Installing Gentoo

Since I have Gentoo on my my computer for some time i decided, after a really damaged Linux install to try Gentoo on this laptop.

I used Paragon Diskmanager 2009 to move some ext3 partitions. Unfortunately the entire filesystem was damaged afterwards and, mainly the /etc directory was vanished. Very annoying since this is the most important directory for backup and systemrestore.

Anyways, I tried Gentoo, but i was forgotten that installing Gentoo is a very lengthy process, usually taking several days.
Of course the first thing being a problem was my ATI graphics card.
I hate ATI ! On my desktop with NVIDIA card framebuffer worked out of the box and also the X driver. Even with FreeBSD i got bot drivers working without a problem.
Not with ATI. The framebuffer gave me a black screen and the fglrx driver causes dependency hell in Gentoo.
Even in Windows the ATI drivers cause problems. Unfortunately my laptop has a ATI card en there's no way to replace that.

Next problem was getting a working kernel config. Gentoo's default genkernel is bad, so you soon will have to create your own kernel.
Then there was the dependency hell of use flags, but i got that working by just looking at the ebuild (plain text files) themselves.

Finally after 2 days working I decided to go back to known OpenSuSE. After all OpenSuSE isn't that bad. I got a bit fed up with OpenSuse because of version 11.3. Upgrading with this version caused my bootloader setup to be damaged and in the latest version they have omitted both the repair option and the graphic installer (Sax2). But Gentoo comes with neither of them, so why complain?
OpenSuSE was installed in a few (unattended) hours. Everything works again since my home partition was preserved. Only had some problems with the Packman repository which at the moment seems to be a problem.