I met with Kevin again on Sunday to check each others progress and to discuss any problems we were having. I finally finished installing Gentoo on the second hard-drive on one of the COSI lab machines. Now I don't have to worry about my stuff getting erased when the computers are synced. This took me a long time since I had never installed Gentoo before. Many thanks to Rouslan and Mike for helping me when I ran into problems. After I finished installing Gentoo I setup the esearch database AGAIN. At least this time it only took about 20 minutes. Then I started working on some code and have finished the code so that package info is now displayed for packages in the tree. Next I will be making installs work with the tree. This should be easy now that I can get the package info. However I am using esearch to get the package info each time which is a lot less efficient than storing package info for each package in the tree. I am still trying to figure out how to store package info in the tree. Documentation on the trees is not very good.

I have been following the kernel newbies mailing list and IRC channel. Right now most of it is over my head but people have posted very good links for learning how to do kernel programming. My favorite is: Kernel module programming guide

Kernel Newbies mailing list: Kernel newbies
1) ~30 messages per day
2)many different people posting
3)There aren't a lot of major topics that people discuss for a long time. A lot of topics are answered in 1 or 2 responses. The question most commonly asked seems to be how to make the kernel modules read and write to files.
4) I was most interested in the questions involving what steps to take to get started with kernel programming.
5)yes Archive
6) see link at top
7) An average user probably won't understand a lot of the details of the topics but it is useful to get an over view of the typical problems people have with kernel programming. Also people post very useful links to places to learn more.
8) anyone curious about kernel programming
9) new users post frequently
10) new users are treated with respect and people usually give very good advice and direction.