Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:54 AM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@×××.de> wrote:
> Hi, Gentoo,
>
> My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable.
>
> The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging
> the xfce window manager.  I "solved" this by emerging Openbox instead.
>
> Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I
> know there's a binary for this).
>
> Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did
>
>    # emerge -e gcc
>
> , to try and get a consistent working gcc.  This crashed.  I repeated
> the invocation, and it crashed more quickly.  :-(
>
> At this point, I thought, just reload "everything" from the stage3, with
>
>    # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz
>
> , which didn't help either.  I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get
> some handle on the mess.  Then
>
>    # revdep-rebuild -p
>
> threw a segfault.
>
> At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad.  My rough guess is that there's
> some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my
> USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something
> like that.
>
> One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me
> I had to "revdep-rebuild" something.  I wasn't able to do this through
> not yet knowing what "revdep-rebuild" meant, and not having any file of
> that name on my system.  Could this be the cause?
>
> Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables
> onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config
> files and without portage getting confused?
>
> Thanks in advance for the help!
>
> --
> Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
>
>

+1 for memtest86.

Since it's new hardware possibly your CPU fan isn't well seated?
Failures while compiling sound like heat to me. Failures at random
times sound like heat, PSU and memory problems.

Hope tis helps,
Mark