Why does it want to upgrade linux-headers?

[uudruid74]

OK, I have my kernel in @system, not in @world, and my kernel sources don't support 3.17 yet because its ck-sources, nor do I want to upgrade my kernel.  I'm tired of compiling and tired of stuff being broken.

 

WHY is it trying to install kernel-headers 3.17-r1?  My kernel is 3.13, so this sounds like a really BAD idea.  Shouldn't portage be smart enough not to do this?

 

Maybe funtoo was a bad idea.  Weeks now and still not finished installing!  This shouldn't be this difficult.

 

I only did a sync because it was supposed to fix gedit's vapigen thing, and its still broken just giving me different error (see other thread), php is still not building due to sandbox violations, and now I have a new problem I didn't have before.

 

Next step is a hammer!

 

Anyone know how to fix this??

[Oleg Vinichenko]

fix what? there was update to linux-headers to 3.17 version. Means that kernels up-to 3.17 will be supported. It doesn't mean kernel should exactly match headers version

[uudruid74]

But .. I have the whole kernel sources including the headers.  Installing headers for a different version that may have a different set of patches doesn't seem right.

 

I guess I'll let it.   :/  Can't break it any more than it already is.

[Oleg Vinichenko]

why would we fix your broken system if we didn't?

[sitquietly]

OK, I have my kernel in @system, not in @world, and my kernel sources don't support 3.17 yet because its ck-sources, nor do I want to upgrade my kernel.  I'm tired of compiling and tired of stuff being broken.

 

WHY is it trying to install kernel-headers 3.17-r1?  My kernel is 3.13...

 

Maybe funtoo was a bad idea.  Weeks now and still not finished installing!  This shouldn't be this difficult.

 

.....

 

Anyone know how to fix this??

 

Those kernel-headers are the reference headers for glibc.  They are needed by the latest glibc and will not interfere with your chosen kernel.  You'll be fine!

 

You're right -- A funtoo installation should not be difficult.  Sounds like you're in the middle of a long learning experience.  In grad school (3 times over 3 decades) I always found if I didn't feel a very uncomfortable anxiety and a sense of chaos and confusion I wasn't learning anything.  You must be learning!

 

Yeah, _I_ know how to fix all of your problems.  But I'm not sitting at your computer and you wouldn't like it if I was.  I'll toss out some general advice if you need it.  Maybe read some basic docs over again (I don't know your level of expertise so excuse me if you are already more expert than me).  I'll go look for your vapigen thread...  Best regards.

[uudruid74]

It's not that I don't know how.  I'm busy USING the system.  I've decided to use ShellInABox for a project and it hasn't been updated in about 2 years, so I'm picking up all the patches and forks people have dropped all over the net, plus fixing a bunch of stuff myself and reconfiguring how it handles colors, adding a color reducer for programs that think your terminal can handle 256 color ... *sigh*  ... and its all in Javascript.  Haven't used that in ages.

 

I just assumed that after a decade this stuff would be more mature.  However, it seems like a regression.  I used to use Gentoo a long time ago.  In fact, a company I worked for (back in the dark ages) claims that their network security product successfully protected Spamhaus.org from a massive DDOS attack.  Halloween ... 2004?   Nope!  The applicance failed and was taken out of the loop.  What kept the site up was me sticking a nice little filter line into the Squid proxy .. running GENTOO!!  Very nice set-up, too.  I had everything served out of LDAP with a couple scripts for the few things that couldn't read the tree directly, with a nice web interface.  Very smooth.

 

And I think I was running ~arch back then.  Now that seems to be common.  I'd really like to see a bit more stability where things are tested a bit more.  The solution seems to be "sync and try again", which might fix problem or pick up another ebuild that will break something else.  I know Drobbins was working on a "stable tree" idea, but I haven't seen any completion announcements.

[sitquietly]

It's not that I don't know how.  I'm busy USING the system. ..... I just assumed that after a decade this stuff would be more mature.  However, it seems like a regression. .....  I'd really like to see a bit more stability where things are tested a bit more.  ...

