On Monday 31 January 2011 19:57:01 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 18:35 on Monday 31 January 2011, Andrei
> Brezan
> 
> did opine thusly:

[snip ...]
> > Is it possible to update this system? If yes please shed some light or
> > point me in the right direction.
> 
> It's certainly possible to update the old machine, but the real question
> is, do you want to go through all that effort?
> 
> You will probably have to deal with multiple situations that follow this
> pattern:
> 
> some package version X needs to be upgraded to version x+2. But there's
> some other package that prevents you doing this immediately as there are
> blockers in place. So you upgrade the other package, then upgrade the
> first one to version X+1. Then do it all again to finally get the first
> package to version X+2
> 
> You also have python-2.4 in there which needs to go to 2.6. Ouch. I have
> horrible visions of running python-updater multiple times....
> 
> Gentoo shares its roots with FreeBSD but running Gentoo daily is always
> more involved than with FreeBSD, especially cases like this. You cannot
> just upgrade from eg Gentoo-5 to Gentoo-6 as these concepts do not exist.
> 
> It is so much easier to just backup your data files and re-install, then
> restore the data. It'll take a few hours, trying to upgrade might take
> days.
> 
> If you want to try, start with "emerge -avuND system", get that to complete
> and take it from there.

Only to reinforce what Alan says.  Sometimes even a month or two is enough to 
cause headaches if cornerstone packages of the toolchain have been updated 
more than once.

Unless you want to undertake this for self-punishment purposes, it will be 
much easier to back up /home /etc and /var/lib/portage/world from the current 
system and reinstall using the last two directories to minimise manual 
configuration of your box.
-- 
Regards,
Mick