It's VERY good. If you want to learn how to make the system work by your own hands this is a distro to check out.
Some points.
1. you have to compile a lot of stuff from source, which takes a long time. This isn't so bad aside from the time it takes to go through it.
2. Best is if you have at least a cable/dsl modem. Dial up modems take an eternity.
3. If you have a Pentium processor you can use the stage 3 installation, which has a lot of pre-compiled options to make things go faster. If you have an AMD processor you need the stage 1 installation, which is very time consuming.
4. You have to deal with Portage, which is a pretty good system for installation and removal and update of packages.
5. Check out comments by doing a search for Gentoo on
Check out the home page at
and finally get an idea of what you need by checking out the forums at forums.gentoo.org.
J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group