Sorry i was not replying, I have been very busy over the last two days, not to mention my machine was busy emerging the OS, xfree, gnome, evolution before I could actually use it.
So you installed Gentoo Linux ? There is a 2-CD set of Gentoo, based on the GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) which has pre-compiled binaries for a decent base system - including XFree, GNOME, Evolution, etc. Saves a *lot* of time, although the documentation is a wee bit lacking (you have to set your USE flags to something that isn't the default before it'll actually consider using the packages). Saved me a lot of time last time I installed Gentoo (about two weeks ago) - the base install was bootstrapped off the main CD, and then all the bigger packages were installed off the package CD. I then promptly changed to unstable and re-built everything anyway, but I had a working system to start from at least.