make.conf is broken

notCarl · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2016 Posts: 27

I've been working on building a desktop and after getting xserver working, audio drivers working, and i3wm installed, I somehow managed to destroy my make.conf file. When I look through it in nano, it has TONS of text, and when I move the cursor around, text fills in between the white lines, it looks very buggy. It looks fine when i cat /etc/portage/make.conf but when i use nano -w it goes nuts.
Another crazy thing starts to happen too. When I boot my system and choose root or my username, I get bombarded with tons of text before being asked for a password. Same when I open new terminals and $su

There is a make.conf.save file and it also does the same thing.

I am stumpbed. The make.conf is no good to getpaste because it looks fine! but when I nano -w it goes nuts
here it is anyway : https://paste.pound-python.org/show/iNLSAgtXMwo7IyFeMN6F/

Thanks!

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 5:40 am Post subject:

Is this a remote host and you're accessing through serial console? Are you viewing this through console or terminal emulator on X11? What is your $TERM set to?

Could you do a hexdump of the file and see if you really have special symbols:

hexdump -C /etc/portage/make.conf
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notCarl · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2016 Posts: 27

Thanks for the reply, eccerr0r

I'm not really sure how to answer the first question in regards to being a remote host or serial console, but I see the spam of text right after the kernel loads and I can choose to sign in as root. I see this spam of text before I even run xserver with $startx. I'm very new to linux and after many hours I finally managed to get xserver to run with xterm and then I quickly tried to switch over to i3 by following the guide and using $echo XSESSION="i3" > /etc/env.d/90xsession. I'm pretty sure this mysterious text in my log in and make.conf appeared after I got i3wm running.

here is the hexdump

https://paste.pound-python.org/show/u13H1AXtQuvzLplyr2p8/

Buffoon · Veteran Joined: 17 Jun 2015 Posts: 1369 Location: EU or US

Crosslinked files, methinks. Did your disk get full at some pint? Have you ran fsck?

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 8:03 am Post subject:

That make.conf actually looks kind of clean, unless I missed some high byte characters (0x80-0xff) or weird low characters that aren't lf (0x00-0x1f, excepting 0x0a) - your make.conf is not corrupt.

So the only thing is that perhaps whatever programs you're using is not controlling your terminal correctly.

I was wondering about your setup, normally when you install on your PC that's sitting in front of you, you shouldn't run into these problems as the defaults tend to assume the right thing. However if you're doing a remote install on a remote server through some network interface, the control character mapping can get confused and will print out garbage characters, which is currently what I'm thinking that's going on.

Perhaps you TERMCAP or TERMINFO is messed up and a remerge of ncurses will do something. I don't know, need more info...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 10:26 am Post subject:

notCarl,

nano with tons of text?
cat OK?

Have you built nano with USE="debug"
That makes nano almost unusable as you get the debug "tons of text" in nanos window.

Try

russK · l33t Joined: 27 Jun 2006 Posts: 665

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2016 8:51 pm Post subject:

russK,

Well caught!

notCarl · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2016 Posts: 27

Thanks for the tips so far everyone.

When I make it home from class I will make the suggested changes. I added "alsa alisp debug latex python" to the USE Flags when I was trying to get my speakers to work. I added all the suggested USE flags, and debug was global according to the alsa wiki.

Another quick questions, when I change my USE= flags, do I need to mount /boot before I update the system, or should I only mount /boot when I compile a kernel with menuconfig?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2016 12:09 am Post subject:

notCarl,

/boot is only needed to be mounted for kernel (and initrd) updates.

Where did you find the guide advising to add debug to global USE flags?
It needs to be corrected.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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notCarl · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2016 Posts: 27

I stumbled across it when I was learning about ALSA. It is under the Software section https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ALSA
I'm not sure if the alsa-lib was necessary for me, but I gave it a shot anyway.

notCarl · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2016 Posts: 27

Thank you everyone. I removed debug and ran the commands suggested. Now nano works fine with no more text at start up either.
Problem solved.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2016 9:55 am Post subject:

notCarl,

I've appended a discussion on the ALSA Discussion page of the wiki.

You do need alsa-libs. That's the package that allows other applications to interact with ALSA.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.