the patches that enable "parted" to *think* it can touch them will often corrupt them. 2. Given that /home won't get rebuilt, I back up /etc/fstab, /etc/rc.conf, /etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/, /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /boot/grub/grub.conf. 3. The actual rebuild is done by a collection of shell scripts that live in /home. I usually do a stage3 install, which takes about an hour from a GRP package CD including KDE and all the applications I use that are on the package CD. Re-compiling the applications I run beyond GRP stuff -- KVirc, R, TeXmacs, Maxima, LyX, etc. -- costs another couple of hours. I could save that time by doing a "quickpkg" on everything that isn't in the GRP and copying those packages to /home, but I usually don't do that. I think I will the next time, though; KVirc in particular is a rather long compile. 4. Depending on how old your install media are, you may end up recompiling xorg, kde, or some other big packages as an upgrade the first time you sync. If your laptop application set is the way you want it, you might want to do a "quickpkg" before you rebuild to save you all this time. Random wrote: >Hello, I've been running gentoo on my laptop for more than a year now >and gnome and my laptop are starting to behave somewhat strange. Because >of that I want to format and make a clean start. > >Now I want to save my mails, configurations, my emerged files, my xorg >configurations (getting the display right was a lot of work), etc etc >etc... to use them or atleast look at them when I redo the system. Is >there any way to do that without going manualy throught the folders and >searching each one? I mean, like a nice shellscript or aplication. Or >could someone name more or less the important folders where I should >search? > >I use gnome, evolution, xorg, grub, firefox... > >Thanks in advance. > > > -- [email protected] mailing list
