Gentoo Linux

While waiting for tests to complete or long-queries to run I've been messing around a little on my windows machine.

I was going to use partimage to move my WinXP install to a new disk, and swap out the HD, but both partimage and dd error out on one of the blocks on the WinXP disk, so they don't make a complete image. I'll deal with that later.

The new disk is bigger, so I set aside a slice for installing gentoo linux. Some notes:
1. Installing from the stage-1 tarball is broken. emerge bootstrap fails in either gcc or glibc (depending on how persistent you are)
2. Installing from the stage-2 tarball works, and is able to build both gcc and glibc that failed above (when doing emerge -u system)
3. emerge xfree takes 2 seconds short of forever
4. configuring xfree is stupid, I forgot how annoying it can be (the nv driver works, but I'm not having luck with the nvidia driver any my geforece4ti-4200, I guess I can do without glx support since I don't plan on playing any 3d opengl games on linux -- this is going to bother me, though, and I'll figure it out at some point). The XFree86 logs don't contain any clues (or any indication that something may be going wrong).
5. The 'stable' gcc 3.2 is unable to build arts, so emerge kde fails
6. The 'unstable' gcc 3.3 is able to build arts, but you have to learn wacky emerge incantations to have it be available (ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge gcc)

I expect these sorts of things from an unstable bleeding-edge style system, but emerge by default is set up to mask the unstable packages. You would think that things would work better (automated testing could help).

Oh well, it _is_ linux after all, if I wanted to just have a unix-like system that just worked I would stick with Mac OS X ;-)