Re: [gentoo-user] /var/db gone: possible opportunity to switch profile

[Francisco Ares]

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> wrote:

> Francisco Ares writes:
>
> > On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Alan McKinnon
> > <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:41:39 -0300
> > > Francisco Ares <frares@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> > > > I have managed to delete /var/db. I know this was a very stupid
> > > > thing to be done, but now it is done and /var/db is gone for good.
>
> For every partition I have on my system there is a slightly bigger
> partition on my backup drive, and I regularly make snapshots with
> rdiff-backup. I wrote a script to automatize this, because it has to be
> easy to start the backup, or else I won't do it often enough.
>
> > > > Well, that is a good opportunity to have everything built again,
> > > > time to try new CFLAGS, and so on.
>
> And to go amd64 :)  See it as an opportunity to do this. For me, the
> biggest advantage compared to x86 was that I could use more memory. Apart
> from that, there were not so many differences.
>
>
> > Yes, that's it, now going from ground up. Pity, this system is being
> > upgraded, both hardware and software, since 15+ years. Never had to
> > re-install before.
>
> Um, Gentoo started to exist around 2002 according to
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_Linux .


Thanks for the correction. I really thought that it was that long.

Now, pushing harder from memory, I have being using Linux since the kernel
was on versions 2.2 in '99. I started with "Conectiva" (release 4.0), that
went to "Mandriva" when it was acquired by "Mandrake", in 2004 or 2005, I
guess, but way before that I had Gentoo already installed.

So that makes just, say, 10 years.

I had a few re-installs at the beginning, in the first two to three weeks,
until I get the idea right. When "smartd" starts to advise me about a
failing hard drive, I simply copy everything from this unit to a new one,
and things just keep going. When the hardware is considered old and there is
enough money, I look for possibilities till I get to a specific (and
affordable) new set of motherboard, processor and memory, but before moving
things, I build a kernel with drives for both CPU's; just then I really buy
the new hardware, and normally everything works fine. And there is always a
LiveCD around to help put things back to work.


> > I guess that shows how portage, all dev-guys, and all helpful people who
> > write in this list are really good. Gentoo rocks!
>
> Indeed. I started to use it around early in 2003, when my girlfriend
> installed it onto my server. And I continued using it until one year ago,
> when the server became obsolete (and finally died only three months
> later). I had uptimes of more than a year, and also never had to
> re-install.
>
> Before, I had tried various Linux distros, but I always was disappointed
> with many things. I hated to upgrade, as this sometimes just did not
> work, and often broke things, sometimes more than were fixed. I remember
> the dependency hell of RPM, spending much time on rpmfind.net looking  for
> packages that were compatible... and then came Gentoo, and these problems
> were gone. The rolling upgrades were just great. Over all, things
> worked much better. And in case of problems, I often was able to solve
> them myself. And I learnt to do things by hand - like configuring ISDN.
> When I tried that before on redHat, I ran into a bug of that fancy GUI
> utility, that did not make use of my changes until I quit and restarted
> it. If you do this yourself by directly configuring stuff in /etc/ppp,
> you not only learn more about the whole thing, you also avoid the bugs
> that all those GUI utilities seem to have. Simpler seems to be better
> here. No additional layers calling for trouble.
>
>        Wonko
>
>
Yes, quite like you. I hated the way Conectiva changed the case of some
letters on the names of some of the libraries, so it was hell to have
something installed from source, and their package list was too short. I
though that would be the same with other distros. I was considering "Linux
from Scratch", but when I came to know that in a Gentoo instalation
everything is built from source code, I stopped to look at other distros.
And I really enjoy messing around in /etc .

Thanks