[wplug] General Gentoo questions (and a bit of emerge wackiness)
Vanco, Donald
VANCOD at PIOS.com
Wed May 28 09:18:52 EDT 2003
Hi all -
I have a few general questions about Gentoo that I'm hoping some of
you can answer. I had hoped that this kind of stuff would be in the docs,
but so far the info there has been kinda lacking.
Please excuse any "Red Hat equivalencies" I might allude to - but
it's what I'm most familiar with these days....
1) Package maintenance
How can I tell exactly what packages are installed on my box at any
given moment? (like an "rpm -qa")
- RH boxen keep a log file of this generated by a cron job -
does Gentoo do similar?
How can I tell if I have broken dependencies or altered packages?
(like an "rpm -Va")
I want to insure that my system is fully updated - am I correct in
thinking the process is:
emerge sync
emerge -u system
emerge -u world
???? or is there a more logical way (yes - I would use the "-p"
option initially to see wassup)
How do I remove a package? (a la "rpm -e")
Is there a "best way" to run emerge? (see my bloat comment below)
2) Change
At some point in my frenzied emergeing my system installed ssmtp as
a dependency (I'm guessing). I now want to upgrade to qmail, so there's a
"Block" from ssmtp against qmail. What's the appropriate course for
resolving these blocks? Do I force a removal of ssmtp?
2) System maintenance
Can someone explain the logging structure? I'm used to a
"var/log/messages" file - and /var/log seems to have a slew of subdirs of
dubious function...
My system (after weeks of building the UberLaptop) is becoming
bloated. Is it safe to nuke the contents of /var/tmp/portage if all packages
in question have installed without issue? Is there a reason that it's still
here? (should I use the "--clean" option with emerge?)
What other steps are in order to keep Gentoo lean-n-mean?
Interesting experience......
When trying to install gphoto2 on my laptop I had initial issues.
Trying to emerge the package got me a 3 beep warning and then a
message that said:
-----------Access Violation Summary---------------
LOG FILE = "/tmp/sandbox/blah/blah/blah"
open_wr: /var/lib/rpm/_db.Name.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
...and the compile exited after doing a slew of "make"s when
"creating test-filesys"
So - I tried to do it manually. I ran the configure with
"--enable-docs --with-drivers=all and --disable-SERIAL (and -serial)"
The config seemed to run fine.
make seemed to run fine.
make install resulted in a stop that initially looked like it was
related to serial support. My system has no serial port, hence my attempts
to disable serial - which were seemingly ignored.
At this point I started to compose a "Help!" email - but since I
wanted to get preview support for gphoto I went ahead and emerged aalib.
Re-running the make install at this point completed without error.
Weird.
Don
More information about the wplug
mailing list