Well I added a few more use variables and removed some others and then started the stage 1 build process. It is working. I was surprised that I was able to get this far, but the Gentoo group have some REALLY GOOD install instructions. I only had the couple of questions that got answered here. I'll let everybody know how this goes. Thank God for cable modem. I'm getting 20-26 Kbps from ibiblio.org. Brian