# Upgrading/installing

## sirtoast

Right now I have a Gentoo system up and running on a celeron 566MHz processor, and am aching for an upgraded mobo/processor.  I've searched the forums about the agonies of upgrading CPUs, but most were upgrading from within the same 'families'.  If i upgrade, I expect I'll be getting some flavour of AMD processor, not Intel.  Will my system be bootable/workable after that type of a CPU upgrade, or should I back up my /home and nuke the system and start form scratch?

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## northern

Im in the same boat mate, sometime after Christmas I want to upgrade my cpu/motherboard/RAM etc. I think Ill backup any important stuff and reinstall to make sure I get optimal performance from my new kit.

In /etc/make.conf most folk have the line "-march=cputype", mine says "-march=athlon", I would guess that if you bought a new processor you could change that line (+more) and recompile everything assuming you could boot in the first place. It's probably cleaner to reinstall.

Sorry thats not a specific answer, it's just my view on it........   :Wink: 

Merry Christmas.

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## sirtoast

This is just so different for me...been running the same Gentoo install since may 2002 and i haven't had to worry about re-installs.  With Windows, no matter what version I ran, I routinely reinstalled once every 6-9 months.  :Smile: 

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## shade266

Northern is pretty much right. The only changes you need to make are with your CFLAGS settings. Everything else is already stabalized within the hard disk(s).

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## sirtoast

so I should change the cflags just prior to shutting down and swapping the cpu/mobo, or will i be able to change it upon my first bootup with the new hardware?

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## shade266

yes, u r right to shut down/reboot after u change settings then proceed afterwards. Sry for the late response

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## sirtoast

no worries about the late response, i'm not even close to buying the hardware yet, just preparing myself mentally:)

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## WebsterRF

 *sirtoast wrote:*   

> This is just so different for me...been running the same Gentoo install since may 2002 and i haven't had to worry about re-installs.  With Windows, no matter what version I ran, I routinely reinstalled once every 6-9 months. 

 

How did you manage to go 6-9 months without reinstalling?

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## ashtong

As far as I know some CFLAGS settings won't work with some hardware (i.e. software compiled with them won't run). I've never run into that problem myself though. I wouldn't expect this to be a problem if you're "up"grading rather than "down"grading, as newer hardware typically supports all the optimisations that older hardware did.

You may find you have a problem with your kernel. I once had an Athlon XP box that I downgraded to a PIII when the XP fried itself. The kernel wouldn't load at all. I had to boot from CD and recompile the kernel with the correct CPU selected. After that everything was fine though.

If you want to avoid re-installing (which is quite feasible, and not in the least bit risky) change your CFLAGS and then run "emerge -euD world". The -e means "everything that the target packages depend on", which will basically recompile everything you have. When I did it on a PIII 700 with 256MB of RAM it took just under two days (but I had lots of stuff installed).

Go on, you know you want to! My PIII-700 was installed with the Gentoo 1.2 pre-release disks, and has been upgraded smoothly ever since (including a major gcc upgrade, hence my massive recompile). I've treated it as a test of how often Gentoo needs re-installing, and so far I've been very impressed (i.e. it hasn't needed it once).

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## pjp

Moved from Installing Gentoo.

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## adaptr

 *WebsterRF wrote:*   

> How did you manage to go 6-9 months without reinstalling?

 

Whahahah LOL  :Wink: 

Couldn't agree more - I've never been able to run XP more than 3~4 months before performance got so horrible a complete re-install was my only sane option...

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