[Sussex] Two questions!

[John D.]

Hi list,

The first question is that due to my current undecided status, as to what to 
have as a second distro to learn, I have tried debian (thanks for the 
assistance Steve) and have since changed this to a hard disk install of 
knoppix, but would like to know how "difficult" it might be to "have a go" at 
the gentoo 1.4 that's arrived on this months cover dvd of Linuxformat?

Bearing in mind that my linux/IT knowledge isn't what it could be (and when I 
get stressed with it, my monitor gets threatened with everything from club 
hammers to genocide of all IT professionals - windows developers included 
:P), also I don't really know or haven't heard much spoken about gentoo. 

I understand that some of you use it, but am not really sure as to whether it 
would be considered "hard" or not?

And secondly, in the quest for more "eye candy" with my mandrake install, how 
would I run "xscreensaver" ? The install failed  a couple of times when 
trying it from source, but I found a mandrake source rpm, and that seems to 
have installed OK, the snag being getting the script (at least that's what I 
think it is). I have tried doing "chmod +x xscreensaver.kss" which just 
couldn't seem to find the file or directory, the icon seems to indicate it's 
a script, but when I check the file? it seems to be a "shell script" that 
contains 4.7KB of stuff i.e. like a directory.

So could anyone explain what I need to do to get this running please?