howto cleanup my system

[hedmo]

hi i want to clean up my gentoo.i have only used --depclean put it dont clean everything.
this is what i like to get help with.

1.my /usr/portage/distfiles is getting full and i like to clean it

2.when i emerge a thing and unmerge it,gentoo still know what i have done if reemerege it.
i like to know how to erase things like that

3.is there a command to see the things have emerge and not the thing that comes with.

4.what exactly does emerge -e world do? is it a thing i should do ones in a while?

5. is there some more faq about this or have you guys some advice

regards

[platojones]

I'll take #1...it's the easy one. If you haven't emerged gentoolkit, do that. Then just use the 'eclean-dist --destructive' command. It will remove anything from your distfiles that's not currently installed.

Oh and #4 just reinstalls all current packages and their dependencies. Probably won't do much to help you clean up your system.

[dol-sen]

for #3 you can look at the world file directly

[yzg]

1- Check your /usr/src/ directory and remove all the old kernels sources.
2- Remove everything under /var/tmp/protage/
3- Set WIPE_TMP="yes" in /etc/conf.d/bootmisc

[phajdan.jr]

[hedmo]

thanks guys for your quick answers .

1.fixed

2.what i meant was not the emerge,unmerge part.its when i have bin using a program and conf.. it
for me.if i make a misstake or dont like it like it have become and want to start from scratch.how do i
make gentoo forget that program before emerge it again.every program start with default text or gui
but if you change something,gentoo will remember and this is what i like clean.its har to describe this sort of
problem but i hope i made it

3."cat /var/lib/portage/world | less" was the thing but yzg 3- Set WIPE_TMP="yes" in /etc/conf.d/bootmisc
please describe

4. okej correct me if i am wrong but this is a good thing if some time i have too hit power off (hold 6 sec)
when sys freeze and have to do a fsck manually

5.i am getting back to that

ones again thanks

[rh1]

[Etal]

Here's a nice article in the FAQ section. I wish more people knew about it:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-175546.html#175546

[Shining Arcanine]

[hedmo]

eclean-dist --destructive swiped 1G off

phajdan.jr wrote:
Using eclean-dist in a cron job seems to be the best way to deal with that.

i dont know what a cron job is

AM088 thanks for the link this will comes in hand from time to time

about : 2.

i am trying to clean vdr infact the vdr-xineliboutput. usualy its a plugin that is in vdr dirs
but this is a plugin for xine and i cant find the conf file .i was in vdr when i made the bad change

but its the same with all conf files.i hope there is a cleaning command for cleaning old conf files
that are not used after a --unmerge

[phajdan.jr]

[krinn]

cleaning your system is the best way to break it if you don't know what you are doing

hopefully (or sadly ?) breaking your system is the best way to learn howto not break it again.

So my advise, you can get both advantages: cleaning your system and learn howto avoid breaking it with just that: take great care of what you are doing, and try to think first of what you are doing.

And generally speaking: automated process (like --depclean) or running a cron job is best way to loose control and fastest path to breakage.

Don't use automated things, do it by hands, take more time to think about what you are about to do and what will happen, you will learn, it will take a little more time, but your system will stay healthy and the little more time taken will be less more time than trying to repair your system when you have no idea why/where and how it has been broken.

there's really few simple things you can do that will save you time, as examples: use emerge -1 (oneshot) to install a program, always run --pretend (--version is also a good one, specially with --depclean!), always fetch files before upgrading (emerge -fuD world), emerge -uDN system than emerge -uDN world is better than emerge -uDN world, think twice when looking at etc-update output, run etc-update (i mean don't forget to run it), emerge gentoolkit (revdep-rebuild should be install by default).
and --help : it might just be stupid but --help will always gave you information you might not think exist. for example again, i'm sure many persons don't know revdep-rebuild can use --pretend and --version for a more safe run while this information is just at their hands with a --help output)...

[platojones]

There are quite a few things you can automate along these lines. Here's a daily cron script I wrote and just dropped into my /etc/cron.daily directory (a quick and easy way to use cron, BTW):

[elmar283]

Platojones: why should you run emerge --sync and eix-update? Arn't you doing things dubble then?

[khayyam]

[elmar283]

Thanks for your answer. I had only eix-sync in my crontab:

[khayyam]

[mv]

[khayyam]

mv ...

yes, I missed that, and stand corrected. I generally *do* place the '2>&1' *after* the /dev/null but clearly I'm in a higgildy-piggildy.

best ... khay