Playing whack-a-mole

This is a good-news, bad-news post, with everything revolving around Crux and my mysterious inability to update between the old version 7.3 of xorg that comes on the 2.4 release CD, and the fresher 7.4 versions that are around today.

As you might recall, I was ending up with a dead X environment, where nothing would show aside from the X root window, and the mouse and keyboard were dead. The resolution was all wrong, and I was getting strange behavior that I can’t seem to figure out — lockups with no error logging and nothing as far as information for troubleshooting.

Well, all that is solved for me with the Crux 2.5 ISO. Whatever I was misbuilding, misconfiguring or just plain missing is being filled in with the packages on the CD, plus whatever lesser updates are required. I have a full and complete X, proper resolution, no funky lockups, and — provided I add the “false” flag I mentioned earlier this week — a working mouse and keyboard.

Of course, life isn’t always beautiful, just more or less. What I gained with a graphical environment I had to stumble over to reach. The 4.3.2 version of gcc that comes on the 2.5 ISO was not a happy camper for me, repeatedly — over two different installations, two different downloaded ISOs and two different CD burns — crashing at any attempt to compile a kernel. Here’s the error message, just for future reference.

HOSTCC scripts/basic/fixdep
scripts/basic/fixdep.c: In function 'is_defined_config':
scripts/basic/fixdep.c:399: internal compiler error: Illegal instruction
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See (http://gcc.gnu.org/bugs.html) for instructions.
make(1): *** (scripts/basic/fixdep) Error 1
make: *** (scripts_basic) Error2

I didn’t know what to make of that. I’ve never seen a kernel refuse outright to compile, and that within a few seconds of issuing the command.

Long and short, I got on #crux and asked if anyone there was running into that problem. I appeared to be alone on the issue and as a fallback measure, redownloaded the ISO into the installation environment, mounted it to /mnt and tried reinstalling that version of gcc.

Still no love. So finally, I grabbed a 2.4 ISO, mounted that and tried the old version of gcc — 4.2.2 — off that CD. And thereafter I had a compiling system.

I don’t know what exactly would be the difference between the 4.3.2 and 4.2.2 versions, or why it would happen off the ISO like that. I am 99 percent sure I’ve used gcc 4.3.2 in the past, assuming it was updated anytime in the past month or so on a Crux system on this machine. It’s possible I didn’t update it, but I think I have — I can remember waiting for it to compile. 👿

Anyway, the system seems happy, and I’ll update gcc tonight and see if it plays nice tomorrow. I think it will. And hopefully I won’t get any other strange misbehavior that pops up in its wake. I’m getting a little tired of playing whack-a-mole. 😉