My work laptop is (well, was) running Debian because that's what we run at work on our servers, and since I wasn't familiar with debian as a distro when I arrived, I loaded debian. Although debian has a slew of packages available, dependency issues can arise when bouncing around from stable to testing to get recently updated packages (apt-get -f install ;). 
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Gentoo has been great on my home machine, so I installed Gentoo, which was a piece of cake. Until I tried to bring up my aes-crypted homedir. Whereupon losetup complained that my passphrase was too short. Umm, ok. I figured there was just a revision difference between util-linux on gentoo and debian. Loading the debian stable version of util-linux didn't fix it. Neither did compiling the same kernel as I had on debian. Umm? I love vendor specific utility patches....
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I thought about pulling apart the deb for util-linux, but since I had qemu, I just downloaded the debian install cd and installed it on a disk image. Three hours later after watching <a href="http://www.ninjai.com">Ninjai</a> and reading <a href="http://www.reddit.com">reddit</a>, I had my encrypted homedir in cleartext and on its way to being exported to gentoo. 
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