I've got Gentoo installed on the laptop now. Since I got home from work, I've installed VMWare on the laptop as well so I can run both OSes simulatenously. I think I've decided that Gentoo really isn't too bad of a distribution. It's funny though that I've been too busy playing with base

I like portage. It reminds me of FreeBSD ports. It's not too bad.

Bootsplash is pretty. I had a little trouble getting it to work at first, but I think I was going through it too fast. The newer version, fbsplash, works pretty well with the 2.6 kernel. I got that working but I've run into a snag there. I think I'm just being stupid about something. I think I have that figured out... finally. It's recompiling as I'm typing this.

After rebooting, that doesn't seem to have fixed it. I'll get it figured out eventually though.