Just Finished World Update of Mini x86 3.3b

[DontPanic]

I just finished a world update of my installation of the Sabayon-Linux x86 3.3b mini version. Just to make the process alittle more difficult, I did it with stable "x86" keyword set in my make.conf, and numerous custom "~x86" exceptions made in the /etc/portage/package.keywords file.

I thought I'd post a couple of my observations of the process.

First, I've seen a couple of posts asking about the possibility of skipping the burning of a DVD, and upgrading from the mini CD version. I would only recommend this route if you have more interest in learning about how Sabayon-Linux is built rather than having a working and productive installation. I've been working on this on-and-off for three weeks, and basically have just now gotten to the point I can start doing things with my Sabayon-Linux build. I'm a new Sabayon-Linux user, but I came into this with some experience with Gentoo. Unless you're really experienced with portage, you're going to run into lots of things breaking during the upgrade process, and you have to sort through how to fix them.

Second, I had trouble following wolfden's Upgrade HowTo in the Wiki. Wolfden recommends a system rebuild before doing your first 'emerge --sync' in order to stablize your system. This makes a lot of sense, but the 3.3b mini version is old enough that I had trouble downloading sources for the installed version or many packages. So I basically had to dive right into upgrading. This basically guarantees stuff will get broken, and the upgrade you need to fix what just got broke may be 200 rebuilt packages down the road. More stuff will get broken along the way, and I didn't dig out from the broken packages until I finished the world update. The good news is that nearly all of my conflicts and broken packages have been fixed, but sometimes I really had to dive into some malfunctions to get things moving forward again.

Thirdly, I'm not sure I got what I was hoping for by switching to the stable "x86" flag. In Gentoo, this will cut back on the number of packages updated in a world update, and hopefully stabilize your installation. I figured that the 3.3b version was old enough that most of the packages that were initially unstable had now migrated to stable versions. But lots of packages would introduce conflicts if I didn't allow the use of the upgrades from the "~x86" testing tree. Also, I didn't want to downgrade too much if a package hadn't reached stable status yet. So I've ended up with a long and complicated masking of my portage configuration, which introduces it's own set of conflicts and probably negates any benefits of stability.

So, while it was probably the hard way to get here, I've finally got my Sabayon-Linux installation ready for business.

[wolfden]

Nice!

Yes, my guide was written for fresh releases. 3.3 would need a emerge --sync && layman -S first that is for sure. People ask and I don't even recommend it for the 3.3 since it is old packages. The longer one waits after a release, the more problems will develop.