ok, i got a new computer builtup (athlon xp) and tryed to put gentoo on it (had a small problem with the network card, but got it working)

anyways, i downloaded the minimal livecd (windows couldent download anything bigger then a few houndred MB, ...) , so i downloaded the stage3 bz2 file from teh internet, unpacked it, and ran into problems with no lilo.conf no nasm, no lilo, and worst of all, no web browser

at least the livecd has a web browser, so i downloaded and installed links lilo and nasm

well, now that the system is up (almost) there is yet another problem that i cant solve, there is no /usr/portage and the /etc/make.profile is a symlink to a file in this directory ....

i cant find anything (that i can see, note: since i am using links right now, it makes it a little hard to do a proper full search, but i spent a few hours and no closer to anything meaningfull)

does anyone know how to make this directory, or what package i can download has this directory in it ? (as you might have guessed i cant use emerge without this directory due to the /etc/make.profile symlink so i cant do much right now as far as proceding with installing a more usefull gentoo ) (soory about the spelling, i cant spell very well and im afriad of using the spell check as im using links and it might delete the message)

i had problems too, it complained about ARCH and also no symlinks.

so i left it for 2 days and went back and did another stage 2 install, did emerge sync and then did every other step and voila, it just worked. imo, go for a stage 2 coz it really is easy.

some more advice would be to use another virtual console or screen and use irssi which is on the live cd and then connect to irc.freenode.net #gentoo. u'll prolly get more help in there.

Sounds like you need to install a portage snapshot from the CD you got (if there is one one on it).Otherwise boot from the CD chroot to your installation and emerge portage.
I had nothing but trouble with stage3 installs and don't use them anymore.