how to keep all important messages when updating?

[wenk hsub]

After a recent update, my X display stopped working.
The culprit was a warning message that occurred somewhere in the middle of thousands of
lines of messages. Is there some way to keep these messages, and more importantly,
an easy way for a n00bie to understand which of them require me to take some action?
(I'm on a dialup connection, so I can't babysit it for several hours while it updates.)

The issue was that the updated nvidia-drivers doesn't support my older graphics card.
unmerging nvidia-drivers and installing nvidia-legacy-drivers didn't work properly;
the screen resolution was wrong. I saw many messages in the forum that seemed
relevant, but it took about 50 tries to finally get everything right. What worked was:

switching back to nvidia-drivers,
using "Modeline" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf,
using /etc/portage/package.mask to un-update to nvidia-drivers-1.0.9639,
using modprobe -r to remove the old module.

OK, now it finally works. I'm almost afraid to ask: will I be able to use this driver forever
(or for at least the next 50 years)? Or is the inevitable answer that I should get a better
graphics card and/or driver combo?

[mark_alec]

Moved from Documentation, Tips & Tricks to Other Things Gentoo.

If you want to store the messages during an emerge, look at ELOG
_________________
www.gentoo.org.au || #gentoo-au

[di1bert]

Check out app-portage/elogviewer, it might be the answer you're looking for.

-m

[wenk hsub]

Thanks, I think I have logging working now.
(The documentation on that page is a big sparse, could really
help to be fleshed out a bit.) And maybe a good idea to recommend
setting PORT_LOGDIR before doing any updating.

By the way, I could not delete the logs using eread because I got this error

[di1bert]