hey guys. ok, my first attempts at installing gentoo failed miserably. I understand the whole process, BUT when the installation manual states its time to simply "emerge system" i always get a compilation error along the way, which the manual somewhat leaves me in the dark on. according to it, it should work. im thinking that perhaps i was using the pent-3 tarball instead of the i686 one. to be honest, im not sure which one i should be using. would that be the difference between compiling correctly or not or is there something more to it? i serously dont want to be disappointed again when my system is compiling 4 hours into it, and it aborts, and im basically screwed.

also, what would be the command to wipe a partition clean? because i know 'mk2fs' doesnt exactly wipe anything, and would the fact that i still had junk on the partition during compilation mean the difference too?