TIP_IRC_troubleshooting

Yes, ladies, Gentoo has its own IRC channel(s)! All of them reside on irc.freenode.net. The main support channel is #gentoo.

Getting proper troubleshooting

A lot of people find that the guys in #gentoo aren't nice. They argue they scream "rtfm" continuously. This could be, but I personally think that this is because people with a negative attitude towards #gentoo were one out of many asking the wrong questions. The guys sitting in #gentoo are trying to help people with unique questions, not questions which either are caused fully by an obvious earlier mistake or can be solved by a quick search on the internet. So, especially when you have a negative opinion, please check the following checklist and write down the answers in #gentoo:

• Since when (specifically, since what action) am I experiencing my problem?
• Is this the only issue I'm experiencing? Did something else go wrong before my current issue?
• Did I completely, until the tiniest details, follow the guides I've been solving? If not, please at least report the differences directly.
• What have I tried in order to solve my issues? What have I searched for? What do I think is the cause?

Just four questions! Keeping an eye on them makes the life of troubleshooters in #gentoo a whole lot easier, plus, it'll help you get troubleshooted quicker.

Stuff to keep ready

Often, just explaining your problem isn't enough. You'll often need to upload logs and such.

Rather, upload them to a paste site like this one. Keep the following material ready:

• Output of the program causing errors
• Logs of relevant other software (for example, if glxgears doesn't run, then prepare to upload /var/log/Xorg.0.log)
• If your problem is related to build problems, the output of emerge --info
• If you know the package causing trouble, its exact version number
• If your problem is related to hardware support (ie, drivers), the output of lspci, uname -a and dmesg
• If your problem is related to X.org, /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• If your problem is related to alsa, ~/.asoundrc and /etc/asound.conf
• If your problem is related to apache, /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and /var/log/apache2/error_log
• If your problem is related to booting problems, /boot/grub/grub.conf and the output of /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sda (or whatever your long-term storage device is)
• If your problem is a kernel panic, the exact text of the kernel panic, and /usr/src/linux/.config
• If your problem is related to a building problem, /var/log/portage/elog/SOMEFILEHERE, where SOMEFILEHERE is a filename probably given at the end of emerge's output
• If your problem is related to any other big package, you might be able to find its logs in /var/logs