How long can 250 package take to configure?

[frank56]

I chose eselect set 1 for my first boot to hard drive. I then chose to change to a eselect set 2, desktop environment. It started at about 2 am, and its now 10:40 am. The screen has not shown any change the last 2 hrs. Is that possible that program is still running? I press alt F2 and can log into terminal no problem. I forget the command to view running programs. If I choose to kill the program, will I have to start from scratch, or do any harm, that will take hours to correct? Frank

[MikeTbob]

I chose eselect set 1 for my first boot to hard drive. I then chose to change to a eselect set 2, desktop environment. It started at about 2 am, and its now 10:40 am. The screen has not shown any change the last 2 hrs. Is that possible that program is still running? I press alt F2 and can log into terminal no problem. I forget the command to view running programs. If I choose to kill the program, will I have to start from scratch, or do any harm, that will take hours to correct? Frank

Which comand is running? Emerge? Eselect should only take nanoseconds to complete.
If emerge is still running and if you kill it, you will have to recompile anything that has not finished. Use the ps command to see running processes.

ps
ps -ax
ps -aux

See the man pages for more help with ps command. I have had emerge run overnight and beyond, it depends on your machine specs, number of packages and a few other variables. We couldn't possibly tell you how long it will take. You can kill the process by PID and then use emerge --resume to continue

[frank56]

Mike i am running eselect -e system. I am redoing it, I rebooted. It seems like it is progressing much faster second time around. I started about 45 min ago and I am already at 75 packages? out of 256 at the start. I am thinking it will freeze at the same package but crossing my fingers. Frank

[MikeTbob]

I think you have become confused somewhere. Eselect is for changing gentoo specific settings. Say if I want to use an older kernel instead of the newest one (already installed) I would type

eselect kernel list

Which spits out this code (the * signals which kernel is active)

Available kernel symlink targets:
  [1]   linux-2.6.38-gentoo-r1
  [2]   linux-2.6.38-gentoo-r2 *

So, to set my kernel back to the older one.

eselect kernel set 1

This will just bring a new line and no output is echoed to the screen unless there is an error. You also use eselect for opengl and a few other things. See this link for more help with eselect,
Gentoo Linux Documentation -- eselect User Guide

If you are trying to rebuild your system, then you want emerge.

emerge --sync

emerge -avuDN system world

Hope this helps and didn't cause too much confusion.

[frank56]

Mike your info sure does help. I did a reboot with Alt F2 and the second time, the 256 packages completed. I may have a graphical desktop tonite. I I could get this far in 2009, so I am glad I have gotten this far. Thanks to a lot of people like yourself and others. I got a boost of confidence that I hope stays with me. Frank

[MikeTbob]

Alt F2 does not reboot the machine, it only takes you to a terminal window. To reboot, you need to issue the command as root:

shutdown now -r

Shutdown and halt with the below command.

shutdown now -h

Or just type as root:

reboot