Re: [gentoo-user] How should I clean up my broken system?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Friday 12 February 2010 21:55:29 Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hi, Gentoo!
> 
> As reported in other threads, my new PC had a broken RAM stick in it.
> As a result, an unknown proportion of installed binaries are flaky.  One
> non-functioning binary is probably GCC.
> 
> What I'd like to do is reinstall every binary, yet without erasing any
> configuration info, whose creation was so arduous.
> 
> Where does portage keep it's list of installed packages?  What do I have
> to do to persuade portage it has _no_ installed packages before doing
> 'rm -rf *' in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin?
> 
> Has anybody any other tips to offer me for this operation?

First get a working compiler installed. There are many ways, here's what I 
think is the easiest:

Boot into a Gentoo LiveCD, chroot into your install, and emerge -k the gcc 
tarball on the CD.

Reboot into the actual install, synce the portage tree and 

emerge -e world

That will rebuild everything, including gcc. 

The paranoid might want to emerge gcc itself on it's own first so that 
rebuilding world is done with the same gcc version as what it will become (gcc 
is not built first when you rebuild world, all sort of toolchain tools and 
parsers are earlier in the list). Personally, I don't do that - there is an 
actual chance that using an old compiler to build a new compiler may lead to 
incompatibility issues, but the risk is extremely small and rare, and it's 
never bitten me.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com