This post is a reminder to myself more than it is intended for anyone else.  Well, that’s most of this blog.  Gentoo is a great distribution of Linux, but you have to install everything yourself. This is a good thing, because you get a very lean system, but the downside is that you are re-inventing the wheel somewhat with every install. So, without further ado, here is my current favorite configuration: Global USE flags:X cups dbus hal jpeg png gs dvi gif tiff mpeg bzip2 gtk lapack tetex -gnome -kdePackage list (basic software):* dbus (message bus system)* hal  (Hardware Abstraction Layer) gentoolkit vim/gvim x.org xfce4 thunar mozilla-firefox acroreadPackage list (technical software): blas-atlas* lapack-reference numpy (unstable 0.90.1) matplotlib (Matlab-like plotting package for Python) texlive (experimental, hard-masked) lyx evince (dvi, ps, pdf viewer) paraview (3D visualization of datasets, unstable)