Hi,
I am currently downloading Vidalinux because it seems to be a very good distro. However, I am with dial-up, so it's really painful (the image is about 500mb). Well, I guess I have to live with it. The problem is, now that I'm almost done with the downlad, the people at Vidalinux are announcing a new version of their distro that is coming out twenty days from now. This struck me like a thunderbolt. After so many days of downloading, they are coming out with a new version. Luckily later on, I read about this program integrated in Vidalinux (called portage) that could update packages. Here is the exact description of this program.

Does this mean that I can update the distro to a newer version through this program? Or do I have to re-download the whole distro .iso image once the newer version comes out?
Thank you for your time and I anticipate your replies.

yes

Phew! Thanks a lot.

do read up on the specifics of portage and it's options though, so you know exactly how you want it to treat your system ( config files, overwritten files, etc...).

ok thanks

You should be able to update with Portage if you have loads of time and know how. Its not automatic. Portage will ask you what it should do in many cercumstances. I was really unimpressed.

What did portage ask you? Its never asked me anything after issue'ing any emerge command. It just does what you tell it to do.

And as far as loads of time; typing:

# emerge system

does not take loads of time from a person but rather takes loads of time for the computer. I just typed that command in 2.348 seconds.

Back to the topic at hand. When I heard of VidaLinux I was so excited to hear of a distro that used portage for package management and had the anaconda installer. Unfortunatly, I ran into tons of bugs when trying to upgrade packages in portage. It could have been PEBCAK but I dumped it and went back to straight Gentoo.

I had trouble. I ended up with etc errors? and it kept asking me to what to do like " how the h*ll do I know" ... I ended up with a non booting vidalinux. And this was a couple of hours into an update ... then crash.
Obviously I'm no gentoo guru but it sure did'nt seem newbie friendly to me.

I will give it another go sometime maybe with the next release.

Ah yes...etc-update is actually my biggest issue with portage. When I first started using Gentoo I successfully etc-update'ed my /etc/fstab which caused my machine not to boot. I thought to myself 'why would portage overwrite such a crucial file?' Such is portage for some reason. To this day an update to the 'baselayout' package causes something like 25 config file updates. Their are "intelligent" ways to deal with this but obviously I lack that trait.

You would think they would fix that?

Note to self:

Never > emerge --update world

Portage is really not that bad as is made out to be in some posts.

It's not magic, you may need to manually replace/edit over some configuration files, but really there are very few changes that you can usually overwrite safely 90% of the time. The remaining 10% of the time, prevent etc-update from overwriting the old files, do the changes (if needed) manually and all will be well.

I still don't get it why some config files need updating though. In most cases the new config file is 100% identical to the old ones.