Some days ago I've installed Gentoo 1.4 on my Dell box because I was sick of the RPM hell. The good thing is that Gentoo is up-to-date concerning system software packages. The bad thing is that Gentoo is up-to-date concerning system software packages? Err? Well, in case you are able to compile the sources on your own ... fine! But commercial software very often requires old system packages, mostly older versions of the GLIBC. IBM's WebSphere 4.0 is such a candiate (in fact the bundled JVM is affected) and therefore it requires some tweaking in order to run on Gentoo 1.4. After some investigation I found out that WebSphere 4.0 requires a GLIBC with kernel 2.2.5 support. Fortunately the GLIBC which comes with Gentoo 1.4 can support this feature. It is, however, disabled by default and therefore you must recompile the GLIBC. The following steps are required: [code] 1. Change into the directory /usr/portage/sys-kernel/linux-headers 2. Emerge linux-headers-2.2.20.ebuild 3. Drink some coffee 4. Change into the directory /usr/portage/sys-libs/glibc 5. Emerge glibc-2.3.2-r1.ebuild 6. Drink lots of coffee or take a walk [/code] Make sure that you do not have "ntpl" in your USE variable before rebuilding the GLIBC. Afterwards WebSphere 4.0 should run fine =)