[gentoo-user] New Gentoo system has become unstable and unusable - help, please!

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Gentoo,

My new Gentoo box has become unusably unstable.

The first sign was when the compiler threw a segfault whilst emerging
the xfce window manager.  I "solved" this by emerging Openbox instead.

Then I got another compiler segfault whilst emerging firefox (yes, I
know there's a binary for this).

Then, on somebody's advice (not fully understood), I did

    # emerge -e gcc

, to try and get a consistent working gcc.  This crashed.  I repeated
the invocation, and it crashed more quickly.  :-(

At this point, I thought, just reload "everything" from the stage3, with

    # cd / ; bunzip2 /stage3-amd64-20100121.tar.gz

, which didn't help either.  I emerged gentoolkit, to see if I could get
some handle on the mess.  Then

    # revdep-rebuild -p

threw a segfault.

At this point, I'm feeling a bit sad.  My rough guess is that there's
some conflict somewhere between 32-bit and 64-bit code, and some of my
USE flags are inconsistent with some others, or the kernel, or something
like that.

One other thing I remember vaguely is that early on, some emerge told me
I had to "revdep-rebuild" something.  I wasn't able to do this through
not yet knowing what "revdep-rebuild" meant, and not having any file of
that name on my system.  Could this be the cause?

Finally, is there a way of reloading/rebuilding ALL the executables
onto/on my system without discarding all my painfully wrought config
files and without portage getting confused?

Thanks in advance for the help!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).