[gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Maxim Wexler]

HI group,

My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.

But now that I'm mobile I have the capability of doing a -uD world
whenever it's required without having to take days of dialup time.

Question is, when's that? I assume with fewer packages, updating is
not as urgent as on a big desktop with lots of HD space and lots of
apps.

Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or spacing
their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?

Maxim

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Keith Dart]

=== On Wed, 09/09, Maxim Wexler wrote: ===
> Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or spacing
> their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?

===

Mine is "at least once a week". But I usually do it every few days on
my desktop. 


-- Keith Dart

-- 
-- --------------------
Keith Dart
<keith@dartworks.biz>
=======================

[gentoo-user] Re: How often -uD world?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-09-10, Maxim Wexler <maxim.wexler@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or
> spacing their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?

I find every week or two to be sufficient.  I've found that if
you wait too long (e.g. no updates for months at a time),
you're much more likely to run into problems with blocks and
conflicts.

-- 
Grant

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Philip Webb]

090909 Maxim Wexler wrote:
> My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
> and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.
> But now that I'm mobile I have the capability of doing a -uD world
> whenever it's required without having to take days of dialup time.
> Question is, when's that? I assume with fewer packages,
> updating is not as urgent as on a big desktop
> with lots of HD space and lots of apps.

I recently successfully updated my stand-by desktop machine after 10 months.
I never do 'emerge world' without the '-p' flag,
but 'emerge -Dup world' shows an ordered list of what needs doing
& you can work thro' the list 1 lineful of pkgs at a time.
I update my working machine once/week ('eix-sync' & 'emerge -Dup world').

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Donnerstag 10 September 2009, Maxim Wexler wrote:
> HI group,
> 
> My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
> and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.
> 
> But now that I'm mobile I have the capability of doing a -uD world
> whenever it's required without having to take days of dialup time.
> 
> Question is, when's that? I assume with fewer packages, updating is
> not as urgent as on a big desktop with lots of HD space and lots of
> apps.
> 
> Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or spacing
> their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?
> 
> Maxim
> 

I do 'it' every morning. I am still tired, eix-sync, when I come back with my 
tea, I see the updates, emerge -auvD world, ready when the sugar is in the 
tea. Checking the list. Drinking some of the tea and contemplating the 
updates, then 'y'. when I am ready to rock, the updates are done.
...

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:58:37 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:

> I do 'it' every morning. I am still tired, eix-sync, when I come back
> with my tea, I see the updates, emerge -auvD world, ready when the
> sugar is in the tea. Checking the list. Drinking some of the tea and
> contemplating the updates, then 'y'. when I am ready to rock, the
> updates are done.

Don't you have cron installed on your box? ;-)

I have a cron task run emerge --sync then mail me the output from
emerge -upvD  --reinstall changed-use @world
then it runs
emerge -ufD  --reinstall changed-use @world
to download the distfiles.

I still can't do anything useful before a cup of tea though...

With a slower machine, I'd say frequent updates are more important,
because of the time it would take to work through two weeks' worth of
updates in i one go.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

If you can't be kind, be vague.

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Donnerstag 10 September 2009, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:58:37 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> > I do 'it' every morning. I am still tired, eix-sync, when I come back
> > with my tea, I see the updates, emerge -auvD world, ready when the
> > sugar is in the tea. Checking the list. Drinking some of the tea and
> > contemplating the updates, then 'y'. when I am ready to rock, the
> > updates are done.
> 
> Don't you have cron installed on your box? ;-)

I don't have the box running all the time ;)

also being able to su - and type eix-sync is a first test if my brain has 
already woke up. 

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 10 September 2009 09:58:37 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> On Donnerstag 10 September 2009, Maxim Wexler wrote:
> > HI group,
> >
> > My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
> > and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.
> >
> > But now that I'm mobile I have the capability of doing a -uD world
> > whenever it's required without having to take days of dialup time.
> >
> > Question is, when's that? I assume with fewer packages, updating is
> > not as urgent as on a big desktop with lots of HD space and lots of
> > apps.
> >
> > Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or spacing
> > their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?
> >
> > Maxim
> 
> I do 'it' every morning. I am still tired, eix-sync, when I come back with
>  my tea, I see the updates, emerge -auvD world, ready when the sugar is in
>  the tea. Checking the list. Drinking some of the tea and contemplating the
>  updates, then 'y'. when I am ready to rock, the updates are done.

Same here, except in my case:

s/tea/triple espresso/g

But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine itself:

1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
2. It's sloooooow

Maybe wait for Neil Bothwick to show up and ask him for the gory details - he 
seems to have gotten it down pat on his Eee.

