On 12 Feb, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:50:46AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> On Friday 12 February 2010 10:54:53 Alan Mackenzie wrote: >> > 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). > > > >> everything you mention below is indicative of failing hardware, >> especially RAM closely followed by PSU. > >> Swap them out with known good items and test thoroughly *before* doing >> anything else. > > I hope you're not right here. ;-) The hardware is spanking brand new; > so new, in fact, that it's still gleaming. > > Are there any handy utility programs around to test RAM exhaustively?
I have made good experience with sys-apps/memtester. If you have not more than 4 Gb RAM, you can use the SystemRescueCD. Otherwise the GRML64 RescueCD has a true 64 bit version of memtester. I have made the experience that memtester finds errors more quickly than memtest86+ . Helmut. -- Helmut Jarausch Lehrstuhl fuer Numerische Mathematik RWTH - Aachen University D 52056 Aachen, Germany