Since I live in a location that DSL and CABLE cannot get to, I am on dialup. I opted for a stage 3 install from the universal CD (which I downloaded at work). Wow, I got stage 3 up and running at a prompt in a matter of an hour or two. So, now I'm thinking okay - I'll just wvdial to the internet and setup the rest of this machine with packages I don't have. Well it turn's out wvdial is one of them. It's not even in the /mnt/cdrom/distfiles directory.

I then put my FC3 drive back in as master, put the gentoo drive as slave, booted up mounted gentoo and chrooted to the gentoo drive. I thought okay - I'll just emerge wvdial.

Well, the internet connection is okay but it tries to install 29 packages and fails when it says it cannot create /var/tmp/portage/"world"

How do I get wvdial and a gui working on this?

ok, it can't create the directory 'cause you don't have root privilages the way you got your system hooked up to the net. do just like your doing but use:

emerge --fetchonly wvdial

it will fetch everything needed to install. then boot into gentoo without an internet conection and:

emerge wvdial

it should work. good luck

Well, that's a no go. I was able to --fetchonly successfully but once I booted and tried to emerge, I got the same error. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Maybe I'm simply not quite ready for Gentoo....

so when you boot into gentoo as root and emerge you still get cannot create /var/tmp/portage/"world"? does this happen at the end or the beginning? it sounds like a file permissions error make sure that you can write in that folder. the world file is a list of installed packages so you would get that no matter what you try to emerge unless you fix it.

It happens at what seems to be the end, although I'm not quite sure how long it should take. If I try to emerge it goes through alot of compiliation (about 3 hours) and then I get the error. Does that sound like it's near the end? Gosh I hope so.

I am running 'emerge wvdial' as root - so it should have write permissions, shouldn't it?

it could be maked read only and even root couldnt writ without changing the permisions. its posible that wvdial is installed and working and it just fails to update your world file check if it works anyway. also my world file is in /var/lib/portage/ what was the exact error message?