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Announcements Software Linux

Free Gentoo Technical Support 209

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the finally-my-relatives-can-call-someone-else dept.
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that GenUX is offering free technical support for anyone using Gentoo Linux. I spoke briefly with one of their support staff and he assured me that it would be completely free Gentoo tech support for approximately 2 weeks to help them 'work out the kinks' of their new support system. GenUX is offering this support through both web-based chat and the traditional phone call. I certainly hope this catches on.
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Free Gentoo Technical Support More

Free Gentoo Technical Support

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  • No way! (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeOptimusPrime ( 875888 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:35PM (#13705724)
    What kind of Gentoo nerd would I be if I called tech support?

    • Interesting quote... (Score:5, Funny)

      by temojen ( 678985 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:58PM (#13705931) Journal
      ...one of the most popular Linux distributions... ...Historically, Gentoo Linux has been one of the most stable and popular Linux distributions for power Linux users...

      Wait... what?... Popular and stable???

      Either they've confused Gentoo with Debian, or they're talking up their prospectus to sell shares...

      (I choose Gentoo because of it's flexibility)

      • Re:Interesting quote... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by moranar ( 632206 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @01:40PM (#13706325) Homepage Journal
        Yeah, not to mention the "Hystorically" bit... It's one of the newest distros around, for chrissakes!
        • First off, Gentoo can be very stable if set up correctly. If you're running ~x86 then yeah, it might not be the stablest. But Gentoo's whole principle is that it is based on *choice*. You can choose to run a very stable, very powerful OS. In fact, that is how it comes by default. If you start unmasking things, and installing packages that have not been extensively tested, well... it's your computer. Again, choice. As far as "historically" (yes, spelled with an "i") goes, Gentoo has been around since _
          • If Gentoo is completely "about choice", then gentoo isn't unstable or stable. It's the user that's a good chooser.

            When you have Mandriva, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Slackware and many other distros, both stable and older than Gentoo, you wonder what exactly does "historically more stable and secure" means, and compared to what. I use Mandriva, which by all accounts isn't the most stable of the lot, though with your reasoning, it could be too... After all, I just have to choose the right package to keep it chugg

      • Re:Interesting quote... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by surprise_audit ( 575743 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @03:07PM (#13707043)
        (I choose Gentoo because of it's flexibility)

        I chose Gentoo because, at the time, it was one of the few Linux distros that support Sparc. Redhat gave up around 6.1, which prompted the switch. I realize now that this is probably a bogus impression, but it seemed back then that Debian was behind the times, with packages older than Redhat's, and several different package managers, all of which struck me as a bit weird. In comparison, Gentoo's emerge seemed amazingly easy to use. So now I've got a bunch of x86 & Sparc systems that present an identical user experience and never mind the radically different architecture underneath.

  • Yay - two weeks of Beta Testers for Gentoo Tech Support!

    I'd be curious to know what they've done :)

    --LWM
    • Well exactly, it's two weeks free support while they get their tech support lines running correctly. Or, alternatively, it's two weeks free support in return for a front page posting on Slashdot.

      I'm slightly curious about the original poster's assertion that "I certainly hope this catches on." What does (s)he hope catches on; that distro companies offer free service while beta-ing their service? Seems an odd thing to wish for, since it's a one-time offer that's hardly going to set the world alight.
      • Perhaps they aren't that concerned with paying a little bit but don't want to hire an admin, and hope that tech support for Linux becomes more mainstream so that there's competition to drive prices down?
        • Actually, the business is geared towards smaller outfits. Maybe not one without an admin, but perhaps one with only a single admin and older computers. In fact, at their presentation at the Gentoo Developer Conference after LWE:SF, they specifically mentioned older machines in their presentation. You can view their entire presentation online at http://devconference.gentoo.org/ [gentoo.org] (warning, streaming video). They were last in the afternoon session.

      • Re:Customer Support...Beta! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by s.d. ( 33767 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @01:51PM (#13706403)

        I'm slightly curious about the original poster's assertion that "I certainly hope this catches on." What does (s)he hope catches on; that distro companies offer free service while beta-ing their service? Seems an odd thing to wish for, since it's a one-time offer that's hardly going to set the world alight.

