I just built a new system, I am not sure if all of the hardware functions properly(it should, its new). The first half of my startup messages are blurred out, I can vaguley read a message saying I need to compile support(not sure what) into the kernel. The last half of my messages are readable, it just clears up midway through. I was looking at /var/log/messages There is a line that say 511MB LOMEM available. Does that sound like a hardware problem? Any idea why my first half of my startup messages are distorted?

You say precious little about your box: How much ram; what kind of monitor; etc. If you have 512M of ram, using 511M for LOMEM might be a reasonable number. I suggest you boot into XP, go into the control panel and get you monitor settings for XP. Monitor name, model, hz and vt refresh rates, etc. Then reboot Gentoo and use whatever hardware management utility it provides, to check you monitor settings.

I do not have xp on this computer(at the last minute I decided against it). I did look up my vertical and horizontel refresh rates on the net. For the boot up screen they are unneeded(since their is no X running) I have got X running with the downloaded nvidia drivers, it seems to work fine. My problem is the first 2/3's of my bootup messages can't be read. If I can't read the errors, I am not sure how to fix it.

about the lowmem line. I am running 512mb, I just though that "lOWMEM" was a negative, it just did not look correct.

Thanks for your suggestions