I just installed Gentoo 2005.1 after taking a break from gentoo for a while. This is my second time installing it because i figured the first timne just didnt go right but i seem to be having the same problem. I seem to be having permission problems meaning my system is already set to a strict set of permissions. for instance the / root directory is not even readable by any users, just root. last time i made / 755 but not recursivley and i started to see problems with other apps such as sudo told me /etc/sudoers was permission denied but whenever i changed its perms it told me to put it at 0440 which is what gave me permission denied in the first place. after i started to get annoyed i just did a chmod 755 -R / and this just messed everything up. Can anyone tell me how the permissions should be set on a linux system. thanks in advance.

Obviously you did not go by Handbook. Below is what the Handbook tells to do right after installing the stage tarball.

i hadn't realized 2005.1 had this problem. i have installed gentoo so many times before i figured it would be the same. it seems odd that there would be . an error like this though.