        While one of the other responders to you is correct, and the email address from the submittor is a gen-ux.com email addr, I think the "I certainly hope this catches on," comment in the post comes from the editor. /. tends to quote a submittor, and then non quoted text is from the editor, in this case, ScuttleMonkey. The posting looks like a GenUX person submitted a story saying, "we got this thing," and from the rest of the post, it looks like ScuttleMonkey called them up, checked it out, and posted his feelings on the topic, with no real commentary by the submittor in the posting at all. Anyway, that's how it read to me...

  • Cool, but (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Coocha ( 114826 ) <.ude.tv. .ta. .ahcooc.> on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:36PM (#13705733) Homepage
    Their documentation is already pretty good; between that and the forums, I don't see how useful live support would be; Gentoo has always seemed like the hobbyists' distro to me (disclaimer: I run it, and know people who use it in production environments). It just seems to me that if support is important to a person/firm, they'll pony up the $50/$100/$whatever for a license that offers support as well.

    • Re:Cool, but (Score:4, Insightful)

      by temojen ( 678985 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:49PM (#13705853) Journal
      Sometimes there are differences between the documents and reality. Also, the documents tend to assume that everything went according to plan and your system has not been customized (bad assumption with gentoo). I.E. the documents for the recent changes to the config file layout for apache2 assumes you're not using mass virtual hosting.

      • Re:Cool, but (Score:3, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )
        OK, docs are always out of date and make unstated assumptions. Are you telling me these tech support folks will be any different? I predict this tech support line will be an expensive text-to-speech interface for forums.gentoo.org. What else would it be? There's no way a person could learn all the combinations of libraries, applications, configurations, and hardware (many versions of each).

    • Re:Cool, but (Score:3, Interesting)

      by KentoNET ( 465732 )
      You obviously don't hang around #gentoo (FN) too often. That channel is basically continuous live support, granted it's to users from users (and developers).

      As developers, some of us try to make it a point to help people who are having trouble with the packages we maintain. Any help we can get is welcome, so I for one appreciate GenUX's contribution, even if they make money from it.

    • Re:Cool, but (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Danger Stevens ( 869074 )
      When I search for answers to any generic linux issue the Gentoo wiki invariably has the answer. They've already got such good documentation that live support is only useful to the kind of people that... well... shouldn't be using Gentoo.

  • "Sir, could you please hold?" (Score:5, Funny)

    by theurge14 ( 820596 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:36PM (#13705740)
    "I apologize sir, our system is compiling. Thanks for holding."

    /obligatory... and ha ha, really I'm a Gentoo user

  • Developer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mysqlrocks ( 783488 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:37PM (#13705744) Homepage Journal
    The press release says you will be able to get support "from a Gentoo developer". Is this accurate? Will you actually get to talk to a developer? Most places have you talk to a tech support person not the actual developers.
  • You mean guinea pig tech support offers that are limited time while they work the bugs out of their system?

    While this may be mildly helpful- especially in the latter portion of the trial, how helpful will it really be? Techs fumbling around for an answer, problems transferring calls, long queue times? Either way, those of us who know what we're doing- if the problem is bad enough that we need to call, is our problem going to happen during their short trial?

    Either way, hope what catches on again?
    • "Techs fumbling around for an answer, problems transferring calls, long queue times? " It's really refreshing to see someone in the Open Source community try to meet or exceed the same fine quality of support provided by commercial software houses. Can copy protection and shrinkwrap licenced be far behind?

  • Two weeks free support? (Score:4, Funny)

    by paulwallen ( 825524 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:37PM (#13705748)
    The compilation takes two weeks on machine? By the time I finish it, the support is over. No good

  • No such thing as free beer (Score:5, Informative)

    by timeToy ( 643583 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:39PM (#13705771)
    Form the press release: "During the initial release of this program, GenUX will be in a testing phase, and will be offering free support during this time"
    Support is free for few weeks, then you have to paid the traditionally high support costs
    http://www.gen-ux.com/catalog [gen-ux.com]

  • Great Idea.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by wilsone8 ( 471353 )
    I certainly hope this catches on.

    <sarcasm>Yes, because their are just such a pethera of other ways to make any money selling Linux that getting rid of the tech support side of the house would make everything a lot simpler.</sarcasm>

  • Look out! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Nightreaver ( 695006 )
    Once your addicted, the price goes from free to... well... not free [gen-ux.com].

