As far as cages, the bigger the better is always the rule with me. You can look at www.Martinscages.com and you should find some excellent cage setups there. They are a little spendy but are great cages, however you do need to have room to clean them. I have an R695 and it's terrible trying to fit one into my tub. For bedding you should use either Carefresh, Yesterday's News, or aspen. You could even house them in a 40 gallon tank if you'd like, but it's a lot harder to clean and lug around, they don't get as much air circulation and it's a little harder to hang items such as hammocks etc. Make sure that any wire cage you get has wire spacing no larger than 1/2 inch, to protect their feet. 1/4 inch is even better.

Here is my website link. On this page you can see some of the cages I use here for my rats, and I will attach another pic as well.

http://www15.brinkster.com/luckies4me/About_Us.html

Scroll all the way down to the bottom. Sorry bout the ads but I am fixing that shortly.

And on this page, you can find out more about what to feed.

http://www15.brinkster.com/luckies4me/feeding.html

I hope this info helps you. And hey if you are curious to see how baby rats develope look at this page I am in the process of making.

http://www15.brinkster.com/luckies4me/babies.html

Hopefully one day soon I will be done with the site! Hey if you click on home, it's snowing there.