This was about one and half years ago on another machine that I no longer use, but the insight just came to me. Many things just lined up and fell into place instantly. I had Sabayon installed on my Inspiron 1520 quad-booting with XP, 7, and Elive. Running the system update before installing LLVM Clang for comping Python to JavaScript, the system got broken. I ran a system update to upgrade all packages because I had been using 7.  Unfortunately, the it broke the package manager!

This should never happen, and I wasn’t able to find any threads on Google. So I gave up on Sabayon and got a desktop to run Xubuntu in a VM. I thought the package manager was too dumb, stuck doing an upgrade of itself.

As all Linux users know, once the package manager is broken, the system is bonked. Installing, upgrading, or removing any software must go through the package manager. The upgrade finished half-way, I was left with a console without X or a graphical window manager. Fortunately, I had many other OS’s to use on the machine. They’re still there today, and today I just read the Sabayon wiki on mixing portage and entropy.

…when mixing Portage and Entropy, never use Portage to update Portage. Sabayon uses a version of Portage that is hard masked in Portage. This means that you will actually be DOWNGRADING, not upgrading portage …

So the summer before this one, I simply downgraded the package manager, which caused it to stop working.