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

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 12 February 2010 11:46:33 Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I hope you're not right here.  ;-)  The hardware is spanking brand new;
> so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming.

The engineering phrase "infant mortality" comes to mind :-)


>
> Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively?

memtest is pretty good at this. Let it run for many hours, there's lots of 
tips out there in Googleland on how to get good results



-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com