blog.arithm » Gentoo

Must remember: dispatch-conf

nurikabe — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:35:06 +0000

Instead of etc-update. So. Much. Easier.

Why can’t Gentoo come up with easy-to-remember command names. Like “updateallthedamnconffiles -anddontaskanystupidquestions“.

I’m going to spend the morning aliasing.

Gentoo’s sshd sometimes won’t restart after upgrade…

nurikabe — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:27:50 +0000

It can be a little alarming to see “!!” in response to attempts to restart sshd. This has been a problem on Gentoo for some time and seems to occur whenever sshd is upgraded.

To make sshd happy again, killall and restart:

# killall sshd && /etc/init.d/sshd zap start

Don’t forget to chain these commands, otherwise good luck getting back in.

Why does emerge suddenly want to rebuild all your packages?

nurikabe — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:40:40 +0000

Because the default Portage behavior has changed.

Old: $ emerge world
New: $ emerge -u world

New Portage thinks that a simple “emerge world” means you want to reinstall everything.

Shame on you for not zealously reading and memorizing everything that Portage has to tell you. Bad Admin. Bad.

Why I love Gentoo

nurikabe — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:08:13 +0000

After doing an emerge world on an older box I get:

* Messages for package sys-libs/com_err-1.40.4:

* PLEASE PLEASE take note of this * Please make *sure* to run revdep-rebuild now * Certain things on your system may have linked against a * different version of com_err -- those things need to be * recompiled. Sorry for the inconvenience

In other words, “This update is going to break your system. ~~We kind of screwed up.~~ Something changed. Here’s how to fix it.”

So now I don’t have to google around frantically trying to figure out why randomserviced is suddenly failing. And the Gentoo guys even apologize.

Honesty, transparency, and humility in software. Go figure.

Portage Logging

nurikabe — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:19:34 +0000

Something else I should have known about long ago. To turn on logging in portage, simply add the following to /etc/make.conf:

PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log" PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"

The will add log files for each package to /var/log/portage/elog/:
# ls -lah total 108K drwxrws--- 2 portage portage 4.0K 2008-06-06 01:13 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K 2007-10-04 12:29 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root portage 200 2008-06-06 00:58 dev-db:postgresql-8.0.15:20080605-155810.log -rw-rw-r-- 1 root portage 72K 2008-06-06 00:44 summary.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root portage 67 2008-06-06 01:06 sys-apps:coreutils-6.10-r2:20080605-160624.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root portage 108 2008-06-06 01:08 sys-apps:shadow-4.0.18.2:20080605-160842.log

Useful to have around when you miss a barrage of announcements after a large emerge.

Fix the mktemp / coreutils block in Gentoo

nurikabe — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:47:42 +0000

Looks like mktemp is now provided by coreutils. No wonder. This block has been bugging me (read: I’ve been ignoring it) for months.

To fix just unmerge mktemp and update coreutils.

Update: Same for the setarch / util-linux block should you come across it. Unmerge setarch.

Manually fetching files in Gentoo

nurikabe — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:36:10 +0000

Here’s something I’d never had to do before. Be careful as this kind of tip will only popup for you once on the first emerge.

# emerge dev-php5/ZendOptimizer
>>> cfg-update-1.8.2-r1: Creating checksum index...
Calculating dependencies... done!
>>> Verifying ebuild Manifests... 

>>> Emerging (1 of 1) dev-php5/ZendOptimizer-3.3.0a to / 

!!! dev-php5/ZendOptimizer-3.3.0a has fetch restriction turned on.
!!! This probably means that this ebuild's files must be downloaded
!!! manually.  See the comments in the ebuild for more information. 

 *
 * Please download ZendOptimizer-3.3.0a-linux-glibc23-x86_64 from:
 * http://www.zend.com/products/zend_optimizer
 * and put it into /usr/portage/distfiles/.
 * Please note that you need a valid Zend Account
 * (free) to download the Zend Optimizer!

Manually pushing the archive into distfiles and running emerge worked fine. For a moment I was concerned that I might actually have to build something from source. Whew!

Gentoo Compiler Caching

nurikabe — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:49:40 +0000

I really should learn to be more patient and read the docs. Today I stumbled across Gentoo compiler caching. From the About ccache section:

ccache is a fast compiler cache. When you compile a program, it will cache intermediate results so that, whenever you recompile the same program, the compilation time is greatly reduced. In common compilations this can result in 5 to 10 times faster compilation times.

Sheesh. How much time have I wasted sitting around drooling on myself waiting for portage to build package XYZ?

In addition to learning to read the docs I should also probably learn to stop drooling on myself.

Simple command line check for installed Perl modules

nurikabe — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:13:01 +0000

This is quite convenient and is accurate (unlike the g-cpan list command..):

perl -e 'use ; print "ok\n"'

Can you tell that I’m fighting with CPAN modules and Gentoo?

mod_perl on Gentoo

nurikabe — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:54:58 +0000

mod_perl doesn’t play so nice with Gentoo. Perl and, specifically, g-cpan still seem to have problems.

I’ve been scratching my head (read: driving my head into my desk) over the following error:
Can't locate lib.pm in @INC (@INC contains: blah blah blah) at /etc/apache2/modules.d/apache2-mod_perl-startup.pl line 1.\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /etc/apache2/modules.d/apache2-mod_perl-startup.pl line 1.\nCompilation failed in require at (eval 2) line 1.\n

Thanks to an obscure post at the bottom of a thread from a couple of years back I was able to fix it with
# perl-cleaner reallyall # emerge libperl

perl-cleaner appears to be like revdep-rebuild, but Larry Wall style.

Now I can run Apache::ASP.

Thank you crazy Larry Wall people.