After I got my media computer up and running, it was time to upgrade my desktop machine from RedHat 9 to Gentoo. I was very excited to finally migrate my last RedHat box! Other than running into one bug with the bootstrapping process, everything went quite smoothly. That is until I tried to install Xorg.
I started the Xorg compile, it ran for about 5 minutes and then just segfaulted. I went in to the build directory and restarted the compile, it picked up where it left off and plugged away just fine--for about 5 more minutes until it just segfaulted again. I was going nuts. The compile kept crashing at different times for no apparent reason. I suspected heat my be the issue--my 1.2 GHz Athlon Thunderbird makes ovens seem cold. I searched the gentoo forums just to make sure that there wasn't some other issue with Xorg. Yup, I found confirmation. Heat and bad memory are the primary causes for "segfaults" with gcc.
I had a great idea. Install distcc to spread the load around! I listed localhost as the last host in the configuration to force distcc to pawn traffic off the the other machines more. That worked beautifully. That kept the load down on my machine so I could install Xorg. Everything went along swimmingly, that is, until I tried to install OpenOffice.
The OpenOffice build didn't want to distribute. It only wanted to compile on the localhost. On top of that, the build really wanted to keep the machine's load around 3. Needless to say, I started getting "Bus Errors" and "Segmentation Faults". Fortunately, I had just bought a brand new CPU cooler from NewEgg. I thought I would need it for the Biostar system (I mentioned this here), but the system came with an awsome cooler. I installed the new cooler--LED's and all--and I'm off and running.
So far, so good. OpenOffice is compiling just fine and my computer has a happy green-red glow. :-D
Posted by enigma at January 15, 2005 04:25 PM