I know for myself, I made the conscious decision for Gentoo on my desktop and 
notebook but the Aspire One runs Ubuntu Remix for this very reason.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Mark Stapper]

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Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Thursday 10 September 2009 09:58:37 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>   
>> On Donnerstag 10 September 2009, Maxim Wexler wrote:
>>     
>>> HI group,
>>>
>>> My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
>>> and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.
>>>
>>> But now that I'm mobile I have the capability of doing a -uD world
>>> whenever it's required without having to take days of dialup time.
>>>
>>> Question is, when's that? I assume with fewer packages, updating is
>>> not as urgent as on a big desktop with lots of HD space and lots of
>>> apps.
>>>
>>> Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or spacing
>>> their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?
>>>
>>> Maxim
>>>       
>> I do 'it' every morning. I am still tired, eix-sync, when I come back with
>>  my tea, I see the updates, emerge -auvD world, ready when the sugar is in
>>  the tea. Checking the list. Drinking some of the tea and contemplating the
>>  updates, then 'y'. when I am ready to rock, the updates are done.
>>     
>
> Same here, except in my case:
>
> s/tea/triple espresso/g
>
> But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine itself:
>
> 1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
> 2. It's sloooooow
>
> Maybe wait for Neil Bothwick to show up and ask him for the gory details - he 
> seems to have gotten it down pat on his Eee.
>
> I know for myself, I made the conscious decision for Gentoo on my desktop and 
> notebook but the Aspire One runs Ubuntu Remix for this very reason.
>
>   
Two notes:
1. Don't compile of of you SSD! You can use external storage, like a USB
HDD or nfs share to build (put your portage_tmpdir and /usr/portage on)
2. Don't change a winning team! If your kernel run's smoothly with no
weird glutches in drivers, leave it be. Only update if you want new
features.
Just my 2p's worth
Greetz,
Mark


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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Maxim Wexler]

> 2. Don't change a winning team! If your kernel run's smoothly with no
> weird glutches in drivers, leave it be. Only update if you want new
> features.
> Just my 2p's worth
> Greetz,
> Mark

Works for my desktop. I haven't updated it for years. Just poked along
fixing this and that; if something stops working and I can't fix it, I
just install something else.

LOL here's the bottom line for -puvDN world on my desktop

<...>
Total: 447 packages (303 upgrades, 4 downgrades, 104 new, 3 in new
slots, 33 reinstalls, 11 uninstalls), Size of downloads: 1,062,289 kB
Conflict: 27 blocks (15 unsatisfied)
<...>

Not going to happen.

mw

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:30:04 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine itself:
> 
> 1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles

I have $PORTAGE_TMPDIR on the SD card, which is cheap enough to replace
if too many OOo compiles toast it.

> 2. It's sloooooow

I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly some compiles completed. Not as
fast as my desktop of course, but faster than  was expecting, although 14
hours for OOo required a certain amount of patience.

> Maybe wait for Neil Bothwick to show up and ask him for the gory
> details - he seems to have gotten it down pat on his Eee.

As mentioned yesterday, I now do all emerges in a chroot on my desktop to
build binary packages, then emerge -k on the Eee, so Ooo only takes 90
minutes now. The only compiling I do on the Eee is kernel changes.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

PC DOS Error #01: Windows loading, come back tomorrow

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Rohit]

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>
> > But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine itself:
>
The best solution i've found so far (where RAM wasn't an issue) was to use
"temerge" and 1600M RAM dedicated to it.
netbook may not have that much memory free.
Sorry if this was completely useless.

Rohit

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Maxim Wexler]

> I have $PORTAGE_TMPDIR on the SD card, which is cheap enough to replace
> if too many OOo compiles toast it.

And I took your advice

>> 2. It's sloooooow
>
> I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly some compiles completed. Not as
> fast as my desktop of course, but faster than  was expecting, although 14
> hours for OOo required a certain amount of patience.

My speeds vary, Sometimes it seems quicker than at other times. Most
noticeably when I log in; sometimes it takes ~10 secs for the prompt
to show, sometimes it's instantaneous

>
>> Maybe wait for Neil Bothwick to show up and ask him for the gory
>> details - he seems to have gotten it down pat on his Eee.
>
> As mentioned yesterday, I now do all emerges in a chroot on my desktop to
> build binary packages, then emerge -k on the Eee, so Ooo only takes 90
> minutes now. The only compiling I do on the Eee is kernel changes.

