Re: [gentoo-user] What to do when you can't loggin

[Caster]

On 6/21/06, Paul Stear <gentoo@××××××××××××.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I am running an ~x86 system and yesterday I did an emerge world, all went
> well
> until the next time I booted. kdm ran but the screen just had a flashing
> loggin box.  I could not even get another terminal using alt F1-F7. So I
> am
> faced with not being able to loggin at all.  This raises a few questions
> about my own inadequacies :-
> 1. What is the correct procedure to recover a system in this state?  What
> tools do I need?


You answered yourself in point 3. It's also possible to boot in single user
mode (edit kernel line in grub and add "1" to the end) and remove xdm from
default bootlevel, so on next reboot you are console only and can downgrade
freetype.

2. I have an rsynced backup on an external usb harddrive, but unless I can
> loggin how can I restore the files from the backup?


Again, single user or livecd.

3. It appears that a freetype update was the cause of this failure, but this
> information was hard to find on the forum's (I was lucky). I had an old
> installation cd and chroot'ed and emerged the previous version of
> freetype,
> rebooted and all is well (I hope).


Good.

4. How can an update like this get into ~x86 tree when it plainly causes a
> major problem?  I wonder if I should revert to just x86.


That's what ~arch is for, packages are TESTED there, not all problems can be
known beforehand. Of course after the bug was reported, the first thing they
should have done was to package.mask it to prevent problems even for more
users, because now it was a known major problem.
But still if you run ~arch, you should be ready for problems. If you don't
want, revert to arch...

Caster