KarkomaOnline

As Gentoo’s userbase grows, a common complaint is the slowdown of its primary mirrors. Many people in the community have responded, adding more mirrors to help distribute the load.

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Recently I have discovered this little and cool utility, similar to df but with some extra features and a bit clear output. The utility is di, the disk information.

From the man pages…

di displays usage information on mounted filesystems. Block values are reported in megabytes (1024k bytes) by default, but may be changed. If file is specified, the usage information for the partition on which file is located is printed.

As usual, to install the utility emerge the package…

emerge di

For a basic usage simply type…

kranpak root # di
Filesystem Mount Megs Used Avail %used fs Type
/dev/hda1 / 4102.4 202.9 3899.4 5% reiserfs
tmpfs /dev/shm 376.7 0.0 376.7 0% tmpfs
/dev/hda3 /home 3106.2 1362.5 1743.7 44% reiserfs
tmpfs /mnt/.init.d 2.0 0.0 2.0 1% tmpfs
/dev/hda8 /tmp 2102.2 34.6 2067.6 2% reiserfs
/dev/hda2 /usr 5106.4 3246.0 1860.4 64% reiserfs
/dev/hda5 /var 6000.6 2621.8 3378.9 44% reiserfs

The first thing here is that, as opposed to df you have the info regarding your filesystem type at first sight (compare this with df -t reiserfs).

Here are some of the switches a like:

-s [ s|n|r ], output sorted/unsorted/reversed
-t, print totals
-A, print all fields

There are a lot more switches (i.e. to format the output -very nice), so take a look at man pages. As part of the packages you’ll find the mi utility that will display info on the mounted filesystem (man mi).

When I first start using emerge, I could not understand some of the behaviour of this tool. For example, when I tried to emerge OpenOffice…

kranpak root # emerge -p openoffice

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] net-print/cups-1.1.18-r4
[ebuild N ] app-shells/tcsh-6.12-r2
[ebuild N ] app-office/openoffice-1.0.3-r1

And then I tried…

kranpak root # emerge -pu openoffice

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies …done!
[ebuild N ] app-shells/tcsh-6.12-r2
[ebuild N ] net-print/cups-1.1.18-r4
[ebuild U ] x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9 [3.0.4]
[ebuild U ] dev-libs/expat-1.95.6-r1 [1.95.4]
[ebuild U ] media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.0-r2 [2.1]
[ebuild U ] x11-base/xfree-4.3.0-r2 [4.2.1-r2]
[ebuild N ] app-office/openoffice-1.0.3-r1

Why the difference? Is there any thing wrong? What is the difference between installing OpenOffice and updating it?

Well, here goes an explanation (thanks to spider from gentoo)…

The -pu option will check dependencies downwards from OpenOffice (as it should) and since you are updating it will note you have an older version than the currently available one, and update each package on its way down into the tree.

The “install” will only make sure you have at least the least possible version for satisfaction, not update them.