BT's BIG Gentoo Project.

Ok I would reccomend not having quite so much USE in your make.conf unless you absolutely KNOW that is how you want it. Of course that being said I dont do the alternative myself yet which is to set USE by package, that I really SHOULD do That is next on my list of things I think..

Custom kernels are relatively painless in Gentoo, but I do reccomend you use the genkernel script with the --bootloader flag set, as that can take out the most annoying part(And one that seems to like to fail on me) of setting up your ramdisk, along with doing you the favor of setting up grub to boot correctly. Even if you use the menuconfig, or other config options do it with 'genkernel menuconfig' It makes life easier

But hey try your use flags if you want, it may work out great for you, it is just the make.conf is more for use flags you want on EVERY package, and for specifics I would try to use the more package specific options that I cant remember right now.

Seablade

Here's my make.conf Brutal huh.

i liked to keep my tags simple. in my latest (failed) build i did "-gnome -gtk kde qt alsa" and thats pretty much it.....blah!

anyway...have fun!

Ya, start with as few flags as possible. Once you have your system built and running you can start adding flags slowly.

My make.conf has rather a lot of flags in it atm (over 100) that I've slowly added over the past 6 months. Machine is rock solid, and does exactly what I want it to. Gentoo FTW!

You may also want to check out a little utility called "ufed." It's a curses based (console based) Use Flag EDitor. Pretty decent front end, but it can be a liiiitle intimidating seeing the massive list of useflags to choose from.

Just remember to add them slowly, and periodically do an "emerge --newuse --update world" and "revdep-rebuild" to make sure your system is still stable with the new flags.

Gentoo can be a little intimidating, but the power, stability, and speed you gain is well worth the effort.

Oh, and BigTrouble: Yes and No. Adding a use flag (KDE for example) means that anything you emerge after that will compile with KDE support, but ONLY if the app has KDE support available.
e.g. If I have "KDE -GNOME" in my flags, and emerge Nautilus, it will NOT cause nautilus to run with QT widgets under KDE since it's clearly a Gnome/GTK app. However, emerging an app that supports BOTH Gnome and KDE with those flags would cause it to compile with KDE support and without gnome support, thus making a smaller/faster app tailored to my environment. Hope that makes sense to you.

BT, since you'll eventually get to the business of choosing your CFLAGS, I recommend this resource: http://gentoo-wiki.com/Safe_Cflags. Take that as a reference and start tweaking them if you know what you're doing. There is nothing worse than seeing compilation bug reports from people who have overdone their CFLAGS to hell and back.

As for the GRUB issue, try this: when you're faced with the GRUB screen, select your boot entry in the list and press the 'e' key. This will give you a list of lines that you can edit by pressing 'e' again (key combos should be listed on the screen). Select to edit the root(...,...) line, move your cursor to the right of the first bracket and press tab. Funky, isn't it? GRUB has tab-complete! It will give you a list of available drives for the first option, and a list of available partitions for the second option (it even identifies the file systems on those partitions).

Mikhail

LOL didn't notice the "its fixed" line. Well, the above GRUB trick still holds

That just looks like you forgot to include kernel support for whatever file system is on your root partition. Have you double-checked this?

Edit your /etc/fstab. Either that, or post it here and I'll give you the fix for it.
Most likely, your line that points to the root partition is incorrect, ie:

/dev/hda3 / ext3 noatime 0 1

when it should read

/dev/sda3 / ext3 noatime 0 1

note the differences, s instead of h. I'm also assuming you used ext3 for your filesystem. Make sure to change it to what you formatted your drive with, such as reiserfs, jfs, xfs or whatever. ext3 and reiserfs are the most common, and if you followed the handbook, it would be ext3.

Yep, as long as your config file is still there...

less .config | grep EXT3

Or whatever your filesystem is. It is just a plain text file so all you have to do is look for the config varilables for it, the answer will either be Y, N, Or M. M means module and wont work in this instance without a ramdisk.

However backing up a second, did you do the genkernel route with the boot-loader option set? If not, USE THAT! You wouldnt believe how many headaches it will save you, and if you still do menuconfig you can still customize your kernel the same as if you hadnt.

Seablade

When you invoke grub-install use the tab and verify that it sees it as either hd or sd and try making them match.