Upgrading a very old (2006.1) Gentoo install to current

I just had an old Gentoo install to upgrade and quickly realized that it was easier said than done. There is no supported upgrade path for very old Portage versions.

I quickly found darkside's blog post Gentoo: Tips to upgrade your really old installation.

My install was x86 so I had to modify it a bit, and without thinking I had upgraded to bash-4, which needs a recent glibc, so this pretty much hosed the complete system.

Though a quich chroot allowed me to pull glibc from tinderbox and luckily it worked. After that I rebuild the complete system. The following is more or less the COMPLETELY UNSUPPORTED procedure I used:


#!/bin/bash

ARCH="x86"
PYTHONVER="2.6.2-r1"
BASHVER="4.0_p28"
PORTAGEVER="2.1.6.13"
GLIBCVER="2.9_p20081201-r2"

wget http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/${ARCH}/dev-lang/python-${PYTHONVER}.tbz2
wget http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/${ARCH}/app-shells/bash-${BASHVER}.tbz2
wget http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/${ARCH}/sys-apps/portage-${PORTAGEVER}.tbz2
wget http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/${ARCH}/sys-libs/glibc-${GLIBCVER}.tbz2

cd /
tar xfpj root/python-${PYTHONVER}.tbz2
tar xfpj root/glibc-${GLIBCVER}.tbz2
tar xfpj root/bash-${BASHVER}.tbz2
tar xfpj root/portage-${PORTAGEVER}.tbz2

emerge -va portage --nodeps
emerge -Cva man-pages
rm /etc/locales.build
emerge -va e2fsprogs
emerge -Cva mktemp && emerge -va sys-apps/coreutils
. /etc/profile
emerge -eva system
XZ_OPT="--memory=128M" emerge -eva world


Had to use the XZ_OPT hack since my system had only 128mb of RAM.

After rebuilding the complete system I haven't found any problems with it yet...