Please excuse the bizarre Subject (grin) !
I've named my new toy (ASUS 1005HA) Horace after the great Roman poet
-- my desktop machine is Aristotle or rather his 3rd New Body (ANB3) --
& it has come alive, booting from its HDD at the 2nd try
after I emerged & configured Kernel 2.6.31-gentoo-r4 + Lilo
without any use of the Internet. I used the Minimal Install on a USB stick,
grabbed the latest Portage Snapshot & copied the distfiles from ANB3.
Otherwise, I followed the basics of the standard install procedure
& used a kernel config file I found via Google to get started
(it included a few of the more obscure device drivers which are needed);
it panicked & I then checked it carefully vs the config file from ANB3
(the same kernel version, of course), making a number of changes.
2nd time, it booted ok & I got a login prompt. I still needed to go back
with the USB stick & delete the root password '*' to actually login.

Now I have to get Ethernet working & then start building the real system.
To be shown the recommended driver 'atl1c', you have to say 'Y'
to the 'experimental code' option right at the beginning of 'menuconfig':
it is still considered alpha by the kernel devs. Of course,
I still don't know whether Ethernet will actually work as advertised,
but the really big hurdle has been jumped over.

Thanks to all those who advised & encouraged (big smile).

--
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SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb
ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca