I've been trying to install Gentoo (2004.0) on my laptop for a few days now, but am experiencing odd problems.

In particular, duing a stage 1 bootstrap (which compiles EVERYTHING), if my system is left idle for a few minutes, it just shuts off completely. I find that I have to nudge the mouse every few minutes in order to prevent it from going idle & shutting down. The bootstrap often takes several hours, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna babysit this thing the whole time

If the system isn't compiling and I let it get idle, if I hit any button, the system resumes normally.

Why would it completely shut down during a compile, but come back to normal during non-compiling?

This has also lead me to believe that there's a heat problem with the laptop. The bottom is SO hot when it shuts off, again, I believe due to heavy processor usage when compiling.

ACPI is enabled, but how can I confirm if it's working properly?

Then again, the thing that confuses me is... if I keep nudging the mouse, the system stays on. This kind of voids the heat issue, as moving a mouse wouldn't prevent a hot processor from shutting a system down.

I guess my question is, am I on track with my problem, or does anyone know exactly what my problem could be? Also, how can I prevent my laptop from going into suspend mode? If I leave it for 20 minutes, I just want it to stay on.