Gentoo on VMware?

Hey! I've asked this question before in the Fedora forum, but since I got no response, and it pertains to Gentoo too, I'll repost it here. I recently installed VMWare 4.0.5 on my computer with the intention of trying out a few Linux distros. So far, though, I've only been able to boot into the Slackware 10.1 install CD. I've tried booting Knoppix 3.9, Fedora Core 4, and Gentoo 2004.3-r1. All three of these CDs give me a kernel panic, screaming at me that they "attempted to kill the idle task." Now, this isn't a VMWare issue, as the Slackware CD boots fine. Also, it's not a CD burner issue, because I've been able to install the OSes on other computers, and also because I've tried mounting the downloaded and checksummed ISOs into VMWare. I've tried with both fb and nofb kernels, and I simply do not know what to do anymore. Any help would be immensly appreciated.

Um, not sure I can offer any *help* per se but it is possible to install Gentoo on VMware. I, however, am running 5.5 beta so perhaps that's the problem - you're running an older version?

The problem is, I believe, comming from the kernel used is most of the livecd distros. 2.4 is supported by VMWare 4, however 2.6 is not. I am having the same problem.

If someone know how to run a gentoo live cd with a 2.4 kernel please drop a line...

One piece of advice: Upgrade to VMWare 5. However, in theory you could use the Slackware 10.1 CD to install gentoo, if you burn a CD with the stage files, portage snapshot, and distfiles. I've never tried Slackware, so I don't know if the CD would provide a suitable installation environment, but it's worth a try.