'Til All Are One

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