Nvidia High Definition on Gentoo

tl;dr: Install ALSA as a module otherwise alsaconf won’t work

I didn’t read the upgrade guide before installing the latest version of xorg-server. This broke my mouse and keyboard. A quick read of the upgrade guide revealed that this was because I wasn’t using hal and I hadn’t changed my xorg.conf to take this into account.

I made some changes to my xorg.conf but I had the same problem; no mouse or keyboard. I decided to rebuild xorg-server with hal support. First I needed to enable the correct kernel options. I had some other stuff I was meaning to add to (and take out of) the kernel for a while and why not do an upgrade at the same time.

Mistake.

About an hour of typing time (not including compile time) my devices are being recognised, X is working and I can connect to the net. ALSA is not working.

One more recompile and it is sorted; ALSA must be compiled as a module for automatic detection of sound cards and stuff to work. I don’t know why this is or if there is another workaround but that is what worked for me