[GLLUG] Gentoo Portage Question

[Jeremy Bowers]

Brian Hoort wrote:
> Ohhhhhhhmmmmmm, most high Gentoo Deities,
> 
> I'm a complete G2 noob.
> 
> I'm using G2 on a box with a very small HDD.  As part of installation 
> from Universal CD, I copied the whole portage tree to HDD, hence, it's 
> full.  I want to delete most if not all of it, since I'm not even using 
> the majority of those packages.

You can rm /usr/portage and /var/tmp/portage, but once you do that, you 
no longer have a working Gentoo system. You have a working *Linux* 
system that will still do everything it used to do, but you will no 
longer be able to emerge things.

You could probably get a working system back with "emerge sync", but I 
wouldn't bet on it. (I really don't know what happens if you also toast 
/var/cache; I think that would be effectively unrecoverably with any 
reasonable amount of work, since Gentoo would lose track of what has 
been installed.)

Gentoo is not appropriate for systems where you have to worry a lot 
about the space needed for Portage or the space of downloaded source and 
compiled source. Some common packages will require in excess of half a 
gig free to download, decompress, compile, and install, such as Mozilla.

If you're stuck on a small hard drive, either use Debian or something 
like that, or use another Gentoo system to create the image you want, 
and transplant it onto the smaller system with tar & ssh.