I should first point out that I'm a complete newbie to Linux (in case this is a silly question), had RH7 on my machine for a week then started the gentoo linux installation last night over the top of it.

Just as redhat did, gentoo chooses SMP by default in the 'make menuconfig' of kernel 2.4.24, and if I compile this kernel my machine hangs on startup with 'clocks=0, cycles=0' etc (The machine I'm typing on is the same machine I'm installing linux on so please excuse my un-specifics ;)... I can put 'nosmp' on the kernel line and the machine starts up fine, but I assume I *want* smp support? (My processors a 3.1GHz Intel P4 with Hyperthreading). Or if I don't want smp (I've heard it's unstable) is there a patch to get the kernel to compile with the support removed (can't find symbol smp_num_cpus)?

Additionally my machine won't shutdown properly (and didn't on RH either) - 'Power down.' displays and nothing happens. I'm using 'shutdown -h now'

Aaand, when I add VGA=795 to the kernel line my screen goes light black and nothing displays. My video cards an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200, and I've tried compiling the kernel with both 'nvidia' checked and unchecked.

Any help would be more than gladly and greatly appreciated :) !

- Mab

sounds like you used genkernel to compile your kernel if thats the case you should manualy build it and I bet most of your problems will go away.

somtimes genkernel can break a install instaed of making it faster.

I thought noone was going to message back :-) Thank you =D

I actually opted for the make configuration way of installing this (as specified in the gentoo documentation). ie. running 'make menuconfig', 'make dep && make bzImage modules modules_install' and then manually copying the files across to /boot/. Thank goodness I avoided the genkernel way of doing it then :P

What kernel did you emerge ?

as for the power down I have two pc that work fine but I do have an older pc that wont shut down properly I never really looked into it so I can't help there

To get the power down working u need to compile the kernel with Power Management Support and also use ACPI to get battery and other additional support. I'm using a Dell Inspiron 5150 and runing Debian on it, everything works fine except for suspend.

D