[Stage 4] Questions for future experimentations.

[d2_racing]

Hello everyone, I use Gentoo since May 2005, I enjoy a lot my exprience with Gentoo and also I learn a lot in the process.

In a near future, I will tried to install AIGLX and Beryl on my computer.

So, that's why I post.

For now, my Gentoo is perfect, and I want to know if running the Stage 4 script from Blinkeye is enough
,because I use his script once a month, but I never used it for now to restore my configuration.

So, if I mess up my configuration when trying to install Beryl and I restore the Stage 4 from my other partition or my DVD, what to I have to do
except the emerge --sync and to reupdate my Gentoo with the emerge -uDNv world command.

Do I have to reconfigure manually certains files or something else ?

I found a post that say that the /usr/src/linux is mess up after a restore...so we have to recreate the link correctly...so it's not a big deal for me

Also, I found that backup solution too :
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

It use a Gentoo LiveCD and it use partimage...

Does anyone have try is backup solution ?

Does this thing backup the complete partition...
like if I have a 40 Gig partition and I use only 10 gig...will I end up with a 40 gig .bz2 in the process ?

Finally, I read the Gentoo-wiki for AIGLX and Beryl installation, and I found that there is a Gentoo Xeffect project that describe
the AIGLX and Beryl installation also....Which one do I have to use to succesfully install a AIGLX/Beryl with a ATI Radeon 9600 PRO...

I also read the threads forum the english also the French forum...and I am confuse because there a lot of messages

Thank you in advance

[SirYes]

My experience shows that until you have something extraordinary in your system (ACLs, selinux, hardened setup) it's fairly easy to do a stage4 backup of any directory just by using tar:

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# cd directory_to_backup; tar -cvpzf /some_path/archive.tar.gz .

The most important is the "-p" switch for tar, which in effect stores all attributes in the archive. The archive can be later similarly restored (again, with "-p" switch):

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# cd directory_to_restore; tar -xvpzf /some_path/archive.tar.gz

For some speedup you may omit the "-z" switch and change the archive's extension to just .tar instead of .tar.gz. Similarly, for some size reduction of the archive at the cost of speed you can use "-j" switch instead of "-z" and change the archive's extension to .tar.bz2.

A piece of advise: it's perfectly possible to create a backup of your whole Linux partition if you run another system (e.g. LiveCD) and use the above method. However, in Gentoo there is a portage tree (/usr/portage and especially /usr/portage/distfiles) which can grow pretty big after a longer period of using Gentoo - like 5GB or even more. Luckily it can be restored quite quickly if you have fast internet connection. So it's sometimes desirable to skip it altogether while doing a backup. Here the "--exclude" tar option may come handy.
Alternatively, "eclean" program and its "eclean-dist" variant also help with the reduction of number of files that reside in /usr/portage/distfiles. And if you happen to build binary packages or use "quickpkg" to quickly create a temporary copy of installed package, some more cruft can reside in /usr/portage/packages. Now if you know where to look, you should be able to find Your Own Way (tm) of doing your backups as you want.

Some users (including me) even put the portage tree on a separate partition and mount it under /usr/portage by putting additional entry in /etc/fstab. This is also the best method if you have parallel Gentoo installations on the same machine - less space used, and less problems in the long run (less filesystem fragmentation, easier backups, etc.). The same stands for separate /home partition - and this is even better if you have several different Linux distros on one machine (think shared mail and browser settings, files on Desktop, etc.).

Hope this helps

[Headrush]

And in the case of trying beryl it will be hard to mess up your installation.

The installation of beryl resides beside the normal X setup and doesn't replace key system files.
You can switch between using beryl and normal X at will, so it is highly unlikely you'll bugger your system that restoring from a backup would be needed.