YJL

I have always wanted to record how I update my system ever since I posted my update process, but really didn’t think that would be helpful in any way, therefore I didn’t go for the idea. But I think there might be some people want to just see how you update Gentoo, so they can decide if they want to try out.

So, I made a video:

Click on image to watch the video

I only had 6 packages to update, one of which was the kernel. So it certainly made this update took longer a time, but a better video.

The video is boring because all I did was typing words to viewers, fixing words, and waiting commands to finish. For this update, it’s 7.5 min a day in average, almost only a half of time last time I checked.

Updating a Gentoo system really takes not much of time, some would think compiling takes time. They are right, but you don’t need to compile every new release. Keep your Portage world file tidy and you wouldn’t need to update a lot of packages. Also, update regularly, don’t wait for months, or your system may run into nasty blocking issues. Honestly, blocking isn’t really an issue, it just needs experience to read and think what to do with the blocking, but since you have been stalking, I doubt you would have enough capability to handle or resolve.

In this video, you would also see me using a few scripts for kernel updating. I don’t use genkernel, nothing against it, just haven’t learned how to use it. Besides, I kind of like having kernel configuration history.

As you can see kernel update took about 30 minutes, but last time, that was 3 months ago, hence how I forgot how to run my scripts. There are indeed some big packages need time to install, kernel is one of them—and not actual a big one. But they don’t actually get new releases often. Stick with stable arch, have ccache enabled, those are basic guarantees that you wouldn’t waste more time on system update when something goes wrong.

This video was made sort of impromptu. Yes, I did prepare a script to record and adjusted the windows, but I really didn’t have a script in my mind. I said what popped in my mind, showed what I wanted you to see. I just went as it goes. And the Python and kernel packages showed up, I knew it’s quite a nice touch for this video.

The only disappointment was there was only one emerge message and that wasn’t much to read, so I couldn’t stress enough how important reading emerge message is. Being a 4+ years of Gentoo user, the only key point is reading when using Gentoo. You don’t have to be smart or a genius, just read everything and do what you read accordingly.

A couple of corrections, although I used only one core for emerge, but another was used for kernel compilation. So, I basically used almost 2 cores. Also, my computer is almost 7 years old, not 6. If you have a more modern computer, I believe the same update would only take like a blink of a second, well, at least twice faster.