So once I got gentoo installed on the fulong, I decided to do an emerge world update on the system. Yes, there were some problems during this and the KDE update was a bit hairy, but it did eventually install everything in the list.
One issue I found with it was that the emerge would go for a while, then die with a compile error. If I started the emerge again it would continue for a while, then die again in a new spot on a different package. I had to do this iteration more than once because of packages breaking during compile, even though when restarted they would compile fine. Is this a problem with the Fulong where it is getting overstressed or something? The system has a full gigabyte of RAM installed so that is probably not the problem, unless there is some spot in the memory stick that is bad that I do not know about.
Another thing I found was that X broke. Everytime I fired it up, it would die with a segfault. Eventually I found a patch that was running around out there from Zhang Le that fit the bill, and once I patched it with his patch it started to work again. Apparently this is a problem with the 1.4.x series of X. In my case it is a pre-release version (1.4.0.90-r3).
The patch I installed is now on my local web site.
There are also still some problems with KDE, so I am now in the process of unmerging KDE completely from my system so that I can put in something else that I more prefer. Still haven’t quite decided WHAT, of course… 🙂