The vanilla-source ebuild for kernel 2.4.20 is broken, it tries to download linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 But the files is named linux-2.4.20-r8.tar.bz2
sv24 gentoo-x86 # emerge vanilla-sources Calculating dependencies ...done! >>> Downloading http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 --00:13:24-- http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 => `/usr/portage/distfiles/linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2' Resolving www.kernel.org... done. Connecting to www.kernel.org[204.152.189.116]:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 27,421,046 [application/x-bzip2] 0% [ ] 130,696 48.66K/s ETA 09:07 works fine