On 8/12/06, b.n. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have a couple of questions: - Is it safe to upgrade with a full desktop (Xorg+Xfce+Thunderbird+Firefox...) system running, or will I get everything crashing on me?
If you start things up beforehand and leave them running, this should be safe. Just be sure to follow section 3 of the gcc upgrade guide here: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gcc-upgrading.xml You will only need the sys-libs/libstdc++-v3 package if you have old binary stuff installed. I would actually recommend a slightly modified version of those instructions though: emerge -uv gcc gcc-config ... # or eselect compiler set source /etc/profile emerge --oneshot libtool revdep-rebuild --library=libstdc++.so.5 emerge -C =sys-devel/gcc-3.3* emerge -e world The revdep-rebuild step is a "fast" way of rebuilding all C++ packages. During this phase, you may have some programs fail to start, but once it completes, your system should be fine again. The final emerge -e world is optional....used mostly to get any new optimizations that are available. Of course if there are any problems left over by revdep-rebuild, the emerge -e world should fix them.
- If not, is it safe to upgrade using Knoppix and doing the upgrade in a chroot? are there side effects?
This wouldn't make any difference at all. The risk of the gcc upgrade comes from the upgrading libstdc++.so.5 to libstdc++.so.6, which has an incompatible binary interface. What you really do *not* want is to have some programs that link against both .5 and .6 at the same time. This could happen for example if you rebuild qt, qt will get linked against .6, but kdelibs may still be linked against .5. So when you start a KDE app (which link against both qt and kdelibs), it may crash due to the two incompatible versions of libstdc++. This is why I say some things may fail during the revdep-rebuild step above. So since you would chrooting into your system, and using the compilers and libraries from your system, the knoppix kernel buys you nothing here as far as safety. It should be noted that python links against libstdc++, and since portage relies on a working python, it would be a very good idea to quickpkg python and gcc before beginning. Then should something go catastrophically wrong, you should be able to untar python and/or gcc to get back to a working environment... Good Luck, -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
