Binary crosscompiled gentoo minimal gentoo install howto?

[node@are-b.org]

So i've been using my mediacenter (freevo based) for a while happily now, but the harddisk sound is just getting to loud. So i was thinking, what about a diskless mediacenter.

First thing that came up to me was to put the HDD in my server, and just boot it with a minimal PXE image, and mount the whole thing via nfs.

For some reason that doesn't seem fast though (yet I have gbit). This is 'an' option.

But then it got me thinking, the box has 638mb of ram, so i could use some of that ram as a ramdisk and have it all running from there. It'd be nice and fast yet quiet. And i could use apps like firefox, if needed via /usr/local (which that dir is inteded for isn't it) over nfs (to keep the ramdisk size descent.

Since I love gentoo, I'd really want to keep using that as some sort of a base, but I understand the whole right tool for the job.

So I'm thinking, 16-32mb might be tight, but if it's only binary packages, it should go quite a way (I remember a X based floppy distro of 2 or 3 floppies for use with a server to offer apps over X)

But here comes the hard part, let's say I do want to use gentoo for all this, where do I start?

I'm currently thinking, to create the packages I can either use a cross compiler for on the server (a xeon emt64 based system) could build the i686 binaries (or i386 if needed) for the mediacenter (a p3 1ghz), but I tried using cross compiling once for use with distcc, and ran into a few problems and just abandoned the whole cross compiling thing. So now i'm like, but why don't I chroot into it and build the packages needed there? (I guess I can't chroot into a 32bit enviroment from a 64bit one?

Secondly assuming I figured out how to make the ramdisk/initrd image, the kernel etc, how do I get the packages/files installed inside the image.
I suppose a quickpkg portage should get me started, and to tar xjvz would get that one unpacked (I suppose i'd manually have to create some entries so that portage knows it's installed) and then just emerge the binary packages from there on ...

Or maybe there exists an excellent howto for all this that I should be pointed to?

Right now, this is all just in my mind, as I have to redesign my network for other reasons, so that has priority right now .. but It would be great to get a discussion starting and pick some of your minds