Grub2 install failed [SOLVED]

[catchpole]

I did "emerge sys-boot/grub" and got an error:

[229566]

[catchpole]

Hi GrueXZY,

I accept my telling off with good grace.

However I got the advice from a very experienced Guru within this site and did some reading before acting upon it.
It was an attempt to speed up the compiling. Everything was going well until the last command of section 9. (emerge ppp)
This took over eight hours to complete. So as my processor is a single core I set --jobs to 2.

I'm still very inexperienced and have to suffer the consequences of my ignorance.

Almost all of the information on the internet assumes prior knowledge and its the little things that catch me (and others) out. (Syntax is often a problem)
As an engineer I am conscious of taking my (engineering) knowledge for granted and expect non engineers to understand.
I try to assess peoples knowledge before my explanations so as not to pitch it over their heads.
This is very difficult to do for the advisers on a forum like this and I try to avoid constantly going back with trivial questions and wasting their time.

The reason for the Gentoo installation is to learn more about the inner workings and the command line.
I'll do more reading about the locale, re-initialization and how to find and install the gettext module.

Thanks for your time. I'll get there in the end!
_________________
Noob
With experience of Mint and trying to learn more by intalling Gentoo
Motherboard = MS-7211- MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD
CPU = Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz version: 15.4.9
Memory = 2GB

[229566]

Well, my reply wasn't meant to tell you off, it was meant to suggest that you should read up on and understand what each command or option really does before blindly using it because otherwise it will only lead to a lot of frustration. The fact that you used an invalid option "J2" instead of valid "-j2" made me assume you did not familiarize yourself with what -j2 does. It's a very friendly advice given that Gentoo is not a typical Linux distro that sets up everything for the user and holds his/her hand afterwards. Gentoo is a highly specific meta-distribution which power comes from extensive configurability which requires a lot of reading and understanding the processes in detail.

As for the other problem, that was just a hint and the question that starts troubleshooting it is how did you set up the locale, which was step 6 of the handbook (which I mention because in the ppp thread you said you followed the handbook until step 9). It could really be anything from misconfigured locale, unsourced profile after env change, improperly updated perl (you did mention a lot going on for installation of ppp) or accidental removal of gettext which is in base installation afaik.

Also it would help if you considered what the error message suggested to do if you needed support, ie. posting the output of "emerge --info ...".

[catchpole]

Hi GrueXYZ,

I figured out the mistake with the j2 and changed it to -j2 and also did "emege gettext.
I revisited the locale and remember running through it before and it seemed OK at the time when I looked closely at each stage.

When I ran the suggested command for posting: (Copied and pasted)
`emerge --info '=sys-boot/grub-2.00_p5107-r2::gentoo'`,
The terminal hung and I had to re-boot.

Instead I did "emerge info" and got:

[John R. Graham]

Option is not "-J2" (with an uppercase J) but "-j2" (with a lowercase j).

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

[catchpole]

Hi John R. Graham,

Thanks for that I've just checked and changed that.
I must have left the caps lock in when I typed MAKEOPTS. There's no indicator light for it on my keyboard.
_________________
Noob
With experience of Mint and trying to learn more by intalling Gentoo
Motherboard = MS-7211- MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD
CPU = Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz version: 15.4.9
Memory = 2GB

[229566]

Uh, how exactly did you install Gentoo? How did you start (LiveDVD?), which stage-3 tarball did you use? You seem to have some rather old-ish software, especially the kernel.

Now, your portage tree reports to be as old as 11 Oct 2014, which is not that much of a problem, just I can't tell if the older versions of, eg, bash and perl etc are at least from that date. No wonder that in that ppp thread emerge had a lot to do. Perhaps the mods can be persuaded to merge that thread with this one as it seems the core of the problem is the same.

Since you said you just installed Gentoo, I don't know which advice is better - to start from scratch and latest stage-3 and portage tree, or to throw you in the fire of full problem solving on Gentoo with trying to update what appears to be a rather old installation, but I'm inclined to suggest the latter. The best way to learn something is by doing it.

There are some nice tips and tricks on updating Gentoo here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-807345.html

Also, instead of using MAKEOPTS="-j2" I'd suggest giving -j2 to emerge (although I combine both for multicore CPUs), just keep in mind you can't combine -j flag with others as above, you need it as a standalone switch for example emerge -vaNDu -j2 world. The former attempts threaded compilation on a single package while the latter attempts multiple packages in parallel and has nicer summarized output. On my not so young dualcore AMD, with MAKEOPTS="-j2" and -j2 emerge option I see my CPU load between 2 and 3, which seems like a fine balance between IO wait and CPU saturation, and I can use the computer just fine to do work while it compiles in the background.

Emerge is smart and will serialize building in order to satisfy build dependencies. Another advice is to use buildpkg FEATURE (see man make.conf for that) so you can have a backup of all the packages and their versions in case you need to rollback something and don't want or can't compile).

[catchpole]

Hi GrueXYZ,

I think I know what's happened.
There were problems from the very start when I booted up from the live installation disc.
The computer I am using for Gentoo already has Lubuntu and Mint on it and I created another partition "sda4" for the install.
My first call for help was not being able to connect to the internet.
I managed to get online using some links.
Posted at:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1000836-highlight-.html
This will give some background as to how I arrived at my present position.

I left the installation disc out and carried on the installation using advice from my first post and thinking that the "links" would continue to give access to the internet.
However I think that some of the things I was loading were not coming from the Gentoo site but from the Mint distro on sda3.
If this is true then I may be better starting again and fixing the first problem from my first post.

That's my history in three posts.

The question now is:
Should I start again or suffer the pain of trying to sort out a bad start?

If I start again from the beginning I guess I'll have to wipe all data from sda4.
_________________
Noob
With experience of Mint and trying to learn more by intalling Gentoo
Motherboard = MS-7211- MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD
CPU = Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz version: 15.4.9
Memory = 2GB

[catchpole]

Hi All,

I managed to get the output log from the failed "emerge -j2 sys-boot/grub"

Can anyone tell my where I went wrong?

[John R. Graham]

Well, first of all, by not providing the log. What you've provided is the output of

[steveL]

[catchpole]

Hi steveL, John R. Graham,

I followed steveL's fix first in case any broken items were affecting the Grub install.
Then I ran: