For grins - bringing 2006.0 up to date in 2008.

[depontius]

For various reasons, later explained, I've reactivated an old 2006.0 install that still contains valuable configuration data, so I'm trying to bring it up to date, instead of a flat reinstall. (partly just to see if I can)

Looong ago, my laptop was made dual-boot between Windows and an "official Linux." Later I decided to put Gentoo on, and never really used the official Linux after that. At some point in there I was getting nervous about some of the upgrades happening, and decided to wipe the "official Linux" and did a new Gentoo install in that partition. It began as an experiment, but soon became my mainstay. (/home is already on a separate partition.)

For the past few months my mainstay partition has been getting tight. So I decided to wipe the old partition and move /var over there, to free space. Another trick I pull with that is to move /usr/portage and /usr/src over to /var, and bind-mount them into /usr. That balances space and changes /usr into a read-mostly and /var into a read-write partition. So I booted a rescue CD and went to work, deleting the spare space, making a new filesystem, copying /var over, etc. I was going to do the fancy stuff with portage, src, and bind-mounts after booting into the new layout.

I deleted the wrong partition.

Now I have the old 2006.0 install, a /boot containing a 2.6.25-gentoo-r6 kernel and initrd, and a mostly empty /var partition that used to contain a very good 2008.0 install. But I figure the 2006.0 install is still pretty well configured for the machine, so I might as well at least try a little to resurrect it. I also have another 2008.0 machine handy that I can get some of the tweaks from, and have brought forward changes to make.conf and the like.

After a little fiddling and uncommenting a previously commented initrd, I have the system booting and networked, despite a pile of boot-time errors. Obviously there's no matching /lib/modules/2.6.25-gentoo-r1 to get the stuff not in the initrd, but at least it works.

I figure this might at the very least be amusing.
Slightly better, it might help others.
Best, someone might have suggestions to speed my task. Right now it's going to take classic Gentoo compile time.

First, I was able to "emerge --sync" successfully, so now I have an up-to-date portage tree. That also meant breaking my profile, because 2006.0 is now gone. I first tried moving to 2008.0, but there's something in there that kills a 2006.0-vintage portage, so as an intermediate I moved to 2006.1, which was the oldest present. That let me start to upgrade portage.

To upgrade portage, I first had 2 blocks. I forget what the first was, but I began with a separate emerge for it, and it started out OK. Shortly after it failed, and it looked like some sort of curses library problem, so I did a separate emerge of ncurses, then reemerged the first package, and all was well. There's obviously a dependency missing in the ebuild. I may try and dig it out, but this stuff is so old it's probably not work fixing. Next, the current bash requires newer portage than I had, and the current portage requires a newer bash than I had, in order to install. I masked bash to an intermediate level which would work with my current portage, and was able to emerge the new portage.

Next I figure it's time to go after the toolchain, so I'm in the gcc-upgrade HowTo. Right now I'm in the middle of "emerge -uav gcc", which is upgrading more than I wanted, because it's all going to have to be redone after I have the new gcc installed.

After the "emerge -eav system" I plan to rebuild my kernel, reboot, install the new kernel headers, and rebuild glibc. At about that point, I should be able to "emerge -atuvDN world" and figure that things are sufficiently obsolete that everything that needs rebuilding will get rebuilt. I may do an "emerge -ep system and emerge -ep world" to compare their outputs to "emerge -puDN world" and see if I need to pick up any extras.

More later...
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[ziggysquatch]

I did this very same thing recently. I upgraded from 2006.x (can't remember what I was at exactly). I did it just because I wanted to learn and thought it would be a good experience. I think it was, I ran into several problems along the way especially because I hadn't planned it out so well as you have, I just plowed ahead and fixed things as they broke.

It took about 2 weeks to get it fully up to date and now that system is updated weekly and used as my primary system.

I wish you luck with this and I think it's great you are planning on posting your experience on here as I think it will help people out a lot with other issues.

[tabanus]

You're both mad. Just re-install
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[depontius]

Oh, come on. Where's your sense of adventure. Yesterday I finished the toolchain rebuild and "emerge -e system". I was going to try and be smart and minimize recompilation, but what the heck, it's the weekend. So while I've been doing woodworking, walking with my wife, sleeping, driving with my (learner's permit) daughter, and watching "Meatballs" with the family, my laptop has been back on my desk at work, recompiling "emerge -e world." I just checked a few moments ago, and pciutils failed - I suspect the old version was too old to remove properly. I'll figure that out Monday, for now I just "emerge --skipfirst --resume" and let it keep going.

