So I got to thinking: Why would I recompile all these things under Arch and not take the time to try a Gentoo installation? If I’m going to actually rebuild all these things, why not just grab a Gentoo install CD and see if the work will actually make a difference?

Bad idea. Three hours into the installation, I’ve got a cryptic “Install failed!” message, the CPU is still cranking along at 100 percent, the fan is running like crazy and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

I probably shouldn’t have bothered. I think I’ll go back to Arch for a bit longer. I was having much better luck with ABS and makepkg.

(As a side note though, the Gentoo live CD installation procedure is much more friendly than the old text-driven method. A Gnome GUI probably isn’t doing my poor Pentium II any good, but it’s smoother than the text process, that’s for sure.)