I set up a file that had all the packages I wanted 'emerged' (installed) and ran this command to install all of them:

cat autoemerge.txt | xargs emerge

I was hoping to see at least 1/3 of it done, but my virtual machine ran out of space well before then, so I had to clean off some disk space and keep going.

Well, the virtual machine kept choking on building fluxbox and openbox, so I tried emerging IceWm instead. Let's see how that goes.