After upgrading the portage to 2.1.7, I started to get things like below when running emerge:

At the moment, there is a bug in keepassx-0.4.1 that prevents keepassx from installing. The problem is that qt3support doesn't have the version that matches the rest of the qt-xx packages. And as a result, we see ebuild "blocks" that we don't have a way to satisfy the dependencies.

It turned out that the solution is quiet simple. As stated in the bug report, qt3support is not needed at all. So all we need to do is to create a custom ebuild that doesn't depend on qt3support.

Without python, gentoo's portage is totally dead.

Here is a thread of discussion on how fix the problem. The particular solution is here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4669397.html#4669397

On Gentoo, run

# emerge -v lshw
# lshw

Then you will see a nicely structured hardware report.

For more tools, reference this page http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Index:Hardware

Getting X up and running

Read all of the guides below carefully and follow the instructions:

• The X Server Configuration HOWTO
• Xorg 1.5 Upgrade Guide
• Gentoo Linux nVidia Guide

Follow them to configure the kernel, and then install the xorg and video drivers.

When trying to build xorg-server with an nvidia video card, we got:

After a grub update, we were instrusted to do install the new version's stage1 to MBR. A first attempt failed as follow:

# grub-install hd0
/dev/sda1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.

(hd0 was the boot disk for this system. You can find out yours from your grub.conf file.) To fix this problem, we just needed to add the "--recheck" option:

When you compile your own kernel, in order to enable support for dm-crypt, please make sure you check

Device Drivers --->
     [*] Multiple devices driver support (RAID and LVM) --->
        <*> Device mapper support
        <*> Crypt target support

Kernel configuration

ATI Rage XL is a  very acient video card. The hardest part was to find the correct video driver for it. After much guess and trial and searching around, I believe the correct answer is "mach64".

I first tried to use some ati drivers, such as "fglrx" and "radeon". This would bring in ati-drivers. In order to ati-drivers, I had to set the following kernel options. I haven't removed the them to find out whether I can go without them.

After we compiled and installed the new Linux kernel, we found that we could no longer mount the /boot from a shell command. The computer booted fine.

In /etc/fstab, we have

/dev/sda1               /boot           ext2    noauto,noatime         1 2