wolfden

Sabayon 11 has been released and it seems like every time we do a release, people get confused with their current system and upgrades.  Our releases are just a present day snapshot to save a user from having to do a pile of updates on a brand new install.  A rolling distro really doesn’t have a version per say.  Do your updates and you are current, simple as that.  So than I see people wondering why Sabayon 11 has a newer kernel than their fully updated present system.  Well, you need to manually upgrade your kernel with kernel-switcher.  Kernel upgrades in general are not automatically done to prevent users from having possible issues.  Kernel-switcher will make the job simple for you.

In the past while I have noticed users are not properly updating and that can give a user issue(s).  A quick order of things:

1. equo update
2. equo install entropy equo
3. equo upgrade
4. equo deptest
5. equo conf update
6. equo libtest

Now you’re thinking that is a lot of steps, but break it down it makes sense to do it in this order.  Update your repositories, install the latest package manager, do your upgrades, check for dependencies, check for config file updates and check for sanity.  Problems happen when you don’t install latest package manager and proceed to do a large amount of updates, or a dep is missing or forget to update config files.  These steps can save you hours of hunting down a fix.

There is an easy way to save yourself from having to repeatedly do the commands over and over.  Simple create yourself an alias.  In your /root/ directory is a file called .bashrc (period means it’s hidden file) and you can edit that file to save some typing.  Open the file up as root and go to the bottom of the file and enter in your alias word with command you want.  Now you can call that command with a simple word and it will do it’s thing.  So for example, I use the word world with a string of chain commands to perform my updates.

• alias world=’equo update && equo install entropy equo && equo upgrade && equo deptest && equo conf update && equo libtest’
  

I enter the above line at the bottom of the .bashrc file and save it.  I open up terminal, switch to root and than type in the command world and I sit back and watch entropy update my system.  Follow along with it and if it needs user interaction it will stop and wait for you to interact with it, such as a license or config file.  You can use any word you want, just remember what the word is and if you forget what your alias is, simply enter alias into your terminal and it will display all of them.

Doing the above will help cut down issues. Another thing you can do, pay attention to the notice board of important announcements from the package manager.  Such as [1] [Sun, 14 Oct 2012 20:12:39 +0000] Title: Important AMD GPU related changes in Linux Kernel 3.6+  that could apply to you.  Upstream is constantly changing and one day you upgrade and upon reboot you are at a black screen cause all of a sudden your video card is no longer supported.   You may need to mask or use a different driver to prevent the black screen.  So beware of changes happening with your upgrades.  If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post of ” I just did my upgrades, rebooted, and now all I get is a black screen what could be the problem? ”  I could take a lot more vacations.  Of course the user never supplies one single log file so it’s anybody’s guess as to what is wrong.  I can’t stress it enough, nobody has a crystal ball to figure out your problem if you give them nothing to go on.  Get to know your log files and know your hardware.  You’re going to be asked for that information anyway,  so you might as well provide it and save the cat and mouse game.

As a community we have our social sites like facebook, twitter, google+ and so on.  These social sites are not designed for doing support related events.  Our forum is the official place for support.  By using the forum you can help others narrow down their searching for similar issues.  So by posting your questions and getting your issues resolved can help another user and it helps those that do support others to focus on one website instead of multiple sites.  Keep the wealth of information in one area instead of spreading it out across the internet leaving users chasing links.

If you’re not the upgrading your system all the time type of person, Danilo has you covered with frozen repos of Sabayon 10 and 11.  This allows you to use your system as normal and install additional software without doing upgrades.

Happy Rolling!