20 Mar
2018
20 Mar
'18
1:22 a.m.
On Monday 19 March 2018 16:44:34 E. Liddell wrote:
On Sun, 18 Mar 2018 06:09:53 -0700
William Morder <doctor_contendo(a)zoho.com> wrote:
If I can ever find a publisher to give me enough money to live in the regal
style that deserve (and if I should live long enough to complete the Great
Work, and if they are still actually publishing books written by human beings
at that time), then maybe I can afford my very only reliable Internet
connection, and I would be glad to try out Gentoo.
Gentoo is only vaguely on my radar, but I do like to try out new things. One
reason I usually create a root partition of 30 gb or so is that I like to
download and try out lots of new stuff; but then I also get rid of whatever
isn't really useful, or which only duplicates the functions of another
program.
When I have a reliable Internet connection, this isn't a problem; but right
now I don't own my connection (and the wifi password would be absurdly easy
for a child to crack). When my Internet is non-existent, I take my laptop to
the library and download packages, copy them to an external hdd, then bring
them home and install them on my desktop.
Thanks for caring, though.
Bill
On Sunday 18 March 2018 05:24:01 William Morder
wrote:
Guilty. ;)
On Sunday 18 March 2018 05:02:19 E. Liddell
wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 17:13:52 -0700
>
> William Morder <doctor_contendo(a)zoho.com> wrote:
> > I would be curious to know what are other people's methods. I've
> > heard about some net installations already.
>
> Well, my response was shock that anyone would actually have to do
> that much work to reinstall the software on an existing system! I'd
> just issue something like "emerge --emptytree --keep-going world", go
> to bed, and expect 98% of everything to be resolved when I got back
> up in the morning. A Gentoo machine is always easier to recover than
> to restart from scratch (and yes, it's possible to switch out major
> parts of the infrastructure, like openrc <=> systemd and udev <=>
> eudev, without hosing everything or even having to reinstall any
> package that doesn't depend directly on the changed one).
>
> I kept my old system installation for twelve years (2005-2017),
> despite a major hardware refresh about midway through that period,
> and *never* had to start over from scratch. And the only reason I
> didn't just image the old root partition onto a new drive when I set
> up my current machine over Christmas was that I figured it was time
> to get rid of all the leftover cruft from more than a decade of
> rolling updates.
>
> E. Liddell
Ah, but you are an actual geek, and you like this stuff. And I did say that
my method was dirty. The only reason I use computers at all is because I
must; I build my own computers out of parts because I can't afford to buy
anything; and I try to stick with GNU/Linux so that I can be sure that I
really own my own computers.
I've only been running Linux since about 2006, and mostly Kubuntu. Only
in April of 2017 did I attempt Debian. Once I get a system more or less
stable, I almost never need to do a full reinstallation. But then, I have
pretty much taught myself, with the help of some Linux books, and
researching the forums. And I only know one person in the real world (not
online) who can actually offer guidance. Otherwise, most people think I
am a computer freak, which I am not.
If I ruled the world, we would all go back to horses and carts, or at
least bicycles. I still say that this computer nonsense is just a passing
fad, and sooner or later people will wake up.
In the meanwhile, this is what I have to do to keep my computer running.
I like what you say, and am always willing to bow before superior
knowledge. If I could learn how to use your method on a Debian system,
that would be great.
If you can point me in the right direction, I am all ears.
Unfortunately, how I get away with what I do is kind of rooted in the way
Gentoo's package manager works and how Gentoo, as a distro, differs from
Debian (and they're just about as different as can be--Gentoo is a
rolling-release source-based distro that expects you to be at home with a
command line and lacks a graphical install tool).
A limited version of the same thing should be possible with any
rolling-release distro, but I'm not familiar with any Debian-based ones.
P.S. How would you go about maintaining your
computers if you sometimes
are forced to go for months at a stretch without an Internet connection?
Right now I have a fast, reasonably stable connection, but it hasn't
always been that way. I started saving packages to reinstall by dpkg so
that I could keep my system running even when I am offline.
I used to go to the library with my laptop, to use their connection; but
then I would download and save packages to be used in my desktop computer
at home, where there was no Internet. If there is a better strategy for
survival in those circumstances, I would love to hear it.
I don't think there's any easy way to deal with that problem,
unfortunately. Among the things I'd probably end up doing would be poking
through the old distro-specific software intended to minimize bandwidth use
for dial-up users back in the day. That, and manually pulling down certain
types of files using a download manager if the package manager couldn't
handle things on its own. That assumes that I would have *some* kind of
connection, just not a fast or stable one, though--dial-up modem, tethered
phone, whatever. I've been doing this juuuust long enough to remember how
not-fun trying to update over dial-up was.
Gentoo's package manager keeps the files needed for a (re-)install of any
package unless you purge them manually, and copying them around to multiple
machines isn't a problem. You can also fetch packages without installing
if you pass the right flag. The idea of having to explicitly set the system
to keep stuff was part of what made me boggle.
E. Liddell
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