There are ways around these, though. I’ve been (privately) recommending to use the SystemRescueCD, which is an excellent little LiveCD based on Gentoo Linux. It has just seen its 1.0.0 release, and includes a lot of handy system tools, as well as a basic X environment with WindowMaker. At a mere 179 MB, and sporting a 2.6.24.2 kernel, it is an excellent platform to start a Gentoo installation with. The x86 version also includes a 64bits kernel, so you can use it to chroot into an amd64 stage. There is a whole range of partitioning and filesystem tools, including Reiser4, as well as read-write access to Windows filesystems with ntfs3g.

With a choice of 3 browsers (lynx, links and firefox) you can easily access the online documentation, as well as the forums. Then there is irssi to get live support on our #gentoo IRC channel. And you even get the choice of 4 shells: bash, ksh, tcsh and zsh. Nano, emacs and vim are among the editors provided. SystemRescueCD also has tools onboard for hardware testing, cryptography, network analysis and unpacking all kinds of archives.

Apart from a recent LiveCD, you may also want a recent stage3 to kickstart your Gentoo install. Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins is providing unofficial stages of the current stable, at
http://funtoo.org/linux/. I’ve found these very helpful and as these have an up-to-date expat version, they can prevent a lot of problems.

Of course, soon we should have fresh official stages and release media.