I'm not particularly familiar with Gentoo, and hadn't ever successfully
installed it (well, I had, but I didn't have the X server up and running in
time for my LAN party, so I nailed it). However, recently, I picked up
Sabayon Linux ( http://www.lxnaydesign.net ) and it made it easy to install.
What I like, though, is that it came with KDE, XGL, hardware graphics
acceleration, and takes care of a lot of the long configuring that I was
afraid of when I initially tried to install Gentoo. Might wanna try
installing that, if all you want to do is test Gentoo out.

--Patrick C.