Posts tagged Upgrade

Sabayon – Keeping it up to date tips.

94 days
by in Sabayon Linux

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!

 

Kernel-Switcher .38 GCC

792 days
by in Sabayon Linux

I use to think updating the kernel in Sabayon Linux was always a pain till I decided to change the kernel on my Ubuntu box.  I was having issues of system freezing up and others were reporting an upgrade to .36 kernel fixed it for them.  Well I thought instead of only going to .36, I would get .38 kernel instead.  I soon ran into an issue that .38 was not available via the package manager.  So after doing some googling and reading various things.  I discovered that people are installing newer kernels via several methods.  Some of these methods included very long walk throughs, some included running scripts and some involved doing it the old fashioned manual way.  I sat there thinking to myself wow, this is crazy.  I eventually ran across a site that had the .38 deb kernel and headers for download and I used dpkg -i to install them.  I’m a bit of an Ubuntu noob, but I could see where this would frustrate a lot of users.  I started to think how great Sabayon’s tool kernel-switcher is.  There is no reason to complain about how easy it is to upgrade to the latest kernel in Sabayon.

Remember, doing regular upgrades will not pull the new kernel.  You need to invoke a kernel change.  We do this to prevent users from breaking their system and than screaming at us on the forums or in irc.  A new tool recently introduced into main line entropy called kernel-switcher will make your life easier for this job.

# kernel-switcher –help for options

So you want to upgrade to 2.6.38, simply issue:

# kernel-switcher switch linux-sabayon-2.6.38

and you will get something like this:

# kernel-switcher switch linux-sabayon-2.6.38
>>  @@ Calculating dependencies …
>>  ## [U] [sabayonlinux.org] sys-kernel/linux-firmwares-2.6.38|0   [2.6.37|0]
>>  ## [N] [sabayonlinux.org] sys-kernel/linux-sabayon-2.6.38|0
>>  ## [N] [sabayonlinux.org] net-wireless/broadcom-sta-5.100.82.38-r1#2.6.38-sabayon|0
>>  ## [N] [sabayonlinux.org] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-260.19.29#2.6.38-sabayon|0

Your mileage will vary pending on the modules/drivers you have installed.  After install, the grub2 gets updated.  Some users are reporting their graphics stuff aren’t working as well afterwards.  You need to make sure your using the proper driver and to do this:

# eselect opengl list

Available OpenGL implementations:

[1]   nvidia *

[2]   xorg-x11

 

Notice my * is set to nvidia, if it’s not where it’s suppose to be, use the eselect opengl set # replace # with the number next to your driver and it will set the system up to use it.  Restart X and you should have all your eye-candy working well.  You can also check and make sure kernel is selected with eselect kernel list.

So:

# eselect kernel list

Available kernel symlink targets:

[1]   linux-2.6.37-sabayon

[2]   linux-2.6.38-sabayon *

Looking good as it’s set to .38.  If not, eselect kernel set # in the same manner as setting opengl.  Best thing, before reboot, check those two commands out and make sure they are set properly and than reboot to your new kernel.

Another quick thing, Sabayon has migrated to GCC-4.5.2.  So upon install it’s good thing to check and make sure it’s set.

# gcc-config -l

[1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.4.5 *

[2] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.5.2

So after install, my gcc is still at 4.4.5, time to switch it:

# gcc-config x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.5.2

and than we get

* Switching native-compiler to x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.5.2 …>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache…                                            [ ok ]
* If you intend to use the gcc from the new profile in an already * running shell, please remember to do:
*   # source /etc/profile

So we run the command source /etc/profile and check again:

# gcc-config -l

[1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.4.5

[2] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.5.2 *

Perfect, and what great tools to make it all so simple.  After big updates I always like to run equo deptest and equo libtest to make sure things are sane.  I guess using Sabayon can kinda make ya lazy, but at same time, you realize and appreciate how much time it can save you and makes your computing easier.  It’s not a perfect operating system, but #1 in my book.

Cheers!

 

 

 

 

Kernel Upgrade Refresher

1015 days
by in Sabayon Linux

Here we go again with a new kernel and people are simply forgetting that you also need to update your modules/drivers once you pull a new kernel.   Please refer to Sabayon wiki on understanding upgrading before you drive the support staff to raging alcoholics.

A quick and easy command to issue is:

# equo update && equo install linux-sabayon && equo world

Reboot to new kernel.

What does that do?  It will update your repository, install a new kernel if one is available and than it will install the modules/drivers  that fit your new kernel.  A kernel should never be automatically pulled, if it does, file a bug on our bugzilla immediately.  It will also update your grub.cfg file and add the new kernel.  So if you are one that is editing /boot/grub/grub.cfg by hand, make a back up of that file so you can edit and restore it.  It doesn’t hurt to make a back up of it anyway just incase.  Grub2 is about as stable as an active volcano near a plate line.

# mv /boot/grub/grub.cfg   /boot/grub/grub.cfg.backup

Now you have a file called grub.cfg.backup to always refer to.

Please pass this info on to all your buddies, help save the support crew.

