I am fairly new to Linux and sometimes have trouble setting Gentoo up on computers that I did not put together myself. You might consider adding a footnote about using dmesg or equivalent service to get a listing of the detected hardware in the system which could be used when manually adding modules to load at boot. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Okay, yes, 'dmesg' will sometimes contain information about what's been detected in a computer -- and there are also tools like 'lspci' that can also give you hints as to what's installed.... although nothing beats pulling the thing apart and doing some visual inspection. :-) However, this is really not within the scope of the Gentoo Handbook. Yes, it's a neat little feature -- but it's got very little with installing Gentoo. This would be better in a separate "tips and tricks" document if one exists.
We already have the following paragraph in our documentation for the manual kernel configuration part: """ However, one thing is true: you must know your system when you start configuring a kernel manually. Most information can be gathered by viewing the contents of /proc/pci (or by using lspci if available). You can also run lsmod to see what kernel modules the LiveCD uses (it might provide you with a nice hint on what to enable). """ That should be more than enough - there are far better guides on kernel configuration and system maintenance elsewhere.
