Hi, Alan, On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 09:27:15AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Friday 12 February 2010 21:55:29 Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > 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. Thanks! In the end, I just used the gcc I had on the system anyway; it wasn't broken. I first did 'emerge -e gcc', which took an hour, then did 'emerge -e world', which took ~2 hours 30 mins. I was being a bit paranoid. The reason I "gave up" on the installation CD was I failed to find out how to start my LVM2 voluble logics, or whatever they're called. I'm now back on track, setting up my PC. Thanks! > 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. There was that apocryphal tale of the origianl Unix hacker who hardwired a backdoor login into the system, and hacked cc to _keep_ inserting the backdoor each time the system was built, and to keep this hack in cc each time cc was compiled. Whew! > -- > alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
