Simultaneously bumping server, desktop, media center, laptop to kernel 3.10.7 et al… (continued…)

I have used adhoc scripts that do nightly backups of my important files. I zip up critical directories into huge tarballs – not too pretty but gets the job done.
I wanted to back up an entire linux system so it could be easily recreated, and decided it was time to get a little more sophisticated. Enter [rdiff-backup]. I’m emerging it now, but it’s requiring several updates. For one, it’s new kernel time, and there are a few new options to choose when using [make oldconfig]. I went with defaults, as usual, for every option that provided one. I had to pick these though:

Kernel compression mode: 1. Gzip
RCU Subsystem: 1. Classic RCU

Then I had to add FUSE to the kernel and emerge [ntfs-3g], so I could mount my external drive and back up to it.

[make menuconfig]: File systems->[x] FUSE (and rebuild and install kernel of course)
emerge -Davu sys-fs/fuse ntfs-3g

Then I emerged rdiff-backup, and ran the following:

rdiff-backup --exclude-other-filesystems --exclude-special-files -v5 --exclude /home/me/backup / /mnt/external_drive/backup/machinename

And away we go!

For some reason, at the end of its life, gentoo devs decided to change the way KDE 3.5 is handled in portage. I had to hand-pick and unmerge a ton of KDE packages, then reinstall a different new “meta” package. I know there are lots of challenges in keeping up with all the linux userspace chaos, but I wish gentoo devs leaned just a LITTLE more towards a seemless end user experience. But that would not be gentoo then! Compile and learn. :>

emerge --unmerge -av kdegraphics kdebase kdelibs kdepim
emerge --unmerge poppler poppler-bindings
emerge --unmerge -av kde:3.5
emerge -av kde-meta:3.5

240 packages later… let’s try a full emerge… had to do more cleanup…

emerge -av --unmerge app-cdr/k3b perl-Compress-Zlib perl-IO-Compress-Base IO-Compress-Zlib perl-IO-Compress-Zlib Compress-Zlib IO-Compress-Base
emerge -DavuN world

129 packages later, and I couldn’t resist, I had to push my luck with an [emerge –depclean]. A few minutes later, and a couple hundred packages lighter, I tried to re-add doxygen, which went away during the depclean. But gcc was apparently borked when an older version was removed. Fix it with this tool:

gcc-config -l
gcc-config 1 # pick a number from the list

Yay gentoo! Full steam ahead.

This time the nightly machine [tdm2] got taken out on reboot. Trying to fix:

  • X would not start – “bad freetype, type1 and i810 modules”. ignoring the first two errors, I changed “i810” to “intel” in xorg.conf.
  • X now starts, but no keyboard or mouse, rrr…
  • hald was in the default run level, but dbus was not. hald is supposed to start dbus as a dependency. dbus was running. Just in case, I added dbus to default run level.
  • there were no VIDEO_CARDS or INPUT_DEVICES defined in make.conf. Added “intel” video card, and “evdev keyboard mouse” input devices.
  • Rebuilding xorg-server following those changes… [emerge -DavuN xorg-server] pulled in about 4 packages. I really doubt I’m out of the woods yet…
  • The portage log for xorg-server says to rebuild deps. Get them via [qlist -I -C x11-drivers/]. I rebuilt keyboard, mouse, evdev, still no luck…
  • Started slogging through the gentoo xorg 1.5 upgrade guide. Looks like I need a kernel tweak! Mother-son-of-a-seacook… Adding [Device Drivers->Input device support->[*] Event interface], rebooting… and there is light.

New media dependencies have apparently been placed under gst-plugins-meta, which needs to be emerged to pull in packages on which mythtv depends. Add this to package.use:

# MDM mythtv is not finding libFLAC.so.7, looks like I need these now... [flac] [mythtv]
media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta X a52 alsa dvd esd mad mpeg ogg vorbis xv ffmpeg flac mythtv