Those who know me, know I’m a GNU/Linux guy. Those who know me well, know I run Gentoo. Those who run Gentoo, know what an emotional roller-coaster it can be at times.
Gentoo is a source based distribution. We don’t have such things as wizards or default settings – at least those of us that choose to follow the classic Gentoo path don’t. Installation consists of inserting a disk, booting to a text-only interface and running various commands for a couple of days, typing up lots of configuration files, and compiling tonnes of code until eventually you have your chosen graphical interface to boot into, and enough support for your chipsets and hardware devices for that interface to function. Needless to say, things are easily broken in our world, but at the same time when things work again you’re rewarded with a massive sense of accomplishment and some kind of geeky feeling.
To the point, updating Gentoo isn’t much different to ‘installing’ Gentoo. It’s a slow process of compiling, fixing, recompiling, fixing again and learning new ways to swear. I’m pretty sure it also involves a little hair loss. Eventually though, after the 22nd tweak to some core configuration, the boot process makes it to the end, a little cursor appears in the middle of your screen for the first time in 48 hours, and that sense of accomplishment returns.
I haven’t updated this system for a long time. I haven’t really dared to as my work takes up about 90% of my time at the moment and as a web developer it’s pretty important I have a working computer, but I can’t hold off any longer. I’m running web browsers that are 3 major versions behind, and I’ve recently learned that the newer versions of Gimp support more of the features Photoshop PSD files contain, such as layer grouping and proper text layers. While I need a working computer to do my job, I also need recent software versions.
And so it begins, I’m updating. As I progress I want to keep a sort of diary to demonstrate this roller-coaster and to try and illustrate why, regardless of the headaches, Gentoo is such a great experience. I’ve absolutely no idea what will break, or how long the updates will take, but one thing can be guaranteed – I’m about to bore the hell out of everybody who’s bothered to read this far!
9pm, Thursday the 9th
I’ve sync’d my package manager to the Gentoo servers and I’ve read through the 291 packages it wants me to update. I’m happy with the use flags and I’m ready to start the updates. Among the 1.4GB of downloads are the likes of XOrg, ATI drivers, GCC, QT, Python, the whole of KDE, OpenRC and of course the kernel itself. To those who don’t speak GNU, that’s pretty much everything essential to a working environment really. Here goes, emerge –update –deep –newuse world.
7:45pm, Friday the 10th
It’s been almost 24 hours now. I’ve just gotten around to checking this system again and it’s still happily compiling my updates. To be honest I’m a little surprised – I don’t think I’ve ever known it last this long without flaking out on one of the ebuilds before! Fingers crossed it makes it all the way to the end…
12pm, Friday the 10th
Oh wow, some time in the past 2 hours, the updates completed. I’ve NEVER known Gentoo update such a large number of packages without any issues. Portage must have improved tonnes recently! I’ve now put together a list of commands to run next, thanks to the output messages Portage collected along the way, and I’ve learned about a (new?) prelinking daemon that should increase overall performance. Unless something goes wrong when running these few commands and minor configuration steps, it seems this has been an even more boring blog post than I’d thought.
4am, Saturday 11th
I should have known it was too good to be true. Upon rebooting I discovered I had no keyboard or mouse input to KDM, my graphical login. I had to boot to a commandline, i.e. runlevel 3, to prevent KDM from kicking in. From here I recompiled X11 and the input driver for my Synaptics as well as evdev. Thankfully this did the trick and I could boot into KDE again.
Next up, it turns out KMail 2, brought in by the new KDE 4.7, has a pretty major bug in migrating e-mail accounts from previous versions. After a lot of messing about I eventually wiped the POP3 entries from Akonadi and created all my e-mail accounts again. KMail remembered my identities and they seem to have simplified the account set-up quite massively so this didn’t take too long, but it does look like I’ve lost all my previously saved e-mails for good which is a huge annoyance. I have 8 e-mail accounts set up on here and had a fairly large number of e-mails containing things like obscure passwords and cost approvals from clients.
On the plus side, KDE is running extremely fast, and the Opera web browser seems to be much smoother during page renders too. Probably all down to a combination of the aforementioned prelinking daemon, the new XOrg, and better ATI drivers. I’ve not yet played around with other updated software but overall things look and feel a little tidier. I’m even quite impressed with KMail, regardless of it screwing my accounts up.