adrenaline

I just installed gentoo successfully, but I can't emerge anything. I keep getting circular errors for everything. I mean everything. I was able to get xserver installed but with a ton of errors. I can't seem to get a window manager installed becuase of circular dependancies. I am not a Linux N00b, but I am a Gentoo Newb. The handbook is great help unless you have errors. Am I the only one having issues? I mean if your install is successful should it be as easy as emerge xorgserver and emerge gnome? I have tried all except kde but keep getting circular errors.

is this fixable or should I start over from ground zero?

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joeBuffer

I've personally installed GNOME, Xfce, and Fluxbox without running into circular dependencies or any problems like that. I'm not sure how to help, but I know I've run into a couple of problems with non-DE installations. I had blocked man pages before, when updating, because I had man-pages-whatever, and there was a man-pages-posix pulled in, or whatever. I don't know exactly what happened. Other than that, I had it happen a couple times, only, and didn't know exactly what to do. (what to change, what to remove, whatever).
I do remember having problems when I first installed one package (like gnome-light), and then tried to install more (like gnome).
But yes, I've install x.org and GNOME with no dependency problems or other sorts of problems, and they functioned properly *****using the gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml and gentoo.org/doc/en/gnome-config.xml pages*****
You have to do more than emerge them.

MikeTbob

Can you give us some emerge output errors or something? It's very hard to help without knowing the exact error messages and any more info you can give.

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joeBuffer

I was also going to add this to my last post ... including what the circular dependencies are and other information would be very helpful.

mzv

adrenaline find any sample of the make.conf and add all use-flags into your own make.conf, then run emerge -uNDv world so that you will install all that you need. Then you will be able to install other progs from portages without any errors

adrenaline

Update. I am emerging gnome successfully now, but I had to take avahi and dbus out of the use flags to do it.

I guess I have to be more careful with use flags.

I know I didn't give you guys enough information, but I wasn't really ready for help. I think my main question was is everything going to be this hard in Gentoo, but I am not ready to give up. I am happy you all are willing to help. I will in the future give more information.

Thanks again

__________________
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
-- Linus Torvalds

joeBuffer

I installed GNOME and had it work properly before, and didn't have dependency problems, and I was using dbus and avahi ... Only I didn't use gstreamer, or possibly something else, and the sound applet gave errors. I know I didn't use a gstreamer flag and the error mentioned gstreamer, but if something else caused it I don't know what it was.

i92guboj

Just out of curiosity, are you in stable or in ~arch?

Being in stable the thing should be smoother, sometimes you can get some circular dependency problem, but your system should be able to solve most of them without your intervention.

Next time just include the error and we will help you, eventually you will learn how to manage them

MikeTbob

Errr, I guess I must still be learning!
Sometimes I get so mad at portage and the Gentoo way, mostly because of Masked packages and me not catching the output of emerge so that I will know I need to run revdep rebuild when some package calls for it. But as i92guboj stated, they work themselves out after you mess with them long enough. (Thank God!!)


Do you know of a way to keep track of the messages that get spit out by emerge?

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i92guboj

Hehe, yes, brinary breakage can happen from time to time. I still remember the infamous expat issue, which broke seriously many systems. A couple of days ago I also hit another issue with xcb, which it seems change the ABI, so most X programs were broken.

Usually revdep-rebuild is good enough to catch this. I run it after "emerge e-auDvN world" *always*, which is the way I update 99% of the times. Otherwise, if I update some lib manually I also run revdep-rebuild, so anything linking against that lib can be recompiled if needed.

revdep-rebuild is not perfect though. For the xcb issue, an special shell script does the job: xcb-rebuilder.sh, from time to time there are libtool issues which are working in separate ways as well. Another tipical case is python-updater, which needs to be run each time you update python if you want to make sure that all the python stuff is in sync with the latest available python binary in your installation. It's a bit of a hell, but well, after all it's a make it yourself distro. It was to be expected.

ABI breakage from time to time is completely unavoidable on source based distros, and is solved by recompiling the offended stuff.

There are some variables that control the behavior of portage when it comes to logs, there are even some that let you define stuff to mail you the logs. I have no idea how well these work, but you might want to check them. They all are in "man make.conf".

I always use screen in my terminals, so I have no problem scrolling to search for the output of emerges. The log is resumed at the end of the merge process, so you can review any problem that has happened with any package.