I've had so much trouble installing gentoo into a vbox vm and then setting up X that I got really sick of it and found a premade vm (vmware) and installed... unfortunately I really do not like kde plazma or really just about anything about kde. Plus the version is old enough that its giving plenty of problems with updating... finding piles and piles of masked pkgs .. masked by EAPI.
I tried just updateing portage to get started but even there its a herd of headaches. I don't like kde and really don't want to go thru a bunch of humping and bumping with it in the middle of things. Any advice about slick ways of getting fully updated but dumping kde on the way.