I'm kind of new to Linux. I started reading about it and decided to try it out. Im very good with computers and know in general what im doing with Linux. I have installed SUSE succesfully before. I want to try out Gentoo but i'm having trouble with the install. I have attempted this install about five times! I first tried the GTK graphical install and it worked fine until halfway through unpacking the stage tarball, it failed. I have since tried the minimal installation in text mode and am having trouble downloading the stage three tarball. On Gentoo's website, i followed the handbook instructions for intallation. I got to the point where i had to mount the drives and activate the swap partition. Afterwards, i changed directory to /mnt/gentoo and proceeded to download the tarball. At about 80% i got an error message saying that the destination was full and it could not save the file. I have tried many things to get this to work and frankly, im stumped. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Do you know how big the tarball is and how much disk space you have (that would be the obvious answer based on the error message)?

Personally i would say go for debian, the whole idea of compiling everything from source is a bit daunting even for me and i would class myself as intermediate+ (a couple of rungs up the ladder from newbie).

Was that destination full really?
I mean to say was your hdd full?

My hd is completely empty. I wiped it for the new install all i have done with it was format the partitions. It is an 18gig drive so there is no way it is full. if you go to the gentoo x86 handbook you can read the exact instructions i was following. It should work easily. I think it might have something to go with the gentoo mount point but im still kind of new and don't fully understand it.

If you want any help with this issue we need to know much more than you have revealed so far. First let us know of your disk layout, post fdisk -l output. Then, to see what and where is mounted, post also output of mount command.

the issue is not with mounting. anll the drives nount and the swap partition is activated. I then download the stage three tarball and it won't save it. it says there isn't space to save the file

You are trying to download and save the stage file into RAM. This is why I asked for additional information. Since you refuse to do that I cannot see how I can be any further help here.