Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@×××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:48:49
Message-Id: 20100212085453.GA1207@muc.de
1 Hi, Gentoo,
2
3 My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable.
4
5 The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging
6 the xfce window manager. I "solved" this by emerging Openbox instead.
7
8 Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I
9 know there's a binary for this).
10
11 Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did
12
13 # emerge -e gcc
14
15 , to try and get a consistent working gcc. This crashed. I repeated
16 the invocation, and it crashed more quickly. :-(
17
18 At this point, I thought, just reload "everything" from the stage3, with
19
20 # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz
21
22 , which didn't help either. I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get
23 some handle on the mess. Then
24
25 # revdep-rebuild -p
26
27 threw a segfault.
28
29 At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad. My rough guess is that there's
30 some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my
31 USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something
32 like that.
33
34 One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me
35 I had to "revdep-rebuild" something. I wasn't able to do this through
36 not yet knowing what "revdep-rebuild" meant, and not having any file of
37 that name on my system. Could this be the cause?
38
39 Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables
40 onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config
41 files and without portage getting confused?
42
43 Thanks in advance for the help!
44
45 --
46 Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

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