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The ~ represents a masked package. This means the package is available but has not been marked stable by the Gentoo developers. In some cases you can install masked packages with no problem. In terms of big things like GCC I would stear clear of using the masked version. Just go with the most stable.
If by any change you want to unmask a package you can do it through the command line:
# USE="~x86" emerge <package>
if you are using the x86 architecture or(the more appropriate way):
Thanks Crashed_Again. Just out of curiosity, have you updated from 2004 to 2005? If so what steps did you perform?
Actually I have some important work going on in Gentoo right now and I don't want to take the risk of updating now when the work is half way done, but probably next week I can update Gentoo when my work is done, but not at present.
How can one say if they have officialy updated to 2005 in a metadistribution like Gentoo? I did change my make.profile link but other then that I didn't do much. I don't really ever emerge -uD world. The only thing I use daily is:
# glsa-check --fix new
which will fix any packages with security updates. Other then that, I don't really update much.
Originally posted by Crashed_Again How can one say if they have officialy updated to 2005 in a metadistribution like Gentoo?
Second that.
Only I have a totally different approach . I use ~x86 (unstable tree) and do an emerge -uaDN world almost every night. That means I always have bleeding edge software with latest bugfixes, but also latest "bugs added". It usually pays off nicely (gimp-2.2, php5, apache 2.0.53, gcc 3.4.3-20050110... the list goes on and on.) It means that i can have a 15s startup time (counting from the GRUB menu) and an average reboot time of 50s (from # reboot to actually being logged into X using kde3.4 with kdm.)
Only I have a totally different approach . I use ~x86 (unstable tree) and do an emerge -uaDN world almost every night. That means I always have bleeding edge software with latest bugfixes, but also latest "bugs added". It usually pays off nicely (gimp-2.2, php5, apache 2.0.53, gcc 3.4.3-20050110... the list goes on and on.) It means that i can have a 15s startup time (counting from the GRUB menu) and an average reboot time of 50s (from # reboot to actually being logged into X using kde3.4 with kdm.)
All of them, plus a streaming server for our HI-FI (802.11g over the whole house + gigabit ethernet), plus samba host, plus ssh server for my friends who want to see how linux works, and soon it's gonna be an e-mail server too.
Of course it crashes down sometimes, because of the wrongly-written ebuilds (see the gcc 3.4.3 is upon us, the binutils package and stuff, but usually it runs smooth as hell)
Plus it's ultrasweet because my hardware allows me to have systemwide transparency . KDE just rules (transparent titlebars, transparent toolbars, transparent menus, transparent taskbar, transparent clock ...) 2gigs of RAM does have it's advantages .
The thing is, it's sweet now, but I had to work my ass off to get enough money to buy it all ... make websites for extra dough, it pays .
I like your approach though, so stable and reliable I would easily trust you with a crucial webhosting stuff. Too bad you don't get php5 and mysql 4.1. They're crucial.
Nowhere is it clear whether I should change the profile first and then update or whether I should update first and then change the profile (make.profile).
Do the emerge first - as mentioned, the release concept is only applicable to people downloading the CD.
You do *NOT* want to do that if you have a running system.
After everything is up to date, change the symlink - just a trivial last step.
There will be warnings during the emerge, but if miss them and you use etc-update you'll get them again from etc-update - that was when I did it; when I got reminded.
For starters, if you haven't done it yet, here are some guidelines for you:
Once a day update your portage tree: emerge --sync
Then see what updates are available: emerge -uvpD world
If there is an update out, but it's not showing up, run /usr/sbin/regenworld. I run it occasionally to see if it catches any apps whose respective ebuilds forgot to add them to /var/lib/portage/world. Then re-run emerge -uvpD world.
If there are updates, get them. Otherwise, just use your enjoy Gentoo system.
When new profiles are released it is usually trivial to use it. After a while Gentoo will phase out older profiles over the newer ones. You should NEVER have to reinstall Gentoo to move to a different profile. I have read in the Handbook (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml) that there are cases where you have have to recompile your system, but it hasn't happened to me yet where I had to do that. That was probably for the more drastic changes in the past.
For instance moving to the 2005.0 profile was VERY easy. emerge told you when it was officially available and gave the necessary steps for how to do so. The 2005.0 profile made 2.6.x the default kernel whereas in previous profiles 2.4.x was the default. There may have been other changes but that is the one that I know of.
Make sure to follow in sequence as well. emerge will most likely telll you when it's time to move to a new profile. I'd suggest signing up for Gentoo's weekly newsletter or visit their home page often to read it. It tells you of upcoming changes like the profile switch. They also offer a RSS feed to get the same info.
A poster mentioned asking Gentoo questions in the Gentoo forums: That's actually a pretty good idea. Not because Gentoo users don't frequent this area, but that GNU/Linux users here are from nearly all of the distros and don't have the collective knowledge base that the Gentoo forums have.
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