I didn't say anything about my hardware. The main hiccough, installing gentoo, has been the ath5k module, which was at one time, I think, ath_pci. Newer kernels may support this out of the box, in a gentoo install. Beside that, dual monitors are working with the nvidia drivers.
Another problem, a MAJOR problem, has been a recent marriage of pata and sata drives, all as scsi, /dev/sdX. With Gentoo, say a year or so ago, I had no problem with mixing four drives, two sata and two pata. Ubuntu wasn't able to differentiate, and even on a recent install I was forced to edit grub.conf (or grub.lst) before the system could boot off the right drive. Former /dev/hda became /dev/sda1, and former /dev/sda1 was recognized as /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda3. UUID numbers were confusing and I then blamed Ubuntu for moving ahead too quickly. I lost a bunch of archived material due to that issue. More recently, I see that Sabayon is also using UUID numbers in fstab. Still, I am now reluctant every time I try to upgrade or install. My recent attempt to update Ubuntu resulted in, eventually the loss of my 90GB /home directory. I will never know what I lost. (Yes, I know, should have backed it all up.) It was my fault again, but the failure of grub again to recognize the drive on which I had installed, or the need to shuffle boot priorities. I am still learning how all this works. Sabayon also had the same issue, so I moved partitions and now have the system booting off of /dev/sda . All this means I am pleased that sabayon is working, and I am able to treat it as a gentoo system, without TOO much tweaking. I think I cannot go back to Ubuntu, as easy as that was. That's about the hardware issues. Alan
