Gentoo woes - compiling long programs then crapping out

[tody4me]

I've been trying to get KDE on my system for weeks now and it keeps on crapping out at some point. Then I have to resume the emerge and it takes hours and then craps out again. Latest one was with KDE 3.4.3 and the kvoctraindoc.lo object compiling. I get an occasional seg fault, and sometimes it gets further than others. I was starting to have hope until Friday when it crapped out again at kdemultimedia (which is HUGE also), so I had it started to compile on friday, got back into the office to see that kdeedu crapped out. I resumed the emerge and it crapped out at the kvoctraindoc.lo object. I have 2 computers, so I didn't catch exactly the line number that it crapped on but I'll try to catch it now. Just ranting about the lengthy time it takes to get gentoo to compile on this old arse machine. I love gentoo, and the way it works, but I just hate the lenghty compile times. I have been without a DE in gentoo now since before X-Mas, and it's starting to get to me a little. I miss using KDE and I've been dying to try out the wine tools to see if this VB program that was written would work well in linux or not.

NOTICE: this is just a rant. Just a little frustrated because I have had gentoo installed on the machine for about 2 months, and still trying to get KDE installed since around the beginning of December. i'm installing on a p2 400 / 256 Mb ram.

Thanks for taking the time to read this rant.

[je_fro]

have you tried
emerge --resume somepackagename
?
It should work if you haven't done any other emerging since something bombed out...

[stumbles]

Yes sometimes rolling your own can be frustrating. A while back kdebindings was taking a poop, the exact error I don't recall but it turned out ruby needed to be compiled with shared libs (I think). kdebindings is another one that seems to "grind" forever.

This was on Lunar-Linux, another source based distro.

Anyway. KDE 3.4.3 ? Gentoo don't have an emerge for 3.5.0?

[Icarus]

Nope, unless you add kde to packages.keywords
Major desktop upgrades like KDE and Gnome hang around in test with Gentoo for a quite a while because they like to hammer out every possible bug so the 'stable' people don't throw a fit when something like kpanel or whatever doesn't work because of a known bug

Have you tried installing the kde bin instead of compiling it?

[tody4me]

je_fro:
I am using emerge --resume. It resumes with the big packages, craps out, then re-resumes and it works some times, other times it craps out again. Then there's another 3 hours of compiling down the tubes. I wish it would resume the portion of the compile that it left off at.

Icarus:
I haven't tried to install the bin, didn't know there was one for gentoo. I would have preferred to have 3.5, but I want to wait until the testing is done.

[je_fro]

If I were you I'd emerge memtest86 and run it for awhile.

[tody4me]

Thanks for the suggestion je_fro. I'll try that if it takes a dump again on kdeedu.

[bwkaz]

Yeah, if you're getting segfaults when compiling stuff (especially at different points during the compilation!), I'd suspect that either your processor or your RAM has issues. Are you overclocking anything?

[tody4me]

not overclocking anything. I finally got KDE to come up, but it took forever. I'll try to run memtest86 to see if anything is wrong with the memory. It's a really old computer, so I wouldn't doubt that is causing some of the issues. There's just a lot of code to compile. I tried to do something similar to a 3GHz machine and it was a lot faster, but it still took a while to get to where I left off. I didn't quite get KDE completely compiled yet on that machine, but I loved watching it compile.