I'm up to the stage where one builds the kernel in the latest Gentoo install. Probably 4 hours wasted trying to get Knoppix to work as the hosting/building environment.

For some silly reason it kept losing my USB keyboard and mouse. After I switched both to PS/2 connectors that problem was solved, but then the DNS started getting "lost" after 20 or 30 minutes (far too little time to complete the installation). Never did figure out what was wrong, just wound up using the officially supported method (i.e. using Gentoo's own live CD, which doesn't let you use Mozilla as you build, but at least it seems to work).

Still a long way from finishing, but looks as though it might work this time. Hopefully the wacom tablet will work (it hasn't worked with any ot the recent kernels I've tried, so I'm not really all that hopeful).

Spent some of my waiting time trying to figure out how GATOs AVView works. It's apparently a Tk extension, which would suggest that it would be available from Python's Tk wrapper, or even view ctypes for wxPython, but I can't find any definition of the C-level interface that looks usable.

Kernel has finished building now (went much faster on the Athlon64 2GHz than on the old Athlon 1GHz). Suppose I'll keep trucking.