gentoo success? no freaken way!

So basically since monday i've been working on gentoo 2007 amd64... and i would call this a success, at least more than my...ugh 6 or 7 earlier attempts at this. i went with XFCE4 as my desktop with a slant toward gtk apps (using USE flags gtk -gnome). my 3 big issues at this point are gensplash (done it before, but can't get it to work now), win32codecs and java (both of which are amd64-related troubles).... which of course leads to some issues with firefox plugins (do have flash 9 though). I am sure i'll figure those out in time. Basically after 3 nights of labor the system is mainly ready... still a few tweaks here and there, still a few apps to install (like compiling openoffice because the ooo-bin includes dependency on qtlibs which i don't want). I have even gone as far as to add some speed features.....namely prelink. Boot time is not the greatest....attributed to some redundancy in the things i have done (will clean it up later), but also due in part to using traditional init rather than one of the newer, faster alternative boot scripts. its not completely horrible, haven't timed it yet but would estimate it at around 45 seconds, which is slower than mandriva and pclos2007, but certainly faster than ubuntu and several other distros i've recently tried.

in regard to boot time i have some modules that autoload @ start of boot, and some that autoload as part of the modules script....there is some cross-over between the 2 loads...so pretty much a few modules are being loaded twice. another concern is wireless... i have it currently set up where dhcpcd does its thing during boot... just using wifi radar once i actually log in would easily save a good 5 seconds.



progress report: installed mplayer, works well, firefox plugins are there. now working on suspend2 (b/c it works..unlike the generic hibernate feature)

problem solving time.

seems like auto mounting removable devices (and USB devices) doesn't want to show me any love. I've tried gnome-volume-manager and ivman and in both cases i got no love. Now i don't know about you, but to me it seems like an important feature for any OS to have. at this point i am taking ideas, suggestions, troubleshoots.

progress thus far: suspend2 kernel works great. suspends and most importantly unsuspends to/from disk as needed. with it fbsplash started to work too (i believe my earlier issue was a bad grub config). standby (hibernate-ram) does not work yet....it goes into it successfully, but it does not come out (screen remains black, though there seems to be lights and system noise otherwise... using radeon video drivers).