As of just this moment I've managed to load X11 (and KDE, and Mozilla) on the new Linux instance. I've also fixed the problem with the delay during BIOS startup (it was the lack of a floppy that caused the problem, I'd detached it so I could add the SATA drive to the drive-cage and didn't think to reattach it until I had given up and was packing up the case for the night.

Ran into rather an annoying problem with the mouse under X11, turns out that the newest Gentoo's are udev-based, which means one has to use /dev/input/mice instead of /dev/mouse in xorg.conf. I also had to remove all of the Wacom-specific statements in xorg.conf. No big deal there, they never worked to begin with.

Guess I'll testing a few programs and then set a couple of packages to building while I sleep. Have to wait for the weekend to try the new video card, this little fix has killed far too much productivity this week.