Gentoo seems fine when you run it on a modern piece of hardware. Even my rather old laptop does a reasonable job of churning through a build. But doing the build inside the emulated environment (VMWare) on the same laptop gets a bit painful.

I'm thinking maybe I'll switch to using the host machine to do the building and then install binary packages from a shared folder into the image. Unfortunately, during the sprint @ PyCon I wound up deleting all of my binary package cache in order to have some space on the laptop drive, so I have to rebuild everything regardless... it just should be a couple of times faster on the non-virtualised machine.

Anyway, the system rebuild for glibc is still underway. I'm getting failures when I try to compile gcc, incidentally. Weird, I've built the same version (4.1.1-r1) on both of the other machines without a problem.

[Update: Reconsidered the plan, rather than stop in the middle and try to develop a new methodology I'm going to finish the build. There's another 355 packages to build now, including xorg and gnome. That should finish by Tuesday morning (I'll have to stop the compile while I'm working tomorrow at the Caffe). After that it's just the sugar-specific stuff (maybe another couple of hours). Also realised that by wiping out the Win32 partition I get another 10GB of space to use for the images and their associated files. Hopefully didn't trash the partition table in the process].