I can always give up and reinstall - and I've copied most of the critical configuration onto /home. But I'll give this attempt at resurrection a few more days. Compile time doesn't hurt a bit, when I'm not there, and since it's only the laptop, it doesn't even hurt that much when I'm at work, most of the time.
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[tabanus]

[depontius]

I was trying to get at the point that while my free time is being used for other things, my laptop certainly has a LOT of free time, at the moment. I haven't invested much time at all in this update attempt. With a new install, there's a lot of dedicated keyboard time to be invested before getting to the "emerge system" point, and then the point of emerging a package list. The fuss I'm going through is still relatively low-level, and is still far below that required for a new install. As I said, if you don't need to be there, "emerge -e world" is free.

Not quite free, as I check periodically, and I've had to do 5 restarts. So far each failing package is non-critical to ongoing installation, so I've added them to a list and done "emerge --skipfirst --resume". From the messages, I see I'm also in for learning some new things about Portage in order to get the problem packages installed, and that's not bad, either.
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[notHerbert]

I think that kind of thing is a great experience.
I did some similarly "mad" stuff, like spending a full year reading man pages and nothing else. It sounds rediculous - kinda like doing homework at school.
But like doing homework at school it pays off later on, because today I can do all sorts of experimental stuff without hosing my system like I used to do regularly in the old days when they sold the Redhat floppy at the dime store for a nickel.

Good luck and don't quit.

[fangorn]

The more convenient way is to just copy /etc over to a freshly extracted stage3 and turn the (cleaned) world file into an emerge wrapper (replace the \n (newline) with " " (space) in your favourite editor and put emerge -uD in front of it).

Much less breaks, much less recompile, and you just have to be careful when merging /etc configuration files.
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[Nick C]

Check the official docs, theres a nice guide with what needs to be done to move from 2006.0, there may be problems along the way but its a start: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-upgrading.xml
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[depontius]

The job is just about done. What is hopefully the last revdep-rebuild is running now, and I've already started rebuilding my customizations, which would also have to be done for a reinstall. (The revdep-rebuild is done, rerunning to see if anything else pops out.)

Incidentally, I first installed Gentoo with 1.4, so I'm no stranger to upgrading profiles. The oddity this time was in taking a 2 year jump, all in one go. I'll have to collect my notes and give some more tips. There can be problems upgrading when the original ebuild you're upgrading from no longer exists, for instance.
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[astifter]

Hi,

i'm right in the middle of an "emerge -uv --deep --newuse world" after changing my profile from 2006.1 to 2008.0. Everything seems to work fine.

(I don't have that much packages though, its a file/web/ssh/ftp/rsync server with (almost) no direct user interaction. (I use Ubuntu and MacOS for doing my work )

Thanks for this wonderful server OS.

Andi

[fangorn]

Welcome aboard astifter.

It is not just that. You can also use it as a desktop system. I do so and many other do so too.

But I have to say: If you need just a Desktop system to work with and can live with the basic configuration you're better off with a binary distribution.

For me it's mostly the second part of the if clause that keeps me from switching. But I do not want much "Desktop Experience" on my personal machine anyway. All more complex/timeconsuming tasks are offloaded to an always running machine (which I pray for to not have to setup again as it took some months to get it running with all the desired features). And a Gentoo system with xterm, vim, screen and fvwm is easily setup in very short time. Even when using firefox-bin and openoffice-bin. These programs are enough to keep me working. The rest of the programs evolves over time.

@depontius
This is why I suggested making a fresh install over the old configuration files in /etc. This way you don't get package conflicts and still have the old configuration. You have to be careful when merging hand edited config files. All others you can just replace with the new ones. This leaves you with a few deprecated files that you have to delete/reconfigure by hand. But Gentoo tells you what files these are.
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[Cyker]

I did this from 1.4 to 2006.1 once


The trick is to DOCUMENT everything you do, esp. the output of emerge -pv --deep world BEFORE you run it - This lets you see what new things are being added and catch things likely to break, and allows you to mask them off or emerge -C them in advance.

The other trick for moving profiles is checking your USE flags.

The annoying things is they keep changing between profile versions, so I no longer use server or desktop profile, just the base one, because it is MUCH more stable.

When I went from 2005 to 2007 this caught me and I was staring at the emerge -pv dump wondering why 4 bazillion packages wanted to be installed O.o
It was only due to the use flags being changed in the profile!


Other than that, this is not that difficult - The scary thing is EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM we've had between 2006 and now (e.g. expat, all the new circular blocker problems etc.) will hit you ALL AT ONCE!!
But since we've figured them all out already, there will be solutions in this very forum for all of them! The trick is just realising that




@fangorn - Gentoo can be a real PITA to build from the ground up to a usable desktop system, but unlike every single other distro out there, you only need to to it once!
Those poor Ubuntu people will have to attempt an upgrade when the one their using stopps being sipported, but we'll never have that problem

I don't recommend just copying across /etc to new installs 'tho - It is almost never that simple. The only safe way to do it is to manually check and copy/edit over each file and config; effectively using your old etc as a template for the new one, but that is reeeeally tedious to do.