    Anyway they're still doing the right thing, since Gentoo is the-one-and-only Linux distro ;-)
    • Gentoo is the-one-and-only Linux distro ;-)

      Says the person who has not yet tried Arch linux. It's like gentoo, but faster, and with no compile times. And SIMPLER! Oh, it's great.
  • Gentoo has excellent documentation for installing their OS whether you are choosing the more difficult installation or the canned installation. Not only that, if you have a problem the forums that they have set up is superiour. It seemed like any question I had was answered within a few hours of asking, sometimes minutes.

    • Very real need... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Phil John ( 576633 ) <phil@@@webstarsltd...com> on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:53PM (#13705891)

      ...in a corp IT environment "answered within hours, sometimes minutes" doesn't cut it. If you wanted to deploy Gentoo in any serious company setting you need to know that there are people you can call 24-7 who know how to fix whatever's not working.

      I've never used Gentoo before (fedora man myself) but for it to be taken seriously for hosting critical apps this type of service is required.

      You and I both know any competent sysadmin worth their salt will know how to diagnose and fix problems but PHB's want to be able to phone a vendor and vent down the phone, it's like a comfort blanket to them.

      • What kind of support does Fedora offer, anyway? :)

        I'm partial to the idea of hiring a sysadmin who knows what he's doing, so there won't *be* problems - but then, I'm that sysadmin, so I'm biased...

  • Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:49PM (#13705859) Homepage
    That's really cool but I've always found the Gentoo community to be extremely supportive. That's one of my reasons for using Gentoo. I've learned so much from using Gentoo and just getting help from the community. Before Gentoo, compiling the kernel scared me but the Gentoo Handbook was excellent. When I screwed up because I forgot to compile my NIC drivers, I was able to get help from the forums on how to to boot with the LiveCD and start from where I left off. I've had another user with a similar problem as me on how to use Kerberos with AD. After he found the solution, he messaged me to offer to lead me through it.

    Unbelivable community unity.

  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by clrscr ( 892395 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:52PM (#13705883)
    Up to now I had to run down to Wendy's in-between shift changes to get to talk to a Linux developer!

  • test (Score:5, Informative)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:57PM (#13705920) Homepage Journal
    I just tried it out, because I've got some burning gentoo questions that nobody on the forums can answer.

    First off, their web chat interface was crazy broken. It just reloaded a thousand times a second.

    Their phone support was actually really good. I was surprised that it wasn't slashdotted. I didn't have to wait at all. The sad part is that calling them was about the equivalent of calling myself on the phone. They did the same google search that I did and found the same stuff I did. This is really only good for people who don't have a geeky friend who knows as much as I do. For now it's free call them with everything you've got. But it wont be worth paying for because they are no better able to answer the burning ultra hard questions than you or I.
    • What was your question?

      I'm not sure I've ever seen a question asked in a slashdot comment, when phrased as impossibly difficult, that someone didn't post the correct solution to within minutes.
      • If you're that confident, I'll risk some karma for an answer to this imposible-to-fix-problem:

        How do I take my sound output from UT2004, mix it with my TeamSpeak output and port all that through my USB headset?

        I can mix all the above through my SB Audigy card, which supports hardware mixing, but AFAICT I can't do that with my USB headset for two reasons:

        1) USB headset doesn't support hardware mixing - cat /proc/asound/pcm indicates that my USB headset can only do 1 playback and 1 capture stream
        2)

  • If they really wanted to help Gentoo... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ThaFooz ( 900535 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @12:59PM (#13705936)
    ... they would fix all of the broken ebuilds. Of all of Gentoo's issues, support is not one of them, their forums are really the best I've seen. The biggest problem is the portage is not scaling well, largely due to the high number of crappy submitted ebuilds, and the low number of testers and devs. It feels like its got much worse in the past year or two, with broken packages often making it to 'stable' and critical apps staying hard masked (the delay in MySQL 4.1, PHP5, and all of the Apache issues are my favorite examples).

    I do love Gentoo & Portage, but so long as 'emerge -upD world' will fail consistently even on the most conservative use flags & keywords, I'll be using another distro.

    • Broken builds seem like they should be simple to detect.

      Have a machine download the most recently submitted "ebuild" files, then attempt to build the binaries. Any failures would then result in a new bug being filed automatically.

      That would be a useful service to offer - if you wished to help.

