It's all installed but all I see is black!

Yup! It's called a command line, and that's Gentoo!

Strictly speaking, any linux distro is just that blank page with just hostname ~ #

All the other stuff you see, all the fancy graphics and nice ways of using the mouse to play with programs and stuff is part of the "graphical user interface (gui).

With most distros you get one already built and ready to go but this is Gentoo which means "choice" and "build it yourself!" The first thing to do is to choose if you want to go the full DE (desktop environment) route or the smaller WM (window manager) route. That is a misnomer really because every GUI needs a WM

A quick and easy lowdown on window managers and graphical systems.

First of all you need what's called an "X server" and unless you're living in the dark ages that is likely to be Xorg (everyone used to use Xfree but in 2004 they changed their license, consequently most of the developers left, forked the project and created a new one (virtually the same as the old one) but it has modularised in the past couple of years and they are now two distinctly different X servers). Basically speaking, an X server communicates with the hardware, recieving signals made by the mouse and keyboard and relays those signals to any graphical programs you have running. I could explain how to emerge xorg-x11 (hint) but the Gentoo page already has an exhaustive step-by-step guide for you to follow.

After installing "X" you'll no wonder want to install something nice and easy to work with. For beginners I suggest installing a DE at the start, you can install as many other window managers to try anyway, you usually just select the one you want from the sign in screen with GDM/KDM/slim/etc. These 3 are probably the most popular:

• Gnome
- Especially popular since Ubuntu made it look nice. Works brilliantly with compiz-fusion for some great eye-candy
• KDE
- Now at version 4. Not my personal favourite, I always seem to get problems with it but others don't. Well worth a try.
• XFCE
- Based on Gnome's gtk toolkit and is like a smaller version of Gnome

All of those can be quite resource heavy so if you have anything less than a P3/4 then i suggest going a bit more minimal