Negatory. My dialup is attenuated by 8 miles of analog telephone line.
When I'm mobile it's a different story.

mw

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Dale]

Maxim Wexler wrote:
>
>
> Negatory. My dialup is attenuated by 8 miles of analog telephone line.
> When I'm mobile it's a different story.
>
> mw
>
>
>   

I was on a really crappy dial-up until recently.  You have my deepest
sympathies.  Dial-up, of any kind, truly sucks.  :-@

Funny thing is, our old phone lines were about that far too.  Most of
the time I got about 3KB/s of throughput.  I hope yours is better than that.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Maxim Wexler]

> Funny thing is, our old phone lines were about that far too.  Most of
> the time I got about 3KB/s of throughput.  I hope yours is better than that.
>
That's about the top speed here.

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Maxim Wexler]

> As mentioned yesterday, I now do all emerges in a chroot on my desktop to
> build binary packages, then emerge -k on the Eee, so Ooo only takes 90
> minutes now. The only compiling I do on the Eee is kernel changes.
>

This suggests using the fetchonly switch, write the files to USB key
while mobile and compile them later on the desktop. But when I do

% emerge -pfuvND world

I just get page after page of the mirrors list from make.conf.

Is there a way to tell portage to ignore the Rs and collect only the
Us, Ns and NSs?

mw

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 11 September 2009 22:32:00 Maxim Wexler wrote:
> > As mentioned yesterday, I now do all emerges in a chroot on my desktop to
> > build binary packages, then emerge -k on the Eee, so Ooo only takes 90
> > minutes now. The only compiling I do on the Eee is kernel changes.
> 
> This suggests using the fetchonly switch, write the files to USB key
> while mobile and compile them later on the desktop. But when I do
> 
> % emerge -pfuvND world
> 
> I just get page after page of the mirrors list from make.conf.
> 
> Is there a way to tell portage to ignore the Rs and collect only the
> Us, Ns and NSs?

emerge will want to fetch everything you will need that is not in your 
distfiles. What else do you expect it to do?

You can keep a local copy of distfiles on a USB stick and insert it when you 
want to fetch; this will help avoid duplicate downloads. But you are asking 
for something that is way out of the province of portage.

If you really wanted to, you could parse the output of emerge -pv, grep just 
the Us and Ns, then re-run emerge -pvf for those packages, cat and sort -u the 
whole lot and finally redirect it to a file that you can redirect back into 
wget.

I used to do this. Trust me, it's more trouble than it's worth. A 4G memory 
card just for distfiles will solve the problem nicely.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Dale]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
> I used to do this. Trust me, it's more trouble than it's worth. A 4G memory 
> card just for distfiles will solve the problem nicely.
>
>   

This includes the tree, distfiles and all the buildpkges on a fully
loaded KDE desktop.

root@smoker / # du -shc /usr/portage/
4.4G    /usr/portage/
4.4G    total
root@smoker / #

May have to boot out the buildpkg part but it should fit.

Dale

:-)  :-)

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:32:00 -0600, Maxim Wexler wrote:

> This suggests using the fetchonly switch, write the files to USB key
> while mobile and compile them later on the desktop. But when I do
> 
> % emerge -pfuvND world
> 
> I just get page after page of the mirrors list from make.conf.

That's because you included -p, so it just tells you all the URLs of the
files you need to download.

> Is there a way to tell portage to ignore the Rs and collect only the
> Us, Ns and NSs?

Yes, don't delete the tarballs from $DISTDIR after installation.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Quality control, n.:
  Assuring that the quality of a product does not get out of hand
   and add to the cost of its manufacture or design.

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Maxim Wexler]

> As mentioned yesterday, I now do all emerges in a chroot on my desktop to
> build binary packages, then emerge -k on the Eee, so Ooo only takes 90
> minutes now. The only compiling I do on the Eee is kernel changes.

I've decided to give your method a whirl. Are you talking about distcc
here? That would require a gcc upgrade on the desktop to match the
Eee's, no?

Can you cite a howto or tutorial for your method? Or, perhaps flesh it
out with a few more details.

Maxim

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:54:57 -0600, Maxim Wexler wrote:

> > As mentioned yesterday, I now do all emerges in a chroot on my
> > desktop to build binary packages, then emerge -k on the Eee, so Ooo
> > only takes 90 minutes now. The only compiling I do on the Eee is
> > kernel changes.  
> 
> I've decided to give your method a whirl. Are you talking about distcc
> here? That would require a gcc upgrade on the desktop to match the
> Eee's, no?
> 
> Can you cite a howto or tutorial for your method? Or, perhaps flesh it
> out with a few more details.

