Gentoo Archives: gentoo-amd64

From: Boyusmaximus <boyusmaximus@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-amd64@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Bootstrapping issues
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 03:45:26
Message-Id: fec0e46d04112619455df7c978@mail.gmail.com
1 Yeah, thanks everyone for your input. I ran memtest86, and it appears
2 that the last 30 megs of my ram fail one of the tests. Problem
3 solved. I switched it with another stick I had lying around, and
4 everything compiles just fine. Now to try and get a new stick under
5 warranty....
6
7 As soon as you mentioned the idea that the ram might be bad, it seemed
8 completely obvious that was the problem, even though I'd been puzzling
9 over it for days. Thanks a lot people.
10
11
12 On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 09:32:09 -0700, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
13 > Boyusmaximus posted <fec0e46d04112602396b094cb1@××××××××××.com>, excerpted
14 > below, on Fri, 26 Nov 2004 10:39:10 +0000:
15 >
16 >
17 >
18 > > Hi, I'm having terrible problems reinstalling gentoo. Using the new
19 > > 2004.3 minimal live cd, I progress to the point where I need to
20 > > bootstrap my system, and I hit trouble. Everytime I try to run the
21 > > bootstrap script, it fails at a random point along the way. I seem to
22 > > always hit a segmentation fault or 'unnamed error' (my favourite kind)
23 > > but at different points along the way, sometimes as early as building
24 > > glibc, other times as late as building gcc. I guess this is some kind
25 > > of hardware fault,
26 >
27 > Yes. Random points along the way almost certainly means hardware.
28 >
29 > What I did here is analyze the bootstrap script and execute the individual
30 > steps one by one that it would have run. That was with 2004.0 (which I
31 > never did get to work, because by the time I figured things out to the
32 > point I wanted, 2004.1 was close enough that I decided to wait) and 2004.1
33 > (which /did/ work for me). Back then, and I imagine it's still the same,
34 > the majority of the bootstrap script was simply checking what versions
35 > were in the portage tree for it to build and that each one fit the
36 > requirements of the profile. The actual bootstrap build process ended up
37 > being about three lines of code (build one set with both use=bootstrap and
38 > use=build set, unset one to build the next set, then do an environment
39 > update necessary before building the third set) altho spread out in about
40 > 15 lines of "glue" code near the end of the bootstrap script.
41 >
42 > Thus, what you do is
43 >
44 > 1) set all the environmental variables it would set, by hand (or manually
45 > set an exit at an appropriate point in the bootstrap script, then "source"
46 > it so it executes in the same command shell you are using, setting the
47 > environment accordingly), ensuring build and bootstrap are in your USE
48 > variable as well, then
49 >
50 > 2) emerge each package in turn of the first set
51 >
52 > 3) unset build or bootstrap (don't recall which, but its in the bootstrap
53 > script so it's easy to see)
54 >
55 > 4) emerge each package in turn in the second set
56 >
57 > 5) update your environment using env-update, where the script would do so
58 >
59 > 6) continue, emerging each package in turn of the third set from the
60 > bootstrap
61 >
62 > 7) tie up any config loose ends and unset the other one of
63 > build/bootstrap, as the bootstrap script does to finish off.
64 >
65 > You are then left where you'd be if you'd just finished bootstrap, and can
66 > resume the gentoo installation process from the handbook.
67 >
68 > Again, note that the above steps may have changed slightly since I did it
69 > with 2004.1 -- the bootstrap script had changed a bit between that and
70 > 2004.0, and that was before portage 2.0.51 and cascading profiles, so it's
71 > likely changed a bit further now. However, it's certainly possible to
72 > follow the bootstrap script for anyone that has a bit of bash scripting
73 > under their belt, and the above demonstrates roughly what's involved,
74 > besides actually parsing thru the script to understand what it's doing in
75 > the first place.
76 >
77 > I'm actually very glad I ended up doing it that way myself, because I
78 > ended up with a FAR better knowledge of the bootstrap process and the
79 > infrastructure that makes Gentoo (and by extension, virtually all Linux
80 > distributions) run, than I would have had if everything had "just worked"
81 > as it was outlined in the manual. As well, I did this in my spare time
82 > over several months (as I said, with several weeks off while waiting for
83 > 2004.1), a single ebuild package at a time, all the while running from
84 > Mandrake partitions on the same machine (which were eventually deleted
85 > when I got Gentoo up and running to my satisfaction). Over all that extra
86 > time, I was active in the various Gentoo groups (aka mailing lists, but I
87 > participate thru GMane's list2news gateway so they are newsgroups to me),
88 > including amd64 (naturally), user, and following announce and devel.
89 > Therefore, by the time I got far enough to encounter most of the problems
90 > other Gentoo newbies have (etc-updating away a site-specific fstab,
91 > anyone?), I had seen them long before covered on one group or another, and
92 > either avoided the issue or knew just what to do without myself having to
93 > ask. In fact, as I was already a Mandrake power user, having been active
94 > on their Cooker group/list for some time, and having migrated to amd64 on
95 > Mandrake, I had the rather unusual experience of being able to answer a
96 > number of questions in the user group in some detail, as well as
97 > participate in the discussion here and a couple times in the devel group
98 > too, well before I was even up and going on the Gentoo Linux platform!
99 >
100 > Thus, doing the bootstrap process manually instead of by script is not
101 > only possible, but something I'd recommend any serious user intent on
102 > learning about his system does at least once. It certainly benefited me!
103 >
104 > The caveat, of course, is that in ordered to do that, one must first have
105 > a decent understanding of bash scripting. In my case, that wasn't an
106 > issue, since I'd gained a working understanding of that early on in my
107 > Mandrake experience, by dissecting their boot scripts, actually splitting
108 > up sysinit.rc into multiple purpose based scripts as made sense to me,
109 > then eventually doing an update to a later version of their script, and
110 > similarly dissecting it, before giving up when I moved to Cooker and was
111 > regularly updating, just as ~amd64 does on Gentoo. However, that
112 > experience means I have at least a basic understanding of bash scripting,
113 > enough to debug anyway, tho not necessarily enough to write my own scripts
114 > of that complexity, and that was quite enough to take apart and
115 > manually follow the Gentoo bootstrap script as well, which is exactly what
116 > I did.
117 >
118 > Not everybody takes three months setting up their Gentoo system, but then
119 > again, not everybody knows as much about it before they've even finished
120 > stage three, as I did.
121 >
122 > --
123 > Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
124 > "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
125 > temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
126 > Benjamin Franklin
127 >
128 >
129 >
130 >
131 > --
132 > gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list
133 >
134 >
135
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