Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo SDcard updates tactics

[Hinnerk van Bruinehsen]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 05:29:11AM +0200, meino.cramer@×××.de wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There are two SDcards of the same brand and model.
> The first one cariies a not so current Gentoo Linux.
> The second one is empty.
> Now the first one is image-copied to the second one with dd,
> which copies the contents of the whole device (not the partitions).
>
> Then the first one is put into my embedded system, boots up and
> the normal eix-syn/emerge/compiel is done to update the system (whch
> takes a longer time becaus this is an embedded system).
>
> Will I get a technical identical working and valid copy of the first sdcard onto
> the second sdcard if I rsync the relevant partition of the first onto
> the second sdcard.
>
> Or will I produce crap this way? Is this valid Gentoo-wise?
>

Moin (again),

this will work quite well, at least if you take care (I used this way for
moving my systems to new drives or even via network to different boxes (in the
latter case CFLAGS and kernel config will become important again, as you can
imagine)).
Ideally you should run rsync with the option to remove files not found on the
source drive (otherwise you'll likely clutter the target with stale files
(especially documentation  but also older library versions).
You will also need to change the configs (at least static network & hostname,
possibly more) so that both systems don't clash, at least if you plan to run
both on the same network.
The "rm" option of rsync is potentially dangerous (e.g. you can delete files
from home).
If you are careful this is a valid way of doing that. Another option that would
move quite a bit work from one machine to the other is just building binpkgs on
one host and use the other one as binhost. That way (if you use identical
/etc/portage dirs) you can quite savely use portage and nonetheless negate the
use of compiling (there will still be the load of dependency resplution,
extracting etc).

WKR
Hinnerk