But the real big question on my mind, as the proprietor of a new start-up IT company, will Gentoo Linux have a future or will another fork of Gentoo, such as Sabayon Linux assume the role to provide support for a possible Gentoo-based Enterprise Server? Financially, many of us would pay for support services from Daniel Robbins.

"Here is my offer to resolve the most recent Gentoo leadership crisis, and is an offer I am making to the current Gentoo trustees, who are the ones who need to decide whether to accept or refuse it. [...] If I return as President, I will preserve the not-for-profit aspect of Gentoo. Beyond this, you can expect everything to be very, very different than how things are today. Here is a basic overview of the changes I will be making in how the Foundation operates, basically by refocusing on its core mission..."

In 2004 Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, walked away from the project after creating the nonprofit Gentoo Foundation to handle its intellectual property (IP). In a blog post last month, Robbins wondered if he should take back the software, since it didn't appear the foundation was taking care of things.

I finally removed myself from all the Gentoo mailing lists. I did this with some sad thoughts. I had been using gentoo for almost 4 Years and it tough me quite a lot about Linux. Unfortunately I have been seeing the Gentoo project die over the past Year or so. After going to the Gentoo UK meeting in 2006 I noticed that nothing important / technical was discussed. It was all about the flame wars going on on the mailing lists.

This is the second part of the Gentoo Tutorials. In the first section “Minimal Gentoo Installation” we have built a fresh Gentoo system using the minimal install disk and downloading the stages/ports and building the kernel. This left us with a bare Gentoo OS. In this second Gentoo Tutorial we are going to customize and add different software to the system.

In April, 2003, the Linux guys from UITS at Indiana University were promoting Gentoo Linux at the 2003 Linuxfest. UITS gave a great presentation of Gentoo and I can see why they were one of the first ones to host a Gentoo Mirror in the US. They kept telling us that installed Gentoo for the first time was not easy. They even demonstrated a Stage 3 install, which at that time, was not easy. I just remembered that I wanted to try Gentoo when I got the chance.

There is a large interest among the Gentoo and larger Linux user community for me to come back as Chief Architect. And recently, I found out that in theory - maybe with a bit of fighting - the position was still available to me, as I was still registered as the President of the Gentoo Foundation up until recently.

So, I have been asked this question many times. And of course the assumption is that I am some sort of a masochist who enjoys wasting time on compiling packages. However, that is not entirely true. There are some other reasons why, after trying Ubuntu (started linux with it), Gentoo and then Arch I settled on Gentoo.

Last night I decided to give Gentoo 2008.0 beta2 a try. All I got to say is wow! It installed much easier than Gentoo 2008.0 beta1 and is probably one of my fastest Gentoo installs ever.