On 12/18/05, Neil Bothwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, 17 Dec 2005 06:29:41 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > > So what I want to do is give my computer a complete clean-out. What I > > > really CAN'T be bothered doing is a complete format and re-install! > > There are some major advantages to not re-installing. One is that all > your settings remain untouched, whereas a reinstall requires you to > reconfigure everything. > > A more important difference is that the computer cannot be used for > anything else during reinstallation, whereas a clean up is performed on > a running system. It is also a lot less work that a reinstallation, > especially if you do it regularly. All you really need to do is clean > the world file of any cruft, emerge depclean && revdep-rebuild and run > the script to clean orphaned files from /etc.
I recently had a similar issue. I seriously b0rked my box by upgrading gcc, neglecting to read the upgrade guide, and pruning the old gcc thus breaking just about EVERYTHING. What I did was recover to a semi-usable state, create a chrooted environment on my disk, unpacked a stage and did a complete re-install, the whole time I was using the computer for some programming work. When all the builds completed I just tarred up the old / partition and the new one from my build environment, booted a livecd and unpacked the new / over the old one, no format involved. It was a major pain in the butt that I hope to never repeat but it gave me a new system while still letting me use my old system. Still, if all you want to do is clean up cruft there are far better ways than re-installing your whole system. That's something windoze users do ;-) -Mike -- ________________________________ Michael E. Crute Software Developer SoftGroup Development Corporation Linux takes junk and turns it into something useful. Windows takes something useful and turns it into junk. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
