Hmm, that's really bad: Even the GCC toolchain, or your Portage/Python installation - or both! - are too old to work currently with your system.sonix wrote:I tried to do emerge --ask --update --deep --newuse world and when it got to compiling glibc 2.4, i got the error These critical programs are missing or too old: gcc and it got kicked out of the emerge.
emerge --ask --update --deep --newuse portage linux-headers glibc gcc binutils results in the same problem. not sure how to work around this.
If only one of GCC/toolchain or Portage/Python is hopelessly outdated, there are still chances to bring back things to normal by emerging the other component group first.
Which means in your case: Can you at least re-emerge/update sys-apps/portage?
If that won't be possible, more desperate measures are required...
My guide has been written for the casual case where systems are updated regularly, i. e. at least once each couple of months: At least for reasons of security updates.
If a system is running in a shielded secure or totally offline environment, this assumption can of course be false then. In such scenarios it's perfectly ok to let installations run as long as they are able to do their jobs, without ever updating.
Another case is installations which have been shut down for a very long time, because there is no obligation to regularly update a down system of course.
So, what to do in such cases?
In a nutshell, those "desperate measures" are: Download a current version of a current Gentoo Live-CD and attempt to fix things with it.
That is, boot from the live-cd and update at least "system" using the live-cd's Portage/GCC toolchain.
This can be done pretty much in the same way as you installed the first optional packages of your system when following the official Gentoo installation handbook. (Of course you should skip all steps which format or set up the disk partitions and take care not to accidentally overwrite your manually-tuned configuration files.)
If you are lucky, you can reboot then and your system will again be able to do emerges by itself; then you can follow my guide again to update the rest of "world".
If you are not so lucky, then it might be necessary updating everything when being booted off the live-cd, which is essentially a full stage 2 reinstall.
Badpenguin has written a guide for those worst-case scenarios (you can find the link in my guide), and it can always be used as a last resort.




