Okay, I'm going to try updating my system to the 2005.1 profile (again). First task is to try to get a gcc version built with multilib support. Previously I managed to get it built, but then everything I built with the new compiler was non-functional (luckily it hadn't clobbered the old version yet or I would have been seriously annoyed).

The libglut.so problem doesn't seem to have an obvious solution. There may be a way to make libffi load another .so and do the run-time linking when loading a given .so, but I can't even find documentation on the package. I'm hoping Thomas can point out whatever it is I'm missing (he's done a GLUT wrapper before, so he probably already dealt with this).

What I'd like to get back to (with the 2005.1 profile) is that wonderful Gentoo magic of just telling it to build new software and having it produce the results the next time I sit down at the machine. I want to have KDE's network connections working again. I want Digikam working again. In short, I want to get back to proper operation of the OS, rather than facing an infinite collection of annoyances :) .

To give you an idea of how desperate I'm getting for my upgrade fix, I was seriously considering using binary packages for KDE and Digikam!

[Much Later]

Okay, got GCC to build (key being to turn off the "sandbox" feature before building). Got most of the way through the instructions. The instructions for creating the /lib32 and /usr/lib32 directories didn't match a single existing file, but I kept going (that may be a problem). Now I've got glibc 2.5 failing to emerge... oops.

checking for long double... yes
checking size of long double... configure: error: cannot compute sizeof (long double), 77
See `config.log' for more details.

Sigh. Even the version that's already installed is failing to build with the same error. Probably a messed up gcc again, only now I'm so far into the process backing it out is going to be a serious PITA.