I did in another post, probably the "mentioned yesterday" one. I'm not
talking about distcc, although it does use that also. I have a copy of my
Eee in a directory on my desktop that I chroot into in the same way that
you do for installation. FEATURES includes buildpkg and $PKGDIR is an
NFS share accessed by bother. Then I just do emerge -u @world in the
chroot followed by emerge -uK @world on the Eee.

There's a little more to it than that, I also sync /etc/portage
and /var/lib/world* from the Eee to the chroot in the script that starts
up the chroot.

----------
#!/bin/sh

rsync -a --delete krikkit:/etc/portage/ /mnt/eee/etc/portage/
rsync -a --delete krikkit:/var/lib/portage/world\* /mnt/eee/var/lib/portage/

mount -t proc none /mnt/eee/proc
mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/eee/dev
mount --bind /usr/portage /mnt/eee/usr/portage
mount --bind /mnt/portage /mnt/eee/mnt/portage
mount --bind /var/tmp/eee /mnt/eee/var/tmp

sudo su - -c "chroot /mnt/eee /bin/zsh"

sudo umount /mnt/eee/dev
sudo umount /mnt/eee/proc
sudo umount /mnt/eee/usr/portage
sudo umount /mnt/eee/mnt/portage
sudo umount /mnt/eee/var/tmp
----------

/mnt/portage is the NFS share containing $DISTDIR and $PKGDIR.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Feature : BUG with seniority.

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:07:26 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:

> sudo su - -c "chroot /mnt/eee /bin/zsh"

That sudo shouldn't be there, the script used to use sudo for the
commands, but now I just run it as root.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

It is easier to fix Unix than to live with NT.

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[gentoo-user] Re: How often -uD world?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-09-10, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine itself:
>
> 1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
> 2. It's sloooooow

One cringes at the thought of updating xulrunner or OOo on a
netbook.  Presumably one would use binary packages for packages
like those.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! NANCY!!  Why is
                                  at               everything RED?!
                               visi.com            

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:37:40 +0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:

> One cringes at the thought of updating xulrunner or OOo on a
> netbook.  Presumably one would use binary packages for packages
> like those.

Or just leave the emerge running overnight, it worked for me.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

640K should be enough for anyone. -Bill Gates

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[gentoo-user] Re: How often -uD world?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-09-10, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:37:40 +0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> One cringes at the thought of updating xulrunner or OOo on a
>> netbook.  Presumably one would use binary packages for packages
>> like those.
>
> Or just leave the emerge running overnight, it worked for me.

The reported 14 hours for OOo isn't as bad as I thought it
might be.  I used Gentoo for many years on a machine that took
more than 24hrs to build OOo.  You did learn to plan updates of
the big packages.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! Bo Derek ruined
                                  at               my life!
                               visi.com            

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How often -uD world?

[Albert Hopkins]

On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 14:56 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> The reported 14 hours for OOo isn't as bad as I thought it
> might be.  I used Gentoo for many years on a machine that took
> more than 24hrs to build OOo.  You did learn to plan updates of
> the big packages.

Oh, I remember those days... and installing Gentoo from stage1 to a
decent desktop took about 3 days.

I miss those days :)

-a

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Stroller]

On 10 Sep 2009, at 09:30, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> ...
> But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine  
> itself:
>
> 1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
> ...

No harm in compiling on a hard-drive, via NFs or otherwise. I believe  
read speed of SSDs is fast, writes are slow.

However, I am sceptical of wear claims, at least of you're using ½- 
decent flash memory (and SanDisk & Kingston are cheap these days, at  
least in "modest" but usable sizes like 4gig).

I have read many people talk about wear of flash memory to be a  
problem, but I don't think from anyone who's actually HAD a problem  
with it. I have read of many people using it happily for root  
filesystems over periods of years.

I concede that syncing the portage tree & the compilation of emerging  
packages results in an above-average number of writes, but I have this  
notion that the wear / limited writes problems have been largely  
overcome with modern flash memory (c.f. "write levelling").  
Furthermore I have heard figures bandied about in the order of  
100,000s per block and such as "you'd need to write to the flash card  
constantly for years" in order to kill it.

I would really love to hear empirical evidence either way on this  
matter, but I don't think the OP needs to be too cautious of wear. (Of  
course this  advice is worth what he paid for it, and warrantied to  
that value).

Some previous comments:
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/msg_d6e65b4d64a51c97f7c43c723e525e06.xml

Stroller.

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:54:34 +0100, Stroller wrote:

> I have read many people talk about wear of flash memory to be a  
> problem, but I don't think from anyone who's actually HAD a problem  
> with it. I have read of many people using it happily for root  
> filesystems over periods of years.

