I'm a big shit, thank you very much. <3
Also, yayz for my new StepMania setup! StepMania 4.0 + dubaiOne + Cobalt Flux + My Old Computer + Gentoo = Yeehaw! The only real issue that I've had is that my Cobalt Flux control box, for some reason, reports that it's a standard Xbox controller. This wouldn't be a problem, but the xpad kernel driver refuses to map the d-pad to buttons under any circumstance if the controller is known. I did a quick hack (i.e. forcing it to map the d-pad as buttons for that particular controller) but I think I'm going to eventually do it the right way in time (expose an option that allows someone to override those settings). I've been keeping my changes in patch files to allow me to easily update the tree of future kernels, though considering how often xpad seems to receive updates (last update was with kernel version 2.6.16.X -- we're at 2.6.26 now, and my StepMania machine is running a 2.6.25 level kernel since that's what's marked stable in portage).
The machine is pretty nice...really a testament to Gentoo's incredible flexibility (combined with a little bit of hackery by yours truly). It's set to auto-login root on boot on all consoles. There are two major runlevels -- the standard "default" and "nox." They have the same startup services, but if my additions to /etc/conf.d/local.start picks up that the user is running in the default runlevel it starts X/StepMania automagically. Speaking of that, starting StepMania is a one-step process from the command prompt. Just type sm40 from anywhere and that X startup script will start X and immediately start da StepMan. If you don't need the shell at all, however, starting StepMania is a matter of booting the machine, selecting the entry in GRUB, and letting the system boot itself up.
I ended up setting up a window manager in X just for the sake of having something there if I want to do any high-resolution work, since I don't have a console framebuffer in place. Since the system won't typically have a mouse connected to it, I configured and installed dwm -- an extremely light tabbed window manager that requires nothing more than a keyboard and a display -- to use a single tab and to full-screen everything. Terminals are set to spawn with Win+Enter, windows are paged through using Alt+J/K, and windows are brought to the main pane with Alt+Enter. Very simple to use, intuitive, and exactly what I needed. This desktop gets invoked when you type "startx" at the command prompt.
The next step is to get a menu system in place so that I can switch between multiple StepMania versions (I plan to have OpenITG and 4.0 selectable when the joystick input in OpenITG becomes usable), quit out of X, or halt the system. It'll all be joystick and keyboard-controlled so that, ultimately, I won't have to even have a keyboard attached to it. I already wrote a small joystick test program, so all that's left is figuring out the nuances of X11 programming (which may or may not be an exercise in frustration...we'll see).