Recently the Gentoo project deprecated lots of system profiles. What this meant for me what that I needed to do nearly an entire system rebuild with my usual “emerge —update —deep —newuuse -av world” magic. After churning through about 200 of the 400+ ports that needed to be rebuilt my system started getting weird. Notably mount/umount stopped working, and the emerge failed. The error message I got after a bit of digging was that Gentoo “cannot find -luuid”. Running mount or umount (and probably other e2fsprogs utilities) gave me the error “error while loading shared libraries: libblkid.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”.

When you get an error like this it’s time to act fast since a power outage or a reboot can really hose the system. I’ve had it happen before and it’s not pretty. In this case you need to re-emerge e2fsprogs and util-linux. I simply did this:

emerge --update --deep --newuse -av e2fsprogs

That re-emerged both packages for me. If it doesn’t show that it will re-emerge both then you’re best off doing this:

emerge --update --deep --newuse -av util-linux e2fsprogs

After doing that you should have neither “cannot find -luuid” nor “error while loading shared libraries: libblkid.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” problems. If you’re extra paranoid like me you should also re-emerge dbus and then do a revdep-rebuild

emerge --update --deep --newuse -av dbus
revdep-rebuild

If you don’t have revdep-rebuild installed you can install it by running

emerge gentoolkit

dbus tells you that you must run revdep-rebuild after emerging it and restart dbus. Listen to it, it’s not kidding.