"emerge system" is dying at kbd 1.xx-rx

[Mr-GolinuX]

Im installing gentoo on 2 test computers that I have sucessfully installed it on at least 10 times in the past including once with 2004.0 last month when it was released.

FYI, I had to do a little testing and comparison of the latest Mandrake 10.0 & Lindows 4.5 Developer Edition, they are great distros, but... now that im done with that, I want my "old faithful" Gentoo!

On with the problem..everything is going fine, as usual, "emerge system" is churning along, and then it dies unpacking the archive kbd-1.08.tar.gz with this error:

!!! ERROR: sys-apps/kbd-1.08-r5 failed.
!!! Function unpack, Line 332, Exitcode 2
!!! failure unpacking kbd-1.08.tar.gz

and the md5 checks out because:

md5 src_uri kbd-1.08.tar.gz

So I tried to unpack the source myself in a test directory just to see if it might be a script problem, but the simple unarchive process fails too. Hmmm...so maybe its a bad file, I'll try one from another mirror...4 mirrors later, same issue..cannot simply unarchive the file. OK it's getting late now, lets just live on the edge a little and try ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge system ...wake up the next day, it died on the same file, but with a later version number

This has got to be a new developement, because I had already installed Gentoo 2004.0 on these computers once before with no issues.

OK, so what's up with kbd 1.xx-rx ??? ...any ideas???

[Mr-GolinuX]

Please also check over at THIS POST for more details.

[Mr-GolinuX]

I've also tried a resync and to emerge the kbd package seperately, but still no go, it always dies at the same spot, grrr...

Any Ideas?? Or will I just have to wait for 2004.1 ??

[Mr-GolinuX]

Ok, I finally had some spare time from work to analyze this. Preliminarily I have found that the problem is a compatability issue with the JFS file system and the un-tar 'ing of the KBD files...hmmm...very strange bug.

Well my weekend is over, maybe someone else has some time to find the exact root of the problem, but the fix for this issue if you experience this problem seems to be: simply switch to a different file system type. I switched to XFS and it worked first time

Please post if you guys were also using the JFS file system so this bug can be validated, thanks.

[slycordinator]

Your problem is gonna be that I think most people here DON'T use JFS so you'll be definitely barking up the wrong tree.

Personally, I've never had problems with ext3 or reiserfs which are the ones I've usually used. I use ext3 for /boot and reiserfs for /.

[Mr-GolinuX]

well, its more of a howl actually

...but since the JFS FS is relatively new on the linux scene, and deemed "almost stable" we will never work out all the kinks unless some brave souls try it out. IBM is a big company, chances are this FS will rock when its completed

I do a lot of testing in my spare time and my plan is(was) to compare the JFS FS to a parallel installation on the same drive of another FS type and perform some "real world" benchmarks between the two. ...well,I will try again when the new version of JFS is out, or someone stomps this bug

[rparenton]

I'm running JFS and have the same exact problem when installing from the 2004.0 Live CD.

Workaround is here:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... =kbd1+08r5

Bugs are here:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46456
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42859

[mamboking]

I just remounted my JFS volumes with "-o iocharset=utf8" and that seemed to do the trick.

[teedog]

Your problem is gonna be that I think most people here DON'T use JFS so you'll be definitely barking up the wrong tree.

Personally, I've never had problems with ext3 or reiserfs which are the ones I've usually used. I use ext3 for /boot and reiserfs for /.

There are compelling reasons for using JFS. According to the following benchmarks, JFS, along with XFS, are the overall top performing FSs, giving the "best bang for the buck" in most situations. JFS stands out as it uses the least amount of CPU resources.
http://fsbench.netnation.com/

[teedog]

I just remounted my JFS volumes with "-o iocharset=utf8" and that seemed to do the trick.

Took me a few minutes to figure this out, so thought I'd share with other newbies:
You must also specify the file system type if you specify iocharset, so you must do "-t jfs -o iocharset=utf8" with your mount command, not just "-o iocharset=utf8".