Had an issue on my PC at work with a corrupt reiser4 filesystem (still no clue as to why). I managed to repair the FS using RiP-Linux, but not without some data loss. After reviewing lost+found, I found most files related to some HTML cache of Konqueror, but fsck.reiser4 complained about a file that could not be recovered.
After awhile, I tried running emerge to install some new package, and there it was: a broken portage...

The error I got:

!!! Failed to complete portage imports. There are internal modules for !!! portage and failure here indicates that you have a problem with your !!! installation of portage. Please try a rescue portage located in the  !!! portage tree und  ...

Got a curious error during the merge of the latest VirtualBox ebuild for Gentoo:
it fails with a die:

Quote
kmk failed

It took a bit, but looking around the output gave some indication of a problem with one or more dependencies. Looking around the Gentoo Forum, I came across this thread, which had the proper solution.

The error, more in full, is attached.
A bit more to the top of the error (sorry, but couldn't capture the right line as the new merge was already busy), it complains about Xmd.h, and GLXext.h. In that way, the solution provided by the forum thread I mentioned earlier, makes sense. In my case, issuing the following commands did the trick:

mikuru ~ # eselect opengl set xorg-  ...

Gentoo users that do regular updates, probably already ran into this issue before: Gentoo has pushed libexpat-2 to stable, effectively breaking all applications that depend upon it because of a missing library. While this is quite normal behaviour (the two versions of libexpat are not entirely compatible), it is mostly a very annoying thing, as it is not easy to find out which packages depend on it. Lucky, the Gentoo Forums provided me with a good solution.

Normally, in such a scenario, one would use revdep-rebuild to solve these issues, but, as seen on the forums, it more than occassionally results in havok on user's systems. Since I did not want to risk reinstalling my system altogether,   ...

Had a bit of a problem with re-emerging app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 after an update of libexpat: the emerge failed with a whole bunch of compiler messages.
After a quick search on Gentoo Forums, I found a post about someone who has had the same problem, and was able to solve it.

About halfway the merge, the compile failed. At the beginning of a long list, I found these error messages:

Quote
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/beecrypt -I../lua/include -I../lua/local -I../misc -march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -DPIC -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_REENTRANT -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wno-char-subscripts -MT rpmdav.lo -MD   ...

Information about nvidia in Gentoo can be found here.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml

It goes more in detail about which driver versions are suitable for which nvidia cards; quite handy, since they kicked out nvidia-legacy-drivers.

If you don't want to read the article, here's the short story about the driver version:

Geforce FX, 6, 7 and 8: use the newest driver (100.xx and up)

Geforce 3 and 4: max 96.xx

TNT, TNT2, Geforce and Geforce 2: max 71.xx

In order to properly install the correct version, it is recommended to mask the packages like so:

Add the following to /etc/portage/package.mask:

>=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9700

Add the following to /etc/portage/pa  ...

Found this article to be useful while installing a Gentoo in a virtual machine for VMware:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_Gentoo_on_VMware_in_Windows_NT/2K/XP

I found the kernel configuration portion particularly useful, especially since I managed to enable every SCSI controller and network adapter accept the one I needed.

Did (again) a reinstall of my laptop to get rid of all the funny unused packages and software (which was quite needed). Well, the other real reason was for me to test out a new filesystem. While my original plan was to go with XFS, I decided to try on Reiser4.

Installation was not a real easy task: while Gentoo can be installed through virtual any LiveCD (yeah Gentoo), there are not much livecd's out there with new enough (2.6.17+) reiser4 support, and even less cd's that are on top of that 64bit. In fact, I found none.

Since it's impossible to chroot into a 64bit system when running a 32bit kernel, I had to pull some stunts to get my reiser4 installed on Gentoo.

I used these resources:

  ...

Was upgrading a bit on my laptop (amd64), and this included udev and baselayout.
After a reboot, my whole system did funny things. All was retraceable to one thing: the system was automatically loading modules as it pleases, which caused all kinds of problems...

I have a pretty custom configured system concerning hardware.
By default, I only use wireless, and thus don't load the local netif modules (Realtek 8139) and definitely not the IEEE1394 (Firewire) link, as I very rarely us this for networking (and when I do, it's mainly for high-speed p2p transfer - no I don't have gigabit network).
Secondly, I have both my onboard sound card, as well as my Audigy 2 PCCARD configured. Naturally, the  ...