I'm sure the Gentoo crowd will refute this in a day or two when they're finished compiling and can read it.
Edit: bro, a 2001 era Thinkpad is going to take like a month to finish building everything. You can probably cross build that system faster on your phone.
Yes it would be faster but it's my first go at Gentoo for the base install I want to stick to the handbook. As soon as the base install is done I will see how to make my good Debian machine compile the packages for the IBM. Besides, I have time.