Was Yggdrasil that bad? My first distro was Slackware and, with the help of the book accompanying the CD, it was doable. Sure you had to define modelines for X11 (the Xorg name didn't exist bad then) to support your monitor and supporting GPUs was quite the endeavour, but in the end we'd make it work. We'd even compile and run Emacs (in 45 minutes or so).