Damned etc-update!
Beware when gentoo wants to emerge a new base layout. There were a billion files that etc-update wanted to update, so I carefully picked through, thankfully, but it still fucked up things in a major way. It obliterated my group file, it changed the networking totally, and it also wacked away my default X session so I had twm as my window manager.. grah! Oh, and it wiped out my autoload modules too… grrrr…!
Of course I’d been chugging along blissfully unaware that there was basically a time bomb ticking for my next reboot. I’d gone into that horrorshow that is windows to work on some stuff that unfortunately only really works in windows, was getting ready to leave for Patrick’s around midnight and decided to reboot to Linux to check on email and such… that was of course when the lovely surprise of a virtually dead system hit me. For the first time in… …ever(?) I decided that a real person was more important than fixing a computer problem and went to see him and left my poor Escher sitting powered down, heh.
I finally have it working properly, only took about an hour and a half of manually rewriting config files. I’m not 100% sure that things are correct, but I have networking, internet, sound, and… basically everything important, so all good, I think.