So after hearing all sorts of stuff about gentoo, I decided to give it a shot. It only took me two days to get the base system--i had to do it twice because lilo got jacked up...second time I used grub and all was good.

Anyways, I've gotten lots of stuf set up--X works, nvidia drivers are installed and x still runs, scroll mouse works, so hey, why not install kde. I emerge kde and on the 3rd package get a java error saying it can't compile jdk documentation. I have java support in make.conf (or wherever you put the USE flags.) Does anybody have any ideas as to why I'm getting this error? THanks for the help.

Don't know, could you please post the error message. You have synced you tree haven't you. Have you tried installing the package it want to install seperatly out of the kde ebuild? It could be a problem with blackdown java ( apart from it being rubbish ). Other that that you could inject the package or tell it not to use java.

I tried to download blackdown-jdk and i got the same error:

!!! ERROR dev/java/java-sdk-docs-1.3.1 failed.
!!! Function src-unpack, Line 17, Exitcode 0
!!! Please downloadj2sdk-1_3_1-doc.zip from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs.html and move it to /usr/portage/distfiles

Okay so I'm an idiot. I followed those directions. I had to emerge lynx so that I could actually get the doc, but now it's emerging away quite happily. Sorry for waisting your time