I've got a serious problem with gentoo... emerge is giving me problems by suddenly hanging up in between with some vague compilation error. It doesn't happen immediatly, it stops after an hour or so which is really irritating!

Sometimes it exits with a segmentation fault and sometimes with some other error.
I've had to run bootstrap.sh thrice to get the job done and believe me ... it isn't a pleasant thing to do. Why do I keep getting this? The image I'm using is fine and so is the CD (I know coz i double checked). Right now I'm emerge-ing -emptytree system and it's been going on for a couple of hours and I'm upto package 43/94. If it stops in between again, do I have to re-emerge everything or is there an easy way out of this? I don't want to emerge 40 packages individually.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Sounds like you have a heat problem - non-stop compiling is hard on the chip. Get some more air into the box.

Why stage-1 ???. I run predominantly Gentoo and have never done a stage-1; and my system is as optimised as it's ever going to need.
Try "man emerge" - have a look at the resume parameter.

A heat problem? Ok... I've removed the side panel ... but I thought it would hang up instead of an error on heating up.

Anyways ... I thought that a stage 1 install is the only way to get max optimisation... this is the first time I'm trying to install gentoo (I've been using slack uptill now). Which stage do you use?

I'd try man emerge, but I'm still using the liveCD... man isn't working. As a matter of fact, I'm typing this using links2 right now.

Get a desk fan blowing past (not into) that open side panel - it's air movement you'll need.
I do stage 3 - for my quick machine I set use flags then went back and did emerge -e system; emerge -e world before proceeding to X/desktop. Splitting it gives a sensible break-point.
Got everything (just about) in place early. As you update, things get re-compiled anyway.
IMHO stage-1 is more for bragging rights - unless you need something like nptl.

If your emerge breaks, just re-connect, and issue the same command with --resume. I have to do it all the time due to flaky ADSL. Sorry, I presumed the man pages would be on the CD - why I mentioned it

Thanks for the quick reply .

So, you mean to say, that on updating the system, it automatically compiles using the new use flags? Wish I'd known that before. Anyway, it's finally finished stage2 and am now fixing the kernel.

I didn't know there was a --resume command, I assumed that it would resume automatically if it were possible ... kinda like wget. But thanks for the tip. I just hope I can get this thing done .

Well... I still seem to be getting errors for long installations.

Somehow I got the sound working off and when I tried to emerge timidity++, i get the following error:

I got a similar error when I tried to install kde using:

emerge kdebase-startkde kicker

I've made sure that the processor is being cooled properly ... but still this sort of thing seems to happen. Is there something wrong with my kernel?

Thanks.

Well, the issue has been resolved. I had 2 256MB RAM Cards and apparently, one of them is screwed up. I removed that card and then tried installing gentoo with only 256MB RAM. I started last night and it's morning now and I'm in KDE listening to music(mpg123) and 'emerge'-ing konqueror and amarok. It finally ended up being a hardware error. I've even closed the panel and I don't think it's getting heated that much either .