On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 11:36 +0000, R C Mitchell wrote: [SNIP]
> I emerged gentoo-sources, and it ran fine for > about five minutes, and then (choosing the moment when I decided all was well > to go and make a pot of tea, the system rebooted itself. I booted up the > disk again and went through the chrooting process. When I went to emerge > gentoo-sources again, emerge looked for the dependencies and then the whole > system froze solid with one of those "this is NOT our fault" kernel panic > messages. > > Not to worry. I can be very patient on occasions. I cold booted the box and > started all over again, deleting the new partitions and going through the > instructions from the beginning incase I'd missed anything. Again I got to > emerging gentoo-sources. Again it ran for about five minutes before the > system rebooted itself. Again I went through the chrooting process and went > to emerge gentoo-sources. Again the system froze. I rebooted and rechrooted > and tried it again. Same result. > > I'm reluctant to believe that this is down to an arbitrary hardware fault, > since everything else works fine. It does seem to have something to do with > emerging gentoo-sources. Well, emerging gentoo-sources has to be probably the *easiest* package to emerge. All it pretty does is download the tarball, unpacks it and applies some packages. So I don't think it's a problem with gentoo-sources. What you describe does indeed sound like a hardware issue. I remember a long long time ago a similar thing happened to me on a laptop that would not keep cool. When you are compiling a lot of stuff as you would with Gentoo, things can get pretty warm inside, so adequate air flow is important. You might wanna shut your computer down for a couple of hours and try again when it's cool. It could also be a kernel issue but I doubt it. Usually it's something like overheating or faulty RAM.
