Hello, Harry, Long time, no see!
On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 10:19:42PM -0400, Harry Putnam wrote: > My gentoo OS is running on Openindiana (solaris) inside oracle's vbox. > It's been left setting for at least 4-5 months maybe a couple more. > After eix-sync, attempting an `emerge vuND world' comes up with so > many blocks, use flag changes and a variety of other bad news in > such proliferation... I'm thinking better to install from scratch with > latest ISO. I know the feeling. When the same thing happened to me (my system got into a mess because I was running XFCE which was too dependent on gnome-2; when gnome-3 became stable, the demons of hades were let loose, and I tried a couple of times, half-heartedly, to update), I told myself to stop and think. I could spend days fighting with use flags and conflicts, or I could spend a few days reinstalling. In the end I reinstalled (using the old system (rather than an ISO image) to do the initial stages. It took me about a week, compared with about a month the first time I seriously installed Gentoo. "Installation" here means getting everything up and running, including X with destop manager, printing, sound, email server and client, .... > ,---- > | NOTE: The full mess can be viewed here: > | > | zeus.jtan.com/~reader/vutxt/images/emerge_MassiveFailure-150823.txt > `---- > I've been quite a long time gentoo user but last 2+ yrs only very > lightly. > I'm awful dumb for someone who has problably more than 15 yrs running > gentoo. I doubt that! But if I were only using Gentoo lightly for an extended period, I'd forget a _lot_. > I wondered if there are some very new ISO's that would contain all > major changes in last year or so once I got the core installed and key > useflags/make.conf setup? That's not the way Gentoo works - (what was that I was saying about forgetting things?). The Gentoo ISO is really just an installation environment to boot up into, one with enough power for you to be able to download and install a stage 3 into which you reboot, then really get going with configuring the system, and installing further stuff, etc. All the new stuff from the last few months is in portage (which you get with $ emerge --sync, and so on). > Can anyone advise me which iso to use? And which profile to set for > general use in a vbox, hopefully to allow a `no sweat' emerge to a > full OS. Painful though it might seem, I'd suggest you go back to the Gentoo handbook and do a bit of revision. It's been moved to the Gentoo wiki at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page. I'd recommend you then just to reinstall. Remembering my fights with stupid error messages from emerge, and so on, I wish I'd just reinstalled months earlier than I did. Whatever you end up doing, all the best! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
