Have I made a terrible mistake?

Sorry, this is going to sound like a rant but I really do want to get this working. My previously gentoo-base studio machine died, and I've had to rebuild with hardware sufficiently different to warrant a reinstall. Not wanting to go down the path of several days of compilation I thought that 64studio might be a good way to go. I am using the 3.0 beta3 so maybe this is my issue. So far I have been plagued by problems: My rt2500 WiFi card is not recognised. I can't seem to find exactly which sources are used for my kernel. Even if I was to find the sources, I can't find any references to the .config file used by the 64studio developers so I can grab this and modify it. JACK won't start. Ardour won't see my Tascam US-428 under the ALSA drivers (it does appear in /proc/asound/cards). I can't actually tell if ALSA knows I have the 428 (and thus four input ports). I'm getting nowhere fast. I have managed to download the linux headers claimed to be the ones needed by module-assistant to create the rt2500 driver, but m-a still fails. I guess I need the full kernel sources (plus that .config). I'm confused as to why this seems so much more complex than under the supposedly geek-oriented gentoo. Sorry for the whinge, is there a comprehensive source of documentation for this kind of thing somewhere I have missed?