re: You're about 36 hours late....
One of my friends is nuts about gentoo(he runs it on a mac). I think its better for just a general linux distro. but still hear great things about it. my favorite so far has been knoppix, which is based on debian. I never liked Redhat, there were always too many exploits in it, and because they were so big of a target they were too scared to do the things that other distros did to make thier systems competitive with windows.
Regards,
Justin