--On 27 April 2009 21:51 +0100 "Martin A. Brooks" wrote: Installing gentoo is a process of starting with a minimal provided bootstrap environment, then recompiling that to provide an optimalized bootstrap environment, then compiling everything you'll ever need to use. Remember it's -O3 the letter, not -03 the number. Then you'll watch endless scrolling screens of compile crap and, in a little as 5-6 hours, have a basic system installed which is totally unique in the world. You haven't a hope in the world of being able to support it in a meaningful way because yours is the only one of its kind. You have a problem with App A that links to libraries B and C. You don't know why it's crashing, nor can you be sure that the order you compiled B and C in was important, nor the orders in which you compiled everything B & C depend on. Nor can you be sure you haven't picked up a nasty compiler bug which only occurs when you use the gentoo bootstrap compiler to compile compiler version N.X.Y on your Intel chip with the stepping level S which means a bug shows in library C that B hits on really hard. There's a reason most senior Linux systems administrators in the world don't use gentoo.