Trying Debian and Gentoo

Had a break away from work (and my computer) and now I've caught up with things I've decided to have a play with different Linux distros. Firstly I am in the middle of installing Gentoo (Just built the Kernel), this is mainly for the re-learning of how to install linux the manual way (I last did this about 8 years ago with slackware) and the other is Debianwhich I will install at a later date. Another possible is SUSE, but still researching that distro. I'm not looking at any other Redhat like distros as Caos is good (yum/rpm based), and is in some ways the Debian of Redhat type distros.