      Sure you wouldn't catch bugs which were in the binaries, like immediate segfaults, or in configuration file options. But a simple "compile it" test should be trivial to script...


      • Have a machine download the most recently submitted "ebuild" files, then attempt to build the binaries.

        While this wouldnt hurt, compilation issues in gentoo are usually do to particular combinations of packages and USE flags. There are quite simply far too many combinations to test for.

    • This seems to be a recurring problem when people don't use the most up-to-date and unstable versions of things- often there isn't much work put into making sure stable things STAY fixed.

      While I've always run Gentoo with the unstable packages accepted (nearly everything works, actually, on my x86... and if something does fail, syncing the next day and updating almost always fixes it), I had a lot of problems when I tried to use -stable freeBSD. Packages failed to fetch, meaning I had to go hunt them down...
    • That's interesting. I run Gentoo on *counts* 4 or 5 systems. One of those is my desktop, where I run the unstable arch, the others are servers of varying architectures, but I run Stable on all of them. I can't recall the last time I had an ebuild in the install process that was broken. Every now and then, I'll have issues with the PHP or MySQL ebuilds, but they're getting better, and the issues are usually because I catch them in the middle of transitioning to a new structure, like they're doing right now w
    • I've been using Gentoo for almost a couple of years now, admittedly for my own fairly simple purposes (desktop, router/light server, laptop), and I've never once had a problem with an ebuild. I don't emerge anything fancy, but I ran ~x86 for a year on the desktop without a problem.

      -Jesse
      • Right now I'm looking at

        !!! ERROR: media-video/transcode-0.6.14-r2 failed.
        !!! Function src_compile, Line 132, Exitcode 2
        !!! emake failed
        !!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status message.

        I guess they forgot to test xvid support in transcode, since the same version builds just fine with that use flag turned off. "What? Test things? Bah - it works for me." :( There are 5 versions of transcode marked unstable and one stable. One would think that there was time to either prune

    • Amen brotha. I've been a semi-rabid Gentoo zealot for a year or two, but one of the biggest things that bugs me is the lack of testing/maintenence that goes into some of the ebuilds. Heck, Java 5 has been out for...some time now, and the ebuild is still "unstable". Heck, I just went to Google Java 5's release date, and my newly-emerged (as of yesterday) Firefox's search widget is busted.

      Gentoo ebuild developers will tell you that this is due to inadequate user feedback. I don't know if that's necessaril
  • I've written a program in C to provide technical support to new Gentoo users that behaves like a linux expert! The source code is below.

    #include stdio.h
    int main () { printf("RTFM\n"); }
  • CSR: gentoo support how can i help u?
    ./ geek: well i have problem with vwx..i configure y & vwx is messed up & i cannot load the z module & i dont want abc daemon to be kicked in when def server shell is up

    CSR: ooh..hold on sir, while i transfer u to apropriate department..

    after 5-mins...

    CSR: sir, you to have compile def modules with fgh libraries in 3443.115 version & then use the binaries of stuvw to download the ijklm, that will solve the prob.
    ./ geek: Thank you so much. will try it
  • Wow. I think we've managed to conduct a DDoS on a phone number! Next all we need is to report a Linus Torvalds sighting at X, and we'll create a stampede.

  • Shameless Self Promotion? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Xibby ( 232218 ) <zibby+slashdot@ringworld.org> on Monday October 03, 2005 @01:09PM (#13706046) Homepage Journal
    Anonymous Coward [mailto] writes to tell us that GenUX with an e-mail address of hparker@gen-ux.com?
    • Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that GenUX with an e-mail address of hparker@gen-ux.com?

      What's wrong with that? You know, that the whole article summary was written by ScuttleMonkey and not by the gen-nux guy? Otherwise, it would be in italics. ScuttleMonkey was the one who spoke to the support staff.
    • Interesting... hparker is a gentoo dev.... I didn't know he worked for Gen-ux too..

      The person who "signed" the press release is also the lead of "Gentoo developer relations" aka devrel, the Gentoo HR department.

      I'm still trying to find out who else from Gentoo is involved in that thing.. but I can tell you from the internal mailing list that I'm clearly not the only one to be surprised.

      Disclaimer: I'm also a Gentoo Dev... and I didnt know about this before reading about it on slashdot..

  • Obligatory (and on-topic) (Score:3, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @01:13PM (#13706