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I am in the process of installing Gentoo linux on a PC at work and also an old pc at home (the joys of ssh). Over the years I have installed Slackware, Redhat, Suse and Debian but none of those was as complex as installing Gentoo. The handbook is absolutely essential and it is probably best to read it through before starting (tip: install stage 3).
Installation is not just running a setup program, it is down to the basics of mounting file systems, chrooting, untarring, building kernels etc. I have learnt a lot from it and I now think I am competant enough to fix a broken linux system from a boot floppy. I had to install Gentoo this way as the Gentoo CD would not boot and I had to find some linux boot floppies to get things rolling.
Setting it up takes ages as it is building most things from source. The USE preferences variable allowed me to tell it I want perl and python but not ruby. I ran an emerge vim to get vim installed and, to my surprise, I got VIM 6.3 (which I didn't know was out) with python and perl support built in!
I haven't set up X yet. I may do it at home as an exercise but I dread to think how long it will take. You are supposed to be able to install precompiled packages but at my one attempt (lilo) it still spent 20 minutes compiling it from source.
Gentoo in a nutshell:
* Don't think about it unless you have broadband
* Don't think about it unless you are happy at a command prompt
* Don't think about it unless you are patient
Gentoo: something to do in the background while reading RSS feeds.
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