Linux Quandries? Us Too!

My brother and I decided at about the same time to begin the transition from Windows to Linux. He wanted to switch because he had to take his school laptop in for service and the techs decided to just wipe his Windows and not reinstall it for him (ok, for him for free). I'm a software developer who, by some strange twist of fate, has had the same all-Micro$soft-all-the-way boss for most of my career and I want to branch out to more useful technologies like Java and PHP.

To start out he installed ubuntu while I did kubuntu - he on his 4-year-old IBM ThinkPad laptop and I on my 7-year-old custom-built P4 tower. We did the installs while on the phone since he's 5 hours away at school. It went smoothly for both of us...a little too smoothly. Within a few days he'd decided he wanted to try Gentoo. I was feeling much the same, so we set aside a weekend and a few gigs of hard drive space on our machines...and it was ON! I'm now using Gentoo on an old Compaq Presario 1800t laptop given to me by my father-in-law and am trying to find a weekend to backup my Vista install and put Gentoo on my new custom Quad-core tower. He has Arch on his Acer netbook and just put Gentoo on the ThinkPad.

Alright, with the background out of the way we'll get on with what we're sure you're here for :) All (ok, let's say most to be safe) following posts will be detailed explanations of the problems we've encountered and how they were solved.