About a week ago, my Gentoo box was in a bad state where there were some packages that would not install, so I was carefully emerging what I could and filed a bug about one in particular that I could not emerge.

Then I got a new kernel, 2.6.32-gentoo-r7, and I booted from it.* Eeeek. No X11 at all.

The logs informed me about some things to do, and I did them, re-emerging a number of things.* I paid particular attention to emerging anything with x11 or xorg in its name.
Long wait.
I got to a point somewhere in there where X11 started, but would recognize neither keyboard nor mouse.

I kept going.* The keyboard started to work.* I could actually log in, but that's not all that useful without a mouse.
Then I started getting complaints about USE flags needed to make some particular packages support some other packages.* I did those too.
Now I'm at the state where "emerge -aDNvu" denies there's any work to do, and revdep-rebuild reports health.
Still no mouse.
Fortunately, I have a laptop that can ssh into the box and I can work with it, but it's still essentially headless.

Anybody run into this state recently?*
If there's a quick fix, I'd rather not make another bug.
--
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD