Gentoo shows you how to setup and format the partitions on you hard drive for an OS. It then shows you how to cretae directories and mount the the partiton onto your file system tree. It shows how to setup networking by editing the necessary files. You need make sure you have the date and time set correctly. It shows you where things get placed in the system tree. You learn how to compile the kernel which is the heart of the system. You learn about device drivers in the kernel. You learn about many commands in the system. A very good way of learning about "chroot" which can used to created to protected ftp and web servers. You learn about what packages are required for different purposes. I think I'll stop there.

well, to summarise (because these are my thoughts aswell)

Slackware is totaly awesome.
LFS -> build your own linux and learn heaps
Gentoo is like LFS- you are building your own linux in a way.
Debian eats newbies for breakfast. Learning...

titanium_geek

take a steer away from gentoo and go with a minimal distro, I would reccomend Crux (a true jewel if you ask me), but stick with a well-honed distro like debian for a while first as to get an overall understanding of the system's ins and outs.

Okay, this really isn't completely related to the question at hand, but more related to one reason why the question was originally asked.

If you're using ndiswrapper for your wireless card, when you upgraded to FC4 you lost that functionality temporarily because FC4 included a kernel upgrade. You'll have to download the ndiswrapper source, unpack it, make distclean / make / make install, modprobe ndiswrapper, and ndiswrapper -m.

Then check to make sure the drivers are recognized with ndiswrapper -l. Stop and restart the network services, and you should be good to go.

But then, if you're not using ndiswrapper, ignore everything I just said.