After only 24 hours, I have a minimal Gentoo installation and can boot to a shell!

[struggle4progress]

That's 24 hours of searching the web and reading instructions and punching the keyboard incorrectly and ripping out my hair

first: mobo has onboard raid: how do I handle the raidset so fdisk works on it and its partitions appear in /dev/mapper? answer: boot the install cd with option dodmraid

get the network up. partition. download kernel. oops, dumbass! partition is wrong. partition again. download kernel again: oops, now md5sum fails. download kernel again. oops, compile fails on firmware issue. disable the dell and efi firmware options. compile again. install grub and configure: oops, grub can't find file. ok, try it manually. happy now? reboot. joy! it booted to a screen! choose an option. oops, grub can't find file again. yikes! why does this frickin file say "root" when it means "boot"? configure grub again. grub still unhappy. ok, try it manually again. happy now? reboot again. joy! it booted to a screen again! choose an option again. many many messages scroll by. yikes again! just saw something about not being able to mount a partition on the raidset! well, i can login to a shell anyway. linux rocks!