To continue last post,
After upgrading the drive of my laptop I wanted to install Linux on it. Because I am already familiar with Gentoo I choose to install this distribution. And it is quite easy to keep up to date, but more important it is very easy to update to a new version. I know it is a lot of work to install Gentoo! But hey you do learn a lot about the workings of Linux and the kernel. 
Installing of Gentoo is best done with the Live CD they provide on there website. It provides a complete Linux environment from which you can install/manage/repair you system. They give you the option to install Gentoo really manually from the shell and have the latest portage tree installed right away or use their (GUI or shell) installer which copies part of the system installed on the live CD to the disk drive.
I installed Gentoo manually, because your install will be quite up-to-date and you do not have to update the complete system again once you have it running on its own. Their manual is very helpful and quite easy to use. With Gentoo you can choose with patch set use use for the kernel, I choose to use the vanilla kernel 2.6.27.12, because I heard that the patches of the Gentoo developers aren’t always up to standard… And the this is a newer kernel 
The sources can easily be downloaded via emerge the install system of Gentoo. And did “cd /usr/src/linux” and “make menuconfig”. The result was hours of reading and deciding how to set up the kernel…
The kernel compiled with a warning for which I applied the following patch and it seems to be running smoothly:
— arch/x86/kernel/head_32.S.orig 2008-10-14 17:04:39.000000000 -0500
+++ arch/x86/kernel/head_32.S 2008-10-14 17:03:12.000000000 -0500
@@ -600,6 +600,7 @@
.section .cpuinit.data,”wa”
.align 4
+__REFDATA
ENTRY(initial_code)
.long i386_start_kernel
Once you are done, the system is completely bare. So after this I decided to install KDE. I tried Xfce2 also present on the Live CD before, but it was not mature enough for me. Because with Gentoo everything is build from the sources it took me a wooping 5 hours to build. 
This with the kdeenablefinal USE key enable, which should make compiling faster by using enormous amounts of ram.
When it was done I still needed to find out how to get it running. I tried running xorgconfig, but X kept complaining it could not find a window port. After some trial and error I figured out I needed to load the intel-agp and i915 modules, because I forgot to build them directly into the kernel. After this the X would happily start. And I had a GUI for the first time on my system!
The only thing they don’t tell in the manual is that you can only have 4 primary partitions in your MBR. So I needed to fiddle around a bit with partitions when I wanted to add some more partitions afterwards. But for this I found a very handy tutorial. But it is not for the faint hearted, because it involves deleting and recreating partitions with data on them 
To be continued once again