So what's an emerge? Something about something emerging? Or is it more like electronic merge?

emerge is the interface to Gentoo's package management system. I'm having Lightnin' download, compile, and install new versions of everything while I'm off doing other stuff. It's cool. It just takes a really freakin' long time, especially on Lightnin'...600 MHz of pure power!

Gotcha. Good stuff. I use apt-get for dependency resolution and automatic installation of packages. Not sure if it does upgrades.

So you can queue a bunch of packages up and just let them go (and hope they work)?

You can type "emerge world" and bam, it checks for new versions of everything you've got on your system, upgrades everything, takes care of the entire dependency tree, and automatically gets rid of the old packages for you. It's why I use Gentoo.

Damn. That's pretty slick. I'll keep that in mind if I ever run a home linux box. Work mandated Red Hat 7 and just recently upgraded to SuSE 9(?).

Yeah. I've heard of people making it work on other distros, but it doesn't look easy. Over my head, anyway.