When emerging system while installing Gentoo from the minimal LiveCD, emerge gave many errors that /var/log/portage has no write access or doesn't exist (that error message can be improved by checking for its existence, by the way). I installed from the 2004.3 CD with a stage tarball called stage2-athlon-xp-2004.3.tar.bz2, which indeed doesn't have /var/log/portage in it. I created it (if I remember correctly - it's possible that I just changed its permissions) and the errors went away. Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install Gentoo from 2004.3, stage 2 Athlon XP 2.Get to emerge system part of the installation 3. Actual Results: Errors which indicated that emerging couldn't be logged. Expected Results: No errors and emerging is logged to /var/log/portage. root>emerge info Portage 2.0.51-r15 (default-linux/x86/2004.3, gcc-3.3.5, glibc-2.3.3.20040420-r2, 2.6.10-gentoo-r6 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.10-gentoo-r6 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2500+ Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 Python: dev-lang/python-2.3.4 [2.3.4 (#1, Feb 3 2005, 16:53:49)] ccache version 2.3 [enabled] dev-lang/python: 2.3.4 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.59-r6, 2.13 sys-devel/automake: 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.5, 1.4_p6, 1.6.3, 1.9.4 sys-devel/binutils: 2.15.92.0.2-r1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.10-r4 virtual/os-headers: 2.4.21-r1 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/env /usr/kde/3.3/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache distlocks nostrip sandbox sfperms strict userpriv usersandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://adelie.polymtl.ca/ http://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ ftp://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ http://mirror.datapipe.net/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 3dnow X alsa arts avi bitmap-fonts cdr crypt cscope cups dvd encode f77 fam font-server foomaticdb gdbm gif gpm gtk2 imagemagick imlib java jpeg kde libg++ libwww mmx mpeg mysql ncurses oggvorbis pdflib perl png ppds qt quicktime readlinescanner sdl ssl tcpd tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts usb xml2 xmms xprint zlib" Unset: ASFLAGS, CBUILD, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS
Which exact command generated that error message?
emerge system. In other words, as far as I could tell, it was continuously happening for all the packages being installed, until I created the directory manually with write permission.
The example make.conf indicates that you must create that directory first otherwise logging will be disabled... The error is an indication of that.
