computers suck, yet again

I inherited a 4-year old Pentium III 500 a few weeks ago, and decided to try out a new OS: Gentoo Linux.

Since I've never installed any distribution except RedHat, I invited a friend over to help me; he'd recently installed Gentoo on a couple of systems, and had the CD lying around.

We spent awhile walking through the (pretty well documented) installation process, and finally started to compile the kernel. After we got back from dinner, we rebooted the machine, and guess what, it froze during the init sequence.

His next idea was to boot up Knoppix (an awesome "rescue" CD version of Linux) and copy over the config to feed to genkernel. Unfortunately, it was pretty big, and the subsequent kernel compilation ran until about 1:30am before we gave up and went to sleep. The next morning, I rebooted the machine, and guess what, I got a kernel panic during USB Mass Storage initialization.

I guess the next step is to download a new kernel.