RealPlayer and Gentoo Q's

[Adrian Gordinier]

I have two questions/problems.

(1.)
I have two systems running Mandrake 9.1 and on one I installed
RealPlayer8 and it is working fine installed in /usr/lib. via binary I
think. On the other system I have tried installing it as a binary file
and as a RPM in /usr/lib, /usr/share, and /usr/local and none of them
will work at all. What I get when it tries to start, even the very first
time you install and it runs, it loads the framework of the player but
most of it is greyed out and only like one button shows up. None of the
player works and in fact the process of the program is frozen it seems
since I have to kill it to close it. I am having no other problems with
other programs what am I doing wrong here?

(2.) A while back I "attempted" to install Gentoo from stage 1 tarball
but when you get to the first emerge sync that creates the portage tree
I can't go any further it seems that I can't connect or something. I can
ping out to sites and stuff and I even put that system in my router's
DMZ and still no luck emerging. Would there still be some protocols
blocked in the DMZ that wouldn't allow it to work. Do you Gentoo guys do
anything special when you update?

Thank you in advance for any help someone may be able to offer.

Adrian