There was an interesting thread I read in the forums this morning that was talking about the general process of stabling software. Got me thinking about the distribution as a whole, and why I like it, and why I keep coming back to it. In short, why I freaking love Gentoo.

"After several days of being read-only the Gentoo Forums are back online after the upgrade to MySQL 5 and a full conversion to UTF-8..."

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...

« Hi All, Just wanted to announce the Funtoo Forums, which are now available for use at http://forums.funtoo.org. Please create an account and enjoy them. I hope that they will become a great resource for Funtoo users...»

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.

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.

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.