Some years ago, I had a Crucial flash drive die in a couple of months
when the kernel's FAT implementation was updating the FAT on every block
write. So it got rather hammered when writing ISO images to it.

However, SSDs are not the same as SD cards in that they have wear
levelling, so this is far less of an issue. Plus the write wear of drives
has improved over the years.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Committee (noun): A life form with six or more legs and no brain.

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Dwayne Sykes]

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On Thursday 10 September 2009 6:54:34 pm Stroller wrote:
> On 10 Sep 2009, at 09:30, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > ...
> > But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine
> > itself:
> >
> > 1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
> > ...
> 
> No harm in compiling on a hard-drive, via NFs or otherwise. I believe
> read speed of SSDs is fast, writes are slow.
> 
> However, I am sceptical of wear claims, at least of you're using ½-
> decent flash memory (and SanDisk & Kingston are cheap these days, at
> least in "modest" but usable sizes like 4gig).
> 
> I have read many people talk about wear of flash memory to be a
> problem, but I don't think from anyone who's actually HAD a problem
> with it. I have read of many people using it happily for root
> filesystems over periods of years.
> 
> I concede that syncing the portage tree & the compilation of emerging
> packages results in an above-average number of writes, but I have this
> notion that the wear / limited writes problems have been largely
> overcome with modern flash memory (c.f. "write levelling").
> Furthermore I have heard figures bandied about in the order of
> 100,000s per block and such as "you'd need to write to the flash card
> constantly for years" in order to kill it.
> 
> I would really love to hear empirical evidence either way on this
> matter, but I don't think the OP needs to be too cautious of wear. (Of
> course this  advice is worth what he paid for it, and warrantied to
> that value).
> 
> Some previous comments:
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/msg_d6e65b4d64a51c97f7c43c723e525e06
> .xml
> 
> Stroller.
> 

I would think that as long as you back up personal and important files you 
could do it as often as needed to maintsin security and stability.  You may 
want to use --pretend (-p) to see exactly what would be done and also use 
regular updates instead of deep updates which should only be used when needed.

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Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[Willie Wong]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 07:52:40PM -0600, Penguin Lover Maxim Wexler squawked:
> My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
> and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.

You are a brave, brave man. 

With 4+8G, how much non-system space do you have left after installing
gentoo? If bandwidth is cheap, I suppose you can just remove all
distfiles after installing. 

W
-- 
Goddamnit! I missed!
(On the unfortunate non-intersection of the X, Y and Z axis)
Sortir en Pantoufles: up 1007 days,  8:31

Re: [gentoo-user] How often -uD world?

[James Ausmus]

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On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Maxim Wexler <maxim.wexler@gmail.com> wrote:

> HI group,
>
> My netbook has only (4+8)G of sketchy SSD + SDHC RAM for everything
> and I am determined not to emerge anything I don't really need.
>
> But now that I'm mobile I have the capability of doing a -uD world
> whenever it's required without having to take days of dialup time.
>
> Question is, when's that? I assume with fewer packages, updating is
> not as urgent as on a big desktop with lots of HD space and lots of
> apps.
>
> Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb when it comes to timing or spacing
> their updates that members use to keep gentoo happy?
>


For my wife's EeePC-901 (4GD SSD, and that's it...), I do all my compiling
on a chroot on my desktop box, with things like /var/tmp, /usr/portage, and
other non-critical-for-system-use-but-critical-for-portage-to-run
directories bind-mounted to alternative locations outside the chroot on my
desktop HDD - I then exit the chroot, unmount everything from under the
chroot, then copy the image over to a 4GB SD card, then ultimately (after
booting/running the SD card for a week or so to make sure it's all working
smoothly) copy the SD card image over to the internal SSD. The resultant
image with KDE 4.2.x, Firefox, Openoffice 3.x, and all the pieces you could
really want, is about 2GB.

As far as updating, I wait until there is a very compelling reason to
upgrade (just started rebuilding the chroot with KDE 4.3.1, and kernel
2.6.31), then I repeat the process. I encourage my wife to keep her data on
an SD card instead of the internal SSD (which is fairly easy, since the
internal SSD on those things are slower than molasses), and any misc
data/prefs files that she cares about are easy to copy over.

If I had to do everything on the netbook, with no assistance from my
desktop, I would definitely nfs-mount /var/tmp, and probably /usr/portage,
to keep SSD space usage down, and unnecessary write wear (100,000 iterations
can happen awfully quickly, if you're dealing with a lot of small files,
such as c files, .o files, and .h files...).


Anyway, my $0.02...

-James


> Maxim
>
>

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