Gentoo Linux has its problems. Gentoo once heralded the source-based distribution revolution, but in the second half of my time with gentoo, things went from bad to worse.

There are many problems with Gentoo’s QA team, like the lack of proper coordination most of the time, the lack of a real Gentoo-based effort for continuous integration testing, and the lack of an absolute rulebook of “dos ad don’ts” for what concerns ebuilds. The main weakness in Gentoo’s Quality Assurance is developers not giving a shit about quality.

"The latest ebuild available on gentoo targets GNU Smalltalk 3.0.2. 3.1 has been out for quite some time and there are several improvements available via git. This post describes what I did to make things work on my Gentoo amd64 system..."

"...So - you've always wanted to help out Gentoo? A common way to help is by providing a mirror - either distfiles or rsync. We have a good list of mirrors, both rsync and distfiles. Setting up a mirror is a huge commitment and my thanks go out to all those who do. Due to the large requirements for diskspace, bandwith and cpu power, this is usually not an option for individuals.

In celebration of Gentoo's 10th birthday, the Gentoo engineering team banded together and created the Gentoo 10 LiveDVD of the latest packages for this rolling Linux distribution. Less than a month after releasing Gentoo 10.0, the Gentoo Ten team has released Gentoo 10.1.The Gentoo 10.1 LiveDVD contains enhancements and bug-fixes since the 10.0 release at the start of the month...

Many times I can read about how people look at Gentoo and its nature of always compiling each packet at installation. Often it’s believed that Gentoo is faster because the compilation can optimize for the processor being used. That may be true, but that is not what characterizes Gentoo.

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.

Gentoo is turning 10 years old. For the last ten years, Gentoo has been committed to bringing the cutting edge source based distro to users that need more flexibility than binary packages can give them. With a vibrant community and over 300 developers, much has been accomplished since the beginning, Gentoo remains true to its origin.