On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Samir Faci wrote: > I'm actually trying a slightly different approach that's almost > equivalent to doing a fresh install. > > If I don't bork this up, I'll write a lil wiki on how to do this. > > 1. create a loopback file system. dd if=/dev/zero of=baseimage > bs=1k count=5242880 (5 gig image) > 2. partition the baseimage > 3. do your typical gentoo install on the baseimage file > 4. sync data from baseimage fs, to / omitting /dev /proc /sys /home > making sure this is all backed up > 5. rerun grub to make sure everything is proper > 6. reboot and pray. > > so, if I'm right, that should give me a clean fresh install. I'll > take a backup of my /etc directory and I need to remember to backup > mysql db, but I believe that should work fine. I would do this off a > liveCD if I had physical access to the machine. > > It seems like the cleanest solution. if I run emerge -uDN (etc) > world it just keeps pulling X and other crap I removed, and since 80% > of what's on the machine it unneeded, a fresh start wouldn't hurt. > > if anyone is interested, I'll post an update on how my install went > once it's back up.
It seems to me that you are overlooking some stuff, and what you propose is just way too complex. Packages get pulled in through your world file, USE flags and due to run-time and build time deps. If emerge keeps wanting to pull in something X related, it's because you left someting in one of those three categories that is X-related. Simply find it and handle it. I have several times removed gnome and kde from this machine and it was much faster than a reinstall. 'emerge -pe' and 'equery depgraph' are your friends alan -- Optimists say the glass is half full, Pessimists say the glass is half empty, Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be? Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
