Helmholtz Coil's Journal: Gentoo Help?

With SuSE 9.1 Personal not quite getting me where I want to be on my Presario R3000Z, I thought I'd give Gentoo a try again. The last time I'd tried Gentoo was when I was installing Linux on my new desktop at work, and the process was...painful. I ultimately ended up going with Slackware 9.0 and I've stuck with it to this day.

But with the new AMD64 based laptop I thought I'd give it a go, and plunk down for the 2-CD AMD64 set (Gentoo Linux 2004.1 for x86, 2K41-x86) from the Gentoo store. Long story short-I can get everything up and running and boot into the new Gentoo install on the HD, but even though the kernel says it found my touchpad as a PS/2 it doesn't work. I've gone through the literature and it looks as though I should be able to cat through /dev/mouse, /dev/psaux, /dev/input/eventX, etc. to find it, but no go. The only thing I can see is that while the available lit suggests I should see more than one /dev/input/eventX, I only see the event0 which appears to be tied to the keyboard.

Anyone out there know the fix? At this stage I don't really care if the touchpad works a la full-fledged touchpad-I'd settle for PS/2-compatible functionality at this stage.

Update Tue May 25 07:45:06 CDT 2004: belay my last. I gave it another go last night and got it to work-the only thing I did differently that I can see making a difference was using the standard 2.4.25 kernel sources, e.g. emerge vanilla-sources instead of the Gentoo-optimized options emerge gentoo-sources or emerge gentoo-dev-sources, both of which I'd tried and both of which didn't pick up the touchpad. Now KDE 3.2 in all its glory comes up with a working mouse. All that I have to do now is to find the new modeline for X to use the whole screen and I'm done.