Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad T43
Harddisk Upgrade
The T43 has a Problem with non-ThinkPad hard disks, so if you want to upgrade it you look at the mentioned page and/or use the Example of an update on a drive with unsupported firmware. It might work.
Booting
The T43 has a special PATA-SATA-bridge, not every LiveCD will work. This is unfortunately also true for the Gentoo 2008.0 LiveCD. Use Knoppix 5.x instead, this is also nice because you can use a GUI and browse the internet during the installation. Knoppix (and later Gentoo) will see your HD-drive as /dev/sda.
Gentoo has started providing nice weekly stages, you can find those on your mirror under ~/releases/x86/autobuilds/. They work very well.
make.conf
My USE might be a bit bloated, but it works...
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically # built this stage. # Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example. CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -msse2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" # WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly. # Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing. CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" MAKEOPTS="-j2" AUTOCLEAN="yes" FEATURES="${FEATURES} parallel_fetch" #X11 installation VIDEO_CARDS="radeon fglrx" INPUT_DEVICES="mouse joystick keyboard synaptics" LINGUAS="en fr de ar he" #source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/gentoo/ ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/gentoo/" GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} ftp://ftp.solnet.ch/mirror/Gentoo http://gentoo.mirror.solnet.ch" GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/gentoo/" GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/gentoo" USE="3dnow 7zip a52 acpi alsa aac -arts audiofile bluetooth bzip2 cairo cddb cdr cjk css dbus dga dhcp directfb" USE="${USE} dri dts dvd dvdr dvdread encode exif ffmpeg firefox flac ftp gif gimp glitz gnokii imagemagick" USE="${USE} gstreamer gtk hal hdaps htmlhandbook icq java javascript msn imagemagick imlib ipod irc jpeg jpeg2k" USE="${USE} kde lame laptop mad mmx mng mp3 mpeg networkmanager nsplugin ogg openexr opengl pam pcmcia pdf php" USE="${USE} plasma pmu png -qt3 qt4 quicktime raw ssh speex spell svg szip taglib tiff theora truetype unicode" USE="${USE} usb vcd vorbis wma wmf xml xv samba sse sse2 svg webkit win32codecs xvid xcomposite X xine xosd wifi"