Gentoo’s system for maintaining packages, Portage, has had a significant speed boost with version 2.1. Synchronising the tree (the equivalent of Debian’s ‘apt-get update’) feels several times faster. I don’t mind compiling my own apps (I leave it going overnight), but I do mind if I have to wait for ages before I can start the compilation in the first place. Anybody who has been scared away from Gentoo in the past because of Portage should give it another go.
Note that this does not affect compilation times. It does, however, hasten the package management both before and after compilation.
I haven’t posted any articles on PCLinuxOnline over the past three weeks because I b0rked my Gentoo system. I upgraded from glibc 2.2.5 to 2.3.1 and since then I haven’t been able to run certain apps without wrecking everything else. I’ve detailed my problem here and here. If anyone can help I’d much appreciate it.
At the moment I can run most apps, but things screw up when I load any part of KDE (including Konqueror) or Evolution. GTK+ (1 and 2) apps (apart from Evolution) work fine.
Update [2003-03-07]: The problem is with my Nvidia drivers:
Hi! I’m the guy who started this thread. I finally managed to fix things by turning off Grsecurity in my kernel. However, a very similar (but different) problem emerged a few months later. It occurred around the time I upgraded glibc to 2.3.1, so I initially thought glibc was to blame. After lots of experimenting with kernel configs, I discovered that I could have a stable system using Nvidia drivers if I turned highmem off, sacrificing just over 100MB of RAM (I have 1GB total).
I then came across cigaraficionado’s bug report and updated nvidia-kernel ebuild. I compiled a new kernel, this time turning highmem back on, and installed the new ebuild. The updated ebuild had no effect — using the Nvidia driver made my system unstable like before.
My hardware seems fine. Memtest86 detects no errors in my RAM (2x Corsair XMS 512MB DDR333 SDRAM). My GeForce 3 Ti200 card works perfectly in Windows and it worked perfectly in Gentoo until December, around the time I upgraded to glibc 2.3.1. I can’t figure out where the true problem is, but I strongly suspect it lies with nvidia-kernel.
That’s what you get for relying on binary-only kernel modules 
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