 

IMO the problem is systemic in the linux ecosystem.  We have 10000 under qualified hackers working on a ball of strings adding more and more brightly colored strings (lots of focus on playing around with the GUI interface and little work on the hard stuff underneath); it's unraveling and now we have an under qualified and badly motivated cabal from Red Hat trying to change the core of the ball, the part that WAS working well.  I'm in danger of ranting...

 

After Funtoo it's FreeBSD for me.  For now I am very happy with Funtoo without systemd, without pulseaudio, without avahi, without udisks and upower, without gstreamer, without gnome, without consolekit and policykit, running a solid zfs raidz storage system and a full complement of development tools (haskell, smlnj, ocaml, racket, etc.), a great publishing system (org-mode on emacs with latex output), a snappy fluxbox and rox desktop and mostly kde apps.

[uudruid74]

It didn't used to be that way.  Today, we are integrating search engines into desktops (a bad interface on top of a security and privacy violation) rather than fixing bugs.  I was just told that the inconsistent interface items in Elementary (some applications can't change themes and stuck on "dark", and if you change the rest of the windows to dark to match than your notifications are black on black - *doh* - idiots!)  The reply (after about 3 or 4 months) is that is an intentional developer feature. 

 

The devs can't change there own theme that they have to be locked in to one that is non-functional!??  I was trying to figure out why I could get an X connection over tcp the other day, in-spite of the fact that I changed my /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc.  I did some research and lightdm intentionally has it hard-coded to ignore xserverrc (which worked fine) and refuse tcp connections for security purposes.  My house is behind a double-nat (no incoming connections possible) AND I have a Cisco ASA - I don't care about security.  There was a patch made so that you could turn on listening over TCP with a cryptic configuration parameter (what happened to my shell scripts?), but this feature seems to be broken - it doesn't work.  Why are they removing functionality from my apps?  There are so many cool things you can do with X, but I suppose they'll all be gone once we're forced into Wayland.

 

And in the old days, the developers were fewer, but they were rock-solid.  Now its a huge ecosystem - too many cooks spoil the soup.  Its like Gentoo vs Funtoo - a single BDFL keeps the direction focused.

 

Pulseaudio is okay, but it seems to be kinda resource heavy.  I like being able to reroute audio at will, have different apps default to different audio devices (I have many), or broadcast to multiple devices ... and while it works with jack with just an extra click, they should be integrated.   Consolekit I kinda understand.  Its a really ancient security problem that was never addressed really well and every distro did things differently and it made using pluggable devices problematic sometimes.  I don't like emacs, but I hear you on latex!  I cheat and use LyX.  Awesome program, but I tend to have slow display issues - thats the reason I use the ati binary drivers - they make my LyX performance problems go away.  I don't care about games.

 

Gstreamer makes a lot of sense.  Its better to consolidate the APIs so that each program doesn't have a mess of libraries bloating the system.  Then you can work on optimization instead of each program trying to deal with compatibility and optimization on its own.    The new Gnome is a bit resource heavy, but I after using it, I kinda like it.  I hear the old ones weren't as good.  And I don't like KDE at all, but at least we get a choice.   Elementary OS won't let me install Gnome :/  Thats why I'm moving over to Funtoo (that and I hate systemd and like the direction Funtoo is going).

[paddymac]

In the years that I've been running a Gentoo-based system or Funtoo, I've often had a mismatch between kernel version and kernel-headers version and have never had a problem. Granted, the headers were usually an earlier version rather than newer, but still it shouldn't be an issue. If you ever do find an issue where a new package does cause problems, you can always file a bug about it and add the package to package.mask in the interim.

 

When I first installed Funtoo, it took maybe a week or more, but that was mostly because 1) I was on dialup internet, and 2) I had a slow computer. Hitting circular dependencies was a bit annoying, but that generally only happens early on and if you've enabled a lot of use flags.

