saga of emerge system

wow. its been 3 days since i started building gentoo. after a false start... i got the machine to bootstrap properly... with matching kernel-2.6.7-gentoo-rc11 :D
machine built properly, booted... well not so good... i made a mis-step configuring grub... but ran it manually. so no problemo there.

the machine boots!!! hoorah!!! or is it?

hehehehe.

now here i thought the day was going to end right... when as i rebooted for like the nth time that hour... the machine just stopped. wouldn't boot. no apparent reason. was it ram? i dunno... swaped new ones from a spare machine... still no go. vid card? still swaped a new one from an identical machine... no go. so what the heck... i switched all the components... cdr hard drive, fdd, vid, ram, to an identical board and processor... and then it worked.

so off i went and ran emerge gnome... while it was busy compiling... i got my spare knoppix 3.3 cd... and poped it into a spare cd-rom drive... and booted the machine that previously wouldn't boot. surprise! surprise! the blasted thing booted. smoothly.

isn't that insane? but so true.

i ain't pulling your leg here. the only difference is... i didn't pop in the spare usb 1.1 pci card... i left that out on purpose... cuz, the board already has two usb ports and two more wouldn't make a difference as it was just a test. but the machine worked. it boot. was it hardware? i don't know.

so now, here i am... compiling still. i've done with x11... but x wouldn't start. so i'm building the others first... like orbit and bonobo... cuz gnome-desktop crashed whenever it reached orbit2... so there must be some dependency that i need to compile first for it to work.

so emerge isn't perfect. but at least... despite the eternity of building this machine... it does an excellent job of downloading, fullfilling dependencies and installing. so no harm, i love that new toy.