The Gentoo install moves apace. I've got rid of the annoying keyboard error on login (had the wrong settings) and now I've got the two screens running seperately under the default Xorg Radeon drivers (see screeny). I've as yet failed to get direct rendering working though. I think I need a more recent DRM driver than the one currently supplied by the Gentoo peeps. I could also try the official ATI drivers, but they apparently won't do 3D acceleration with two screens (or I couldn't find the correct settings when I last messed with them on Ubuntu).

This, I think, officially qualifies as “nifty”:

Sometime during the Gentoo install, I must have typed mke2fs /dev/hda1 because I wiped the XP partition and replaced it with an empty ext2 partition.

Oh well, the registry was pretty funky anyway so maybe a reinstall will speed things up. It's a pity moving your Documents and Settings dir to a different partition is so difficult in Windows, or it would be a much less of an oops.

I'm almost tempted to not bother - I'm pretty certain I can replace every program I routinely use on Windows with a Linux version, apart from the games (which, ironically, all survived the ooops because they're on a different drive). Wine and Cedega are almost there, but seem to fail on the games I like to play (had a stab with Auto Assault earlier with no luck). Or maybe VMware could do the job - I'm installing FC5 on the freeware Windows version on the laptop at the moment, just to see what it's like.

FIrst post from Gentoo/Gnome. It took a little while to get everything up and running, but I think we're there now.