Ok guys, so I'm about to build gentoo on a laptop for a person who's not too savy with linux. What I want to do is put something on it that will be nice and GUI, a frontend for iwconfig, ifconfig, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the portage tree, but it would be nice. I'd like it to be multi-environment capable (i.e. gnome, fluxbox, enlightenment, KDE, xfce, etc etc), so QT and Gnome libraries both work. What is the best idiotproof GUI frontend out there?

Oh and what's the best frontend interface for an ipod with IpodLinux? I'd like this person to warm up to it and be comfortable with it. I know ubuntu is grandmother friendly, but I want to give this person the best hardware acceleration and package management, and that is what the gentoo portage tree does best.

Take a look at the gnome network manager gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/

I've been using it and like it.

hmm, there are a significant number of masked packages, does it not work well in the portage tree?

Sorry, I don't know about it in Gentoo. I guess you need to see why the masked packages are masked.