I'm using Gentoo Linux on x86 and kernel 2.6.3.

I recently upgrade GCC to 3.3.2 (I'm not sure what version I was using previously). Now a lot of programs stopped working. I'm pretty sure it's a problem with dynamic libraries. It seems like programs lost the ability to communicate. For instance, KDE loaded, but couldn't find any theme files. Recompiling KDE fixed the problem. I'm pretty sure I can fix any one program by recompiling it, but every program on my system is behaving like this (not even su works at the moment). Is there a way to update all programs to use whatever changed about my environment from the new GCC without recompiling the entire system?

revdep-rebuild

But I must ask, did you update glibc as well? Because updating GCC shouldn't screw with you libraries too badly. I upgrade GCC quite frequency as I use the ~arch keywork and it never breaks library compatiblity for me.

Thanks. That worked perfectly. I had to run one of the commands manually (I ended up with a masked ebuild somehow that I didn't want), but it said everything was built successfully the second time.

edit: yeah, glibc got rebuilt. I didn't expressly merge it, though.

Okay. Well, just about everything is fixed, but su is still not working. I'm not sure if this is related. Any idea why su wouldn't work?

If youi did 'emerge world':
Check if your /etc/group hasn't been replaced, and that you're still part of wheel anymore...

Thanks. That was the problem. It works well now. Shouldn't /etc/group have been merged by etc-update, though?

That's exactly the problem; etc-update replaces the old files with the new ones(.cfg_00000 *name* or something like that).
So the changes you made to the old files are erased...
So next time, control which file you're replacing, that's the whole point of the command; fstab, rc.conf, etc..., make.conf should not be replaced most of the time, unless you wan't to reeedit everything by hand once more...

Yeah. I'm usually pretty good at merging config files carefully; I never even noticed that group was in there, though. It must have slipped past me.

I had also recently installed dentoo on my machine and i could not get su to work.
i could log into root through the login screen.but if i logged into normal user and then did su and entered my passwd...it always gave me a permission denied.
could it be the same problem as this?

how do you mean part of wheel anymore.I have this line in my /etc/group:
wheel:x:10:root
(this is at my machine at work)
should it be exactly like this at home too?
thanks

I think a user needs to be part of wheel to use su. So you'd need to make sure any user you want to switch with (probably your primary account, at least) is part of wheel.

well under my debian install there is no entry named wheel.
i did cat /etc/group | grep wheel
and nothing.
is this something specific to Gentoo?
thanks

i think Debian uses sysadmin or something similar as wheel. Wheel is the admin group used in FreeBSD, so I'm guessing Gentoo carried that convention over

Yep, users need to be part of wheel to use su...

If it is a gentoo problem, replace the wheel line of /etc/group with:
wheel:x:10:root,<user>

Just so you know, to play games, you need to be part of 'games'...