Operating systems - Linux II.

I have decided to install Linux on my spare notebook because Microsoft stopped support of Windows 98 that were preinstalled on it.
So I started to choose the most suitable Linux distro. There were 3 distros in my short list - Slackware, Gentoo and Ubuntu. Slackware because my favourite Linux LiveCD SLAX is based on it, Gentoo because it makes me to break into Linux deepest, and Ubuntu because it is the distribution very accordant with open source principles.
I tried Gentoo at first. The reason was very simple, I received an offer for server hosting and one option was to control the whole server using the application prepared for Gentoo. So I was wondering what this distribution looks like.
I made 3 attempts to install Gentoo on notebook - unsuccessfully. First time I stopped the installation after preparing partitions on hard disk and wasn't patient enough to read documentation how to continue. So I loaded Live minimal install CD again and started from scratch. To be able to copy and paste commands from documentation on web, I ran sshd on the notebook after booting Live CD and connected to it using ssh client. It went very well until the PC, I was connected from, crashed during the compilation of kernel.
Third time I determined not to be lazy and type all commands locally. It went slowly then "copy and paste" method, but I learnt a lot about installing Linux. Unfortunately installation wasn't again successful - OS loader couldn't find and load kernel. As I thought, I wasn't the only one with this kind of error (Kernel Panic), it was well described on the internet forums, but the solution didn't help me. Under pressure of time I gave up and grabbed another distro - Ubuntu.
I was successful with installing Ubuntu on the notebook (although the notebook is about 5 years old), but I have to tell that installing Gentoo was more fun and I learnt a lot about Linux.