I did the command in the handbook after adding a few accessibility packages for the system and I have -j2 in MAKEJOBS in /etc/portage/make.conf. The older machine doesn't like to do parallel compiles with acpi, but it had no issue doing them with apm on. If you will use linux, you will learn lots about your hardware. The newer machine I have has comparatively small ssd drives 120GB as opposed to the older machine most drives are 2tb and the one gentoo is on is 3tb in size. The new machine has 14GB of memory available older machine much less than that. One interesting thing that happened is when I tried doing emerge --depclean I was told I have no @world file.
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