And Linux (How do you pronounce that, lin- or line- ux?)

lin-ux - there was a pretty big argument about this, to the effect that Linus Torvald (the creator) had to record a sound file and post it online to settle the dispute, and thats how he pronounced it.

of the gentoo variety is way, way to difficult to load and tweak from what I've read on their site.

well, I have yet to find a good linux distro that doesn't require tweaking, pretty much all of them do. mostly because they are afraid of lawsuits so thy ship with mp3 players that cant play mp3s(redhat) and movie players that cant play movies"(SuSe), then require you do download and replace them with the real versions at your own risk.

Regards,
Justin