Excellent distro if you don't mind doing pretty much everything by yourslef with the aid of the excellent tool called portage. I really like Gentoo, though I couldn't get it as integrated as I found SuSE's or RH's and FC's desktops.
I usually only add sources that I trust to my yum.conf file, so that was no surprise to see in yours the ayo.freshrpms.net servers, but if you live in the US or in the American continent, searching content on european servers is not what you'd call efficient.
I'm not so sure about that... more so if all other apps are showing their icons, however if you don't see an icon you may not see it also with some themes for Metacity... which would mean the binary was built without the icon setup ;)
Hehe, you simply ask too much :lol:
Let's see, what's your distro? In FC2 you can simply put them in /usr/share/pixmaps/splash/, and to change the splash but letting the other users do the same (i.e not globally), you can use gconf-editor and then under the apps->gnome-session->options entry...
The easy answer for FC2 would be to use the neat or system-config-network programs (they're the same, actually) and under DNS you one section called host name, type there the name you want for your computer et voilà, it couldn't get any easier!!