Gentoo Linux Musings

ChaserPnk writes "Gentoo has been in the news recently. First with the news that Daniel Robbins leaving Gentoo and then with Gentoo Linux 2004.1 being recently released. Have you ever wondered how Gentoo got started? An article at IBM DeveloperWorks explains how. Get to know the history of Gentoo." darthcamaro wrote in with a related story that suggests that Gentoo is preparing to change directions soon: "Is Gentoo gearing up to be the third major enterprise distro? That's what an article running on internetnews.com points to. They talked to the head of Gentoo's enterprise efforts. For those that think that Gentoo Enterprise is far off, Gentoo's guy figures if they had the cash they'd be up and running in 6 months."

Have you ever wondered how Gentoo got started?

[Anonymous Coward]

no.

Third major commercial distro?

[JessLeah]

Who are the first two major ones? Red Hat and SuSE? Red Hat and Mandrake? SuSE and Mandrake?

(No, I'm not stupid, I'm just a diehard Debian partisan. No jokes, please. ;) )

Quoting the article...

[cliffy2000]

"People can get ugly" is a headline.
And this comes as a surprise? I mean... come on... we read Slashdot. We don't need to be reminded of our own physical failures HERE.

Re:Server room?

[ErichTheWebGuy]

You (gasp) TEST things before you implement them!

Apparently you are not employed by Microsoft :-D
Microsoft admits major flaw in critical Windows 2000 security patch [entmag.com]

As a side note, you mentioned building KDE. I built KDE using konstruct right after 3.2 came out, and it took the better part of 8 hours on a 2.4GHz/1GB RAM workstation.

ahaha

[Professeur Shadoko]

"the oldest of them is a pentium3-1ghz"

sounds a bit like "no, I'm not really annoyed by traffic jams when commuting in my helicopter"

How Gentoo came about

[alex_tibbles]

From here [ibm.com]:
"[M]y new machine wasn't very stable.
Obviously my first reaction was to go back down to 2x366Mhz. But now I experienced an even stranger problem. As long as my machine kept the CPUs chugging away, the machine didn't lock up. But if I left the machine idle overnight, there was a good probability that the system would lock up completely. Yes, an idle bug -- argh!"

And thus Gentoo was born: as a way to prevent idle bugs by keeping the CPU active 24/7!

If I had the cash...

[Menkhaf]

For those that think that Gentoo Enterprise is far off, Gentoo's guy figures if they had the cash they'd be up and running in 6 months.

Uhm. Yeah. If I had the cash, I'd hire 15 bisexual blonde norwegians to please me (sexually)... But then again, that's just me.

Re:Slackware is easy to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but you only need to do it once every 5 years when the new release comes out :)