[gentoo-user] A few questions on trying to install

["Alan E. Davis" <lngndvs@gmail.com>]

Having been (mostly happily) using Ubuntu for a number of months I
yearn to install Gentoo again.  Tried a beta release of Gentoo 2008.0,
and was pleased, at least to be able to boot and not have the
confusion about naming HDDs, and using Grub was simpler.  Now, as I
approach the Live CD installer (AMD64) some problems are keeping me at
bay.

Now, however, I've tried three or four times to install on an existing
partition.  Grub will not install over the ubuntu grub, or else
something else is crazy.  After a 2 hour preparation the last time
around, emerging the extra packages, the system just stopped, and when
at long last I finally rebooted, it was back to Ubuntu.

May I ask a few questions?

  -  Live CD only installs over a clean partition.  How can I resume
an installation?

  -  I only have a unsupported atheros wifi card for connection.  I've
been using it for years.  No easy way to connect by wire.  Any ideas?

  -  I have an 80GB fast SATA drive and three slower 7000 RPM drives.
What partitions are best kept on the fast drive to maximize
performance (I have basically an all purpose workstation).  My /home
will be about 100GB: is it wiser to split it up into a smaller core
/home with several slower archive and storage partitions (Library,
Project archives, Videos, Music)?

  - Advice about UUIDs?  I lost a partition (a large one) over a
misidentification of a partition when the Ubuntu scheme started
swapping around names of devices.  Old /dev/hda became /dev/sda and
old /dev/sda became /dev/sdb.  What a mess that turned out to be.

For now this will be enough.

Alan