I had a kernel panic, so Laurie suggested:
9 times out of 10, that's an error in /boot/grub/menu.lst caused by failing to point to the right place for your root partition. If it's a laptop, it's usually a misconfigured kernel.
Actually, I'll check grub first. I have a working .config file for that particular laptop (that works with the stock 2.4.18 kernel), which is what I based my menuconfig choices on. It should be fine. If these things don't work, then I will probably post the error msgs-something to do with VFS- in a different thread!
In fact having read the last paragraph, I KNOW it's not pointing to the correct partition for /. I remember putting down /dev/hda3 in fstab, when in fact / is on /dev/hda5! So I probably made the same mistake in the grub menu.lst! Damn my peculiar manner of setting up partitions! Damn the *ahem* person who was distracting me at the time!
So my advice should now be: don't try installing Gentoo if you don't have much time to spare, and don't try if your partner is coming round to visit. ;o)
When you get your 512k cable connection (I have a 512 cable here in my office, and a 2meg line in my server room), be sure to rsync ibiblio. Bear in mind the whole tree is more than 20GB, 90% of which we never use! There are about 2,500 packages now, and growing.
isn't rsync'ing the whole tree a little OTT for a network comprising of 1 gentoo box, 1 ipcop box and 1 debian box? What would the benefits be?