I gave myself a nice treat and bought a new laptop. After some consideration, I decided to go with the HP Pavilion DV7 3150EB. Years ago, I didn't take an HP laptop as the reviews were not that satisfying. However, it looks as if that is past. So I first took a stab at the Gentoo Quickinstall for LVM2 and RAID and gave myself a (software) RAID-1 system with everything except / and /boot using LVM2. To my satisfaction, following the guide was a breeze and it worked out just fine.

The real hurdle, that I just won, was to get the wireless up and running on WPA2. I noticed earlier (before I bought the laptop) that getting the Broadcom 43255 wifi (Broadcom Corporation Device 4357 (rev 01)) might be a challenge. Well, the open-source b43 driver didn't detect the wifi card, but the (closed-source) Broadcom STA driver (as supported by Broadcom itself) does. To install it on Gentoo, it was as easy as unmasking broadcom-sta and installing it. It worked immediately, but not for WPA/WPA2 networks (and I am not going to put my wireless in non-WPA2 mode). Luckily, it was easy to discover that it was wpa_supplicant itself that was giving the card a hard time as non-WPA networks worked flawlessly. A quick stab at the wpa_supplicant.conf file gave me the final success I needed: ap_scan=2 did the trick.

Tomorrow: getting the webcam working...