Well,

   I will not be burning a gentoo Linux yet. My CDRW has decided to crap
out. I can no longer position the read head for CDR/W disks. A HW error.
Still reads CD formats. So it's off to the wilds of Southern KC for a
new writeable, any suggestions? 

Also I'm building a Linux From Scratch (LFS) on a new disk. Plugged it
into an existing system, should have a bare system by tomorrow.

I'm not sure I like the LFS. I doesn't include any of the add on
programs (X, multimedia, chat, mail, apache, etc). Not that it is hard
to find these things. Still it'll be a good learning experience, it
already has me creating some install/configure scripts (in addition to
the ones they wrote).