Well, I tried the gtk+ based graphical installer on a VMWare virtual machine. I am sad to say it failed painfully – and did so after many hours of emerging and compiling. Part of the problem was in the fact that I had selected to install enlightenment, fluxbox and blackbox (to play around with some different wm’s I hadn’t messed with previously) and the installer chose to install those and gnome and kde. Needless to say, it was many hours to go. Thankfully (?) after about 4 hours the installer failed on some ebuild or other (I don’t recall what it was right now) and that was that.
I tried it again. With the exact same results. The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So, now I have a working VMWare install of Gentoo 2006.0 using the minimal install disk and am building enlightenment, fluxbox and blackbox the “older fashioned” Gentoo way – via a simple emerge call.
Final score: VMWare: 2, Gentoo Graphical Installer: 0, Gentoo minimal installer: The winner by default.