Gentoo Notes | bitpost.com/news

Backing up an entire linux system

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!

Comments | Wednesday, September 30, 2009

More gentoo maintenance work

Add [app-admin/eselect-boost] to package.keywords.

emerge --unmerge alsa-utils
emerge alsa-utils
python-updater
emerge -Davu world

Comments | Saturday, August 29, 2009

MythTV getting stable

The MythTV developers are stabilizing the svn trunk at the moment. I’m building it regularly. In gentoo, do this:

sudo emerge -Davu libcdaudio

Comments | Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Gentoo fubar’s KDE 3.5

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.

Comments | Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Tricksy little fluxbox

Latest bump of fluxbox changed the default location of the keys file from [~/.fluxbox/keys] to somewhere in [/usr]. Kinda frustrating when your window manager stops responding to your shortcuts! Just update the [session.keyFile] entry in [~/.fluxbox/init] to the old location. aifol.