[Sussex]login/logout/reboot/shutdown question (Gentoo)?

[John D.]

Hi list,

Disaster struck, because at stupid Oclock this morning, I'd managed to really 
screw it up. For the life of me, I don't know what I did wrong, but the 
bugger wouldn't boot, then after various go's at changing things it booted, 
then it wouldn't fire up a GUI etc etc etc

Only what I should have expected really. That's what happens when you get 
meddlers like me who don't really know what the hell they're doing - just 
messing around changing things on a hit or miss basis.

Anyway, to cut a short story even shorter, for the moment, I've put knoppix on 
my hard drive so I've got something, then i can go back to "square one" and 
re-install again ? dunno, I could see if I can do something with this? as the 
object of the exercise is not to end up going for a particular distro "per 
se", but to end up with a distro that isn't one of them on the endless every 
6 months download/buy/obtain the latest version. That's the round about I 
wanted to get off.

I must have missed something in the first place as I checked everything that I 
could think of and changed as many settings etc as I could find ideas and 
suggestions for (jesus, doesn't gentoo forums get bloody boring after about 6 
hours of searching, reading and meddling! :( )

So, right now, square one is as good a place as any to recommence!

What would the straw poll opinion be. Re-install gentoo? or try learning how 
to modify Knoppix into normal debian? 

As  a mediocre system is better than no system as all !
regards

John D.