Thanks for the replies so far.
They're running Ubuntu now, but I'm not very pleased with the results. The system is slower then I expected, nothing like for example my server, a 800 MHz Pentium3. I want them to switch to Gentoo, but make the transition as fast as possible (convincing them to drop Windows was hard enough already). But if you guys think the performance gain of compiling for Pentium3 with Gentoo instead of installing i386 binaries with Ubuntu is negligable, then I don't even have to bother.
If you *do* expect some noticeable gain, then I want the transition to be as fast as possible. Taking their hard drive home with me is not an option. I want to go over there with, say, a USB drive and a LiveCD, boot from the LiveCD, whipe the Ubuntu-partitions (/home is on a separate partition), and somehow copy over a Gentoo *system* that I *somehow* made with my Pentium4.
I need your help/suggestions on filling in the *somehow* (and probably even the *system*, since I won't be able to run it on my own system).
I do have VMWare, but I guess that isn't configurable to the point of telling it what cpu and motherboard components the virtual machine must have
