I have found the gentoo installation documents very nice and helpful when learning the innards of Linux... If you are not in a hurry of getting it running right away, installing gentoo linux following their install guide can be very educating experience.

www.gentoo.org

In the past (many years ago) when I started experiment with Linux the Gentoo was the only distro that I was able to boot my PC. (All others I tried just locked up or something... never got to a console.) Therefore I took the challenge and did install Gentoo from scratch. It started from the disk partitioning steps, compiling kernels, and downloading and compiling all the apps to use. While it really takes a lot more time than just extracting some precompiled packages on a CD, compiling on the fly you can use optimized CPU flags, include/omit packages you need or don't need, etc. The end result was a very nice and fast running linux machine that you actually knew what was there under the hood... It was nice feeling to be in control, just what the gentoo slogan says...

Maybe if you try first some of the "boring precofigured" distros and get bored with them, try gentoo next...