I did wuss out for Dettux, but not before learning a scary amount of things about dependencies and the such

Gore : stage1 is officially not supported anymore. stage3 is the only one supported in the documentation. I didn't know they had problems; obviously the timing blows, what can I say, maybe it's Gentoo who doesn't like you!

I'm not sure what to tell you.
From the Gentoo official website (you probably know these URLs already..)
http://bouncer.gentoo.org/?product=g...minimal&os=x86
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml

I can only wish you luck in finding the CD you need.

And yes, the package management is heavily borrowed from BSD and Debian. I don't knock 'em, I just like the way they handle it better (shiny CLI display).