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

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie 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).



everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, especially RAM 
closely followed by PSU.

Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing 
anything else.





>
> 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 dot mckinnon at gmail dot com