I've just spent 4 (complete) days trying to install gentoo. I've been using Slack for about a year now and finally decided I should take the plunge into gentoo. Got a little free time and downloaded the minimal install disk, got rid of the Slackware partition and started through the long and laborious process of the handbook. After 3 separate attempts (with stage1, stage2 and stage3 respectively) I've given up today.

To cut a long story short, I finally realised that there must be something wrong with my hardware that kept giving me 'segmentation fault' and 'No error bug, must be a hardware or OS error' errors all through the installation. I mean, whenever I tried to 'emerge' something, if it was a huge installation like X or maybe gtk, it would compile for an hour or so and then give me the error. I've finally given up today, and am going to dig out my slack 10.2 disks from inside and have a happy installation .

But some good did come out of trying to install gentoo. I've got a pretty good idea about what options to select (and what not to select) while compiling the kernel .

But other than that, I learnt never to mess with gentoo again.

/edit: Forgot to mention ... if I do have hardware issues, for some reason slackware and windows XP are not that sensitive to it as gentoo. They work perfectly fine.