Gentoo Profiles

I've been having some trouble with my Gentoo box, and I had been getting the feeling that I was using the wrong profile. Anything reasonably up-to-date, and maybe even working was masked by my profile. I could see that there were other profiles, but it took me a long time to find the /etc/make.profile symlink which pointed off to /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/gcc2. I changed this to point to /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86, and I think I'm on my way to having a working box.

Update 30 March 2005: So, supposedly profiles build upon their parent profiles. That means x86 is the base of 2004.0, 2004.2, 2004.3, 2005.0, etc. I guess that would also mean that I should use one of these releases, and not just x86 for my profile, so I'm using 2005.0 to see if it'll actually work. It seems to intend to build the same gcc-3.3.5-r1 which the parent profile wanted to build. It'll probably fail the same way, too, with stage2 binaries being different or some crap. On my little 586-200, it takes no less than 2 hours to find out that it's failed miserably, and I"ll have to blindly restart it, hoping for something to work. I love the idea of building from source, but it's just not working out for me, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable having to go to the forums for every damn mysterious little thing I broke.

On the bright side, I've gotten quite good with the emerge options.

Update (13:05): During my GCC 3.3.5 build, I get an internal compiler error/segmentation fault. That sounds like a memory issue. This could be the reason I replaced that box with the dual Athlon a couple years ago. Maybe it's time to decomission the old box and move back to a one-computer desk. That sounds sort of odd, doesn't it?