Home update: I finally got a chance to try to install Gentoo at home. Time to rethink my strategy. I was trying to onstall it on a UMSDOS folder on a FAT32 partition I have at home (I'm sharing that drive with a Windows installation.) In situations where file permissions were really important I haven't had much success with UMSDOS. So the next time I try it I'm going to make a loopback filesystem and go from there. Which means I'll need a ramdisk. Time to look at my documentation