Sabayon 5.1 KDE x86 to Current Sulfur Bash Complete

1207 days
by in Sabayon Linux

Wow, feels like I haven’t blogged in a long time.  Time is flying by with the new year heading into February already.  I decided I would take a look at 5.1 x86 KDE edition since it’s been a long time since I have messed with x86 and KDE.  I slotted myself some time, which was my first mistake as I was rushed to it and it came back to bite me.  Silly mistakes when rushed can turn something into a much longer ordeal.  I’ll give you the details.

Booted up the iso and everything was working out of the box and so I kicked the installer in and updated it and went ahead with my install.  I did a manual partition with reiserfs and of course told it to skip the bootloader as I already have grub setup.  After install I went in and edited my grub.conf file and here is where it got me.  Being lazy I took the line above it from my MCE x86_64 line and copied and pasted it.  I did change the kernel so it was . 31 from .32, but that was it.  You see what is going to happen?  My paths are all pointing to a correct kernel of the x86_64 path.  I tell it to reboot and this is where my troubles start.

As it reboots I am not paying attention and soon get the KDM login screen and I log in, but my resolution is all wrong.  I copy over my existing xorg.conf that works fine and checked with my eselect opengl list and had to changed it to nvidia.  I restart xdm and there I sit at a black screen with a blinking cursor.  I check the Xorg log and it says nvidia not loaded.  I thought ok, let’s reboot and upon reboot I get greeted with the same blank screen and this time I noticed on boot about a bunch of stuff having issues.  So than I start to think maybe nvidia driver is not installed properly and fire up equo update and it spits out at me it can’t connect.  Odd, networking worked fine on the live version.  I run net-setup and it can’t find a single network device.  Now I am thinking, is my kernel compiled without the drivers, no that wouldn’t make sense.  I’m digging through the gentoo networking documentation now and nothing is making sense.  After an hour of scratching my head I noticed on one of the reboots that my host was saying x86_64.  So I head back into grub.conf file and start looking at the line.  Sure enough my root (x,x) was point to my 64 bit install, argh!  Edited that and rebooted into my desktop.  This is what happens when a person gets lazy and doesn’t pay attention.

Next goal was to get the latest entropy system.  This is critical for anyone that is installing a 5.1 system.  The method that works best for this is to equo update to get the repositories updated than do equo install entropy equo sulfur –relaxed as that will pull in the needed files without the 100+ other updates. I should mention that I did add the limbo repo also.  Now I got the latest entropy system and since Fabio has been riding me about how fantastic the new Sulfur is I thought fine, I would do the upgrade/world with Sulfur and see what happens.  I’ve never been a fan of Sulfur as I prefer the terminal, but I do have to admit, Sulfur is looking pretty good.  The updates tab was showing my something like 300+ updates, but was kinda confused as how to select em all as I didn’t want to go down each line and select upgrade.  I hit Ctrl + a and it selected em all and than left clicked on a package and than right click and marked upgrade.  It kinda paused for a moment after that, but it did select all for upgrade after that.  I went over to actions and committed it and waited for it to download and install all packages.  I did have to ok some licenses, but Sulfur completed the task with no problems.  I don’t recall seeing a equo conf update tho, so I ran that and had a couple minor files to update.  Time to reboot and see how all went.  Well upon reboot I get the kdm login, but the desktop won’t load at all.  I could alt +  F2 and run applications tho, so it was just the KDE desktop not loading.  I couldn’t find any thing that was pointing to an obvious solution.  For the heck of it I decided to do an equo install kde-meta and noticed it wanted to pull 229 packages.  I thought that was odd as I had just did the updates and there was no more to get.  So I did the kde-meta install and rebooted and was greeted with the full blown KDE upon logging in.  I kept  getting WICD popping up and wanting a password, which I didn’t have before, so I removed WICD as I wanted NM for testing.  I see on the forum others are posting about this too.  I thought everything was going good till I tried amarok and had no sound than it dawned on me that KDE usually has a start up tune and I hadn’t heard that.  I fired up a browser and had sound in flash along with VLC, and XBMC.  I went into System-Settings – sound and bumped my soundcard to the top of the list on everything but still nothing.  There was no pulseaudio in there tho.  Issuing the command as user pulseaudio -k brought back all the sounds.  I still don’t know what is up with that, but it will be looked into.

I believe now everything is running good.  I encourage everyone to check out the latest Sulfur and the git one actually has more new features that will be coming in.  Incase you missed it, entropy now has bash complete which is really sweet.  To get this up in konsole we have to make some changes to your konsole profile.

1.  Open Konsole and click on Settings to Edit Current Profile

2.  On the General tab you will see Command:  /bin/bash change that line to /bin/bash –login

3.  Let make sure it’s enabled with eselect bashcomp enable equo

4.  Now you need to kill all Bash and Konsole and restart it.  In Konsole all I did was killall -9 bash and than closed the Konsole window.  Now restart Konsole and to use it properly you need to  su - and than it will work.  Try out equo search ama <tab> <tab> and you can do same as user also, but will need to be root to install of course.  You can also enable and disable repos too, example:  equo repo enable sabayon-limbo or equo repo disable sabayon-limbo.

Next time you see Fabio, give him a big thanks for these awesome improvements.  Thanks again Fabio!

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