 

If you're having a lot of issues, we'll do our best to help. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about upstream issues.

[uudruid74]

I run ati-drivers which build against the kernel headers.  I happen to know that enough changed when 3.16 was released the ati-drivers would fail to build its kernel module, and that was with kernel headers that actually matched the running kernel.

 

So, knowing the API changed that much in 3.16, running a 3.13 kernel and headers for 3.17 just sounds like suicide to me, especially since I need the ATI drivers because they magically fix some LyX issues and I can't live without LyX.

 

But - you are guys are telling me that it won't hurt, and that I can't stop it from doing its thing anyway.  I just don't see why I would need 2 copies in the first place.  Or don't the kernel sources come with headers?   *sigh*  If they don't have their own copy, then I'd be afraid to rebuild the kernel with mis-matched headers knowing how much changed from release to release of the kernel.  I know libc stuff won't break, but when I next get a video driver update that refuses to install because the kernel got updated ... and most modern distros now give you a black screen if the drivers don't install and they have cntrl-alt-backspace turned off.   Elementary even has terminal switching turned off.  But thats okay, this is like Windows now - we can reboot into "Safe Mode".  Thats why I'm switching over to Funtoo - I'm tired of being told what I can and can't do with my own computer.

[sitquietly]

.....And in the old days, the developers were fewer, but they were rock-solid. ..... I like the direction Funtoo is going).

 

I enjoy your stories.  Thanks.  I don't like emacs either :D and really like vim's modality.  It makes a lot of sense so I use a vi mode inside emacs and am mostly happy with org / latex and still my beloved editing modes and ex commands.  yeah, thank the holy ones for Funtoo as a haven of sanity.  I once did extensive work on '386 and '486 control systems that could handle hundreds of tasks with guarenteed latency of under a millisecond.  Now our thousand times faster systems are ten times slower. :<  AND they crash...

[uudruid74]

486s?  My 8Mhz Atari ST can open a window faster than my multi-Ghz Linux box. Application load speed was about the same and considering how slow that old hard drive was  ....

 

Vi mode inside emacs ?  Wow.   My head exploded.  Emacs really DOES do everything.  Thats like having an Amiga mode inside your Atari.  Oh wait .... that was called Spectrum 512.  We did have that, we just didn't admit it.  It might have ended the war.  And the MCIBTYC wars spurned years of healthy innovation. Bringing back the Desktop wars is tempting, but these days its more of a foot fight - no one rallies behind a cause, they just sling food at targets all over the place.  I use the evil mouse mode in vim.

 

Latency I can kind of understand.  Linux wasn't designed for low-latency, and it has a lot going on under the hood that has to be protected from concurrent access - which means a lot of nasty locking.  Most of the design choices have been cleaned up and latency issues are getting better, but there is still work to be done.

 

Thats why I don't believe that the same installation should be used for servers and desktops both.  There are a lot of ways I'd configure them differently, and the kernel at the very least should be different.  But there is also a difference between a hard real-time application that needs absolute latency at the expense of all else (RT patch set), and a desktop that should simply be low-latency and not let your video player skip when you multitask (CK patch set).  And of course, on a server your video player be damned - we're gonna do it the fast way and serve as many database connections as possible.  Most desktop linux systems only have partial low-latency patches - being stuck in the middle.

 

I just sold my old 3B2 - the ad said to bring a truck and come get it before I take it to the landfill.  He actually paid me to ship it to him.  I forget if its 4 or 8MB of RAM, dual 30MB drives I think.  Not sure.  Don't think that model even had a hardware MMU, but it would run a dozen users on it at once without a noticeable slowdown. All text based via serial ports, but still impressive multitasking for the day.

[sitquietly]

.....

 

Vi mode inside emacs ?  Wow.   My head exploded.  Emacs really DOES do everything. 

 

Yeah, it's Evil.  It sometimes turns a person Evil.  Be careful, don't read that last link, it could happen to you!