The instructions on Google's Wave Protocol wiki can be easily applied to Gentoo Linux. It's actually pretty easy to set up your own wave server. This is just a minimalist working implementation of the server, it doesn't have all the features of the server at wave.google.com. In particular, you can't connect to it using a web browser as a client. So it's interesting to see how the protocol works, but it doesn't help much if you're trying to figure out how to make the best use of a Google Wave account.