Back to Gentoo ... Slowly

After a long hiatus (about several months), I returned to installing Gentoo on my Acer Ferrari 4005.  Things have certainly changed much with Gentoo.  Instead of "emerge" being the single trigger for building a whole system,  I frequently had to run "revdep-rebuild" and myriad other tools. All good but whatever happened to the solid "emerge" that I previously loved? Perhaps AMD64 platform is the one to blame. Not many distributions support it nicely. Gentoo is one of the better ones.

I will chronicle my adventure as I proceed to building a fully functional Gentoo desktop on my Acer Ferrari 4005. So far, some interesting catches:

• ati-drivers took a lot of retries to install correctly. I had to run revdep-rebuild once to correct the issues with libexpat.so.0
  
• Had to reemerge xorg-server and xorg-x11 a few times with minor glitches. One of which was pci.ids error. Very weird. Googling produced a clue from a non-English site. I ended up running update-pciids to generate a new pci.ids.gz. But then again, hal was repeatedly failing since it couldn't locate pci.ids. So, I ended up manually gunzip'ing /usr/share/misc/pci.ids.gz. Emerging gnome is somewhat back on track.
• opera works great. Fast as ever.