How does GRP work?

hokeyru · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2003 Posts: 4

I had an unrelated problem finding the packages. An earlier post here helped immensely. Make sure you have your .tbz2 files in the

/usr/portage/packages/All

directory.

That said, getting to this point felt like a logic puzzle.

snowmoon · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2002 Posts: 64 Location: Albany,NY USA

I just want to add my .02USD... I wanted to bring gentoo onto my PIII800 quick. I am no stranger to gentoo or linux ( been using gentoo since 1.2 and been using slackware since kernel version .94 ~1992 ).

The GRP sucked. It did not work as expected and I had to resort back to a windows PC that was working to track down a several month old bug in the GRP platform that prevents emerge -k kde from working properly. It just seems silly that a few simple dependancy issues cannot be figgured out.

you need to install fam-oss, libarg-lgpl, and libre in order for kde to work as expected otherwise it just crashes and burns with little or no explanation.

Long story short, it needs work. I will be doing a whole system rebuild as soon as possible to tweak the USE and compiler flags. I was hoping that the GRP would save me much hassle, but it's ending up generating hassle.

jjramsey · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2002 Posts: 21

snowmoon · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2002 Posts: 64 Location: Albany,NY USA

Yes, I am using 2003-09-11 PentiumIII GRP cd set. As I stated there were multiple dependancy errors that prevented KDE from working off the bat. Once correct the system appears to work ok.

jamesw · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 5

I understand that it's better to maintain one installation guide instead of working on two separate guides which will surely get out of sync at some point. However, I agree with previous posters that it's difficult to determine which parts of the guide to follow for GRP installs instead of normal installs. The guide explictly notes the beginnings of GRP instruction sections, but it's not so explicit as to where those sections end and where the reader should go from that implicit ending.

While I was able to get my first Gentoo 1.4 install working yesterday, I found the GRP instructions in the guide confusing at points; I had to backtrack a couple of times because I had skipped a step because I thought the guide merged back into general installation discussion in a place other than where it actually did. Without my extensive prior experience with Linux, I'm not sure that I would've succeeded on the first attempt.

Perhaps there should be two guides derived from a single source file, which would keep both in sync while maintaining the clarity of a single guide? I'm not sure what your internal format for documentation is, but it shouldn't be hard to implement with m4 or cpp on plain text and of course xml offers many possibilities. While I don't have much experience with Gentoo, having just installed it yesterday, I have used Redhat since 1995 and Slackware before that. If you could use some help with the installation guide, let me know if I could be of service.

auctmore · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 11 Location: Lint/Belgium

echo6 · Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2003 Posts: 587

trippoint · n00b Joined: 20 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

Ok... the short questions is. Will a stage 1 tarball work? I'm just going to give up on the easy to use GRP. I do want GNOME also.

Woods · n00b Joined: 11 Dec 2003 Posts: 7

Does anyone have a listing of what the /usr/portage directory structure should actually look like if you use GRP?

Thanks

Woods · n00b Joined: 11 Dec 2003 Posts: 7

echo6,

that command didn't work for me. It put the entire contents of the 'All' directory inside the packages directory Which I don't think is right?

e2ka · n00b Joined: 03 Nov 2002 Posts: 56

I just ran into this problem today, really, someone should change the documentation. It's a 3-byte change, come on...

Also, emerge -K gnome did not work because sys-apps/e2fsprogs requirements could not be satisfied.

It may be because I did an emerge sync earlier in the install?

In the documentation, there are instructions to use emerge sync before the point where you should move packages to your system, but the warning about using emerge sync and breaking dependencies is not until the late part of the documentation. I believe most people step through the documentation and perform the install simutainously, instead of reading all the documentation then installing - therefore warnings need to be placed early, before the steps to which they pertain occur.

IMO gentoo should have another install option - a completely automated one. This would make gentoo more appealing to the workplace and better to show off to newbies how great it is with. Also IMO, gentoo is a great system because of how easy it is to upgrade your software, but it really is the worst to install. I want to install once and then never, ever do it again

(but things happen)

- e2ka

nachiketa · n00b Joined: 19 Dec 2003 Posts: 74 Location: earth

this ones for you bro. it was just a wee lil bit early back then. everything falls in place now

https://forums.gentoo.org/search.php?search_author=nachiketa
_________________
Stop Thinking
Start Forgetting!

ArloWhite · n00b Joined: 23 May 2003 Posts: 53

I was hoping to use the GRP to get gentoo installed quicker. However, I do have an internet connection, so I updated portage. There ended up being new versions of gcc, glibc, and xfree. Basically all the packages I was hoping to get away without compiling needed to be re-compiled. I know I could probably inject them or find a work around, but I just let it do its thing.

It would be better if portage was smarter in such a way as to not recompile the newest large packages for minor revision changes. Xfree wants to recompile because of a move from r2 to r3.

Just wanted to give my 2 cents about this.

-Arlo

Sven Vermeulen

Zaffod · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 1

I can install Gentoo with the GRP Install, in a sense. That is, if you count installing Gentoo so that their is no GUI, and none of my computer's peripherals are detected, up to and including my monitor. Basically, everything goes fine, I reboot just fine, Try booting in the new Gentoo installation, and bamf! No GUI. No worries, I just try 'startx' and well, the first time, it didn't even do anything, the other times; I got an error message telling me that my monitor couldn't be detected. Bah, I might as well just go all the way through from Stage 1.

Paul Beta · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 5

gentood · Apprentice Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 157 Location: Sweden

I had the same problem with the gentoo universal x86 livecd 2004. When it comes to choosing the kernel according to the manual: emerge -k gentoo-dev-sources it wants to connect to the net and download. But i have to do a grp install since i use 56k modem..

tried with vanilla-sources also but the same result, but this command works with vanilla-sources: emerge =sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-2.4.24. But the problem i got after this is that it still needed some packages to download from net net after emerging for 5 min..

noob at linux · n00b Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 4

trying to get gentoo installed for two days now. It is my first time on linux, and I am enjoying the building proces.

The problem i run into is the same as an other user did:

aminal · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:45 pm Post subject:

Having same issue basically with the sparc gentoo live GRP install. I have the All directiory filled with all the packages in /usr/portage/packages, I exported the dir, I've used bindist, I"ve used -k , Ive used -K. It's just not happening.

noob at linux · n00b Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 4

for the record i am doing a GRP install too.

I tried everything that has been said here in this topic.

Mozesoft · n00b Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 1

I am using the x86 universal boot cd and the x86 packages cd (both 2004.0), and I cannot emerge the sources properly. I am a n00b at all linux platforms, and I took that into consideration I have tried to do this install 4 times now. Here is what I did and the error it gave me.
emerge gentoo-sources
Calculating dependencies done!
>>> emerge (1 of 2) sys-apps/module-init-tools-0.9.15_pre4 to /
>>> Downloading http://gentoo/oregonstate.edu/distfiles/modutils-2.4.26.tar.bz2
--09:12:51-- http://gentoo/oregonstate.edu/distfiles/modutils-2.4.26.tar.bz2.
=> //usr/portage/distfiles/modutils-2.4.26.tar.bz2
Resolving gentoo.oregonstate.edu failed: Temporary failure in name resolution.
Then it does the same thing with different servers
Then it tells me:
!!! Couldnt download modutils-2.4.26.tar.bz2. Aborting.
This wouldnt be a problem except that I am on a dial-up connection and was trying to do the network-less grp install.
P.s. my system entails:
AMD Athlon T-bird 1000 mhz
ABIT KT7A motherboard (with raid that houses Windows)
512 mb ram
8gb Bigfoot drive for gentoo
nvidia geforce 3 ti200
_________________
Mozesoft, not microsoft

2gen · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Posts: 89

if you have an ltmodem, this can be easily fixed. Just emerge ltmodem wvdial. These will help you to go online when needed. My personal experience tells me that even though it is claimed to be networkless install, you still need an analogue modem for the very minimum. Or you can use the emerge -p packagename to see what is being required, and you go get it from your friends house or office and burn them into cd. Copy what you have in the cd into the /usr/portage/distfiles and you are back into business. That's how i managed to get my pc up with gentoo, slowly but surely, i will have my full featurted gentoo box, one day.

cheers.

ps:ltmodem and wvdial may not be present in either cds, so get them offline and cp them to the same dir. Good luck.

thoughts

I'm new to Gentoo, but not to linux. My system is a P-III 850MHz with 512MB memory. I downloaded two CDs:

install-x86-universal-2004.0.iso
packages-pentium3-2004.0.iso

I booted the first CD, and I was following the install guide (the gigantic one, not the quick reference one). After compiling the kernel, it said "now's a good time to emerge ati-driver-something-or-other," and since I have an ATI card, I did it. It proceeded to build lots of stuff, including X, from source. I let it go for about 3 hours before killing it and starting over.

Then I found the x86 installation quick reference guide. This was TONS easier to use since it wasn't spread across a bazillion pages. This time, I skipped the "now's a good time..." trick.

I got to "code listing 1.13" which says:

...
# reboot
(Send in CD2)
# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
# cp -a /mnt/cdrom/packages/* /usr/portage/packages/
# USE="bindist" emerge -k xfree ...

My CD2 doesn't have a /packages dir. It does have an /All dir, so I used "All" instead of "packages" in the first path in the cp command. Then, I did the USE...emerge command (with only xfree, not gnome and all the rest), and it proceeded to build x FROM SOURCE AGAIN. I don't know whether it downloaded the sources or had them locally somewhere (I have a cable connection so the DL isn't a big issue for me), but it spent just over 2.5 hours building.

So now I have X installed, which is fantastic. But I really don't want to spend the next few days building gnome, kde, moz, OOo, etc, from source, when there are binary packages SITTING ON MY HARD DRIVE for all these apps.

I've skimmed through the rest of this thread, but most of it is over half a year old now. Is the Gentoo install documentation still incorrect, even for the 2004.0 release? Is there a way to install the rest of my system without compiling everything?

Thanks,
Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

enegento · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 8:57 pm Post subject: At least am not alone

After try and try different ways of installing gentoo from binaries, without success, I was tinking on brain damage on my head :wink:

After reading this forum I realize this has been a problem since last year on previous versions. Stage 3 sequence is not clear in manual.

I bought a 2 CD version 2004.0 for athlon XP from gentoo store.

what I can tell is: there is no packages directory on my CD so I could do the
cp -a /mnt/cdrom/packages/All/* /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/packages/All

command or something like that.

Is that an error on the CD release and we will never could do an stage 3 installation?
Will be a fast line to the Internet the answere?

Greetings
_________________
Néstor Gómez

thoughts · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 9:33 pm Post subject:

I should have re-posted here earlier when I figured out a solution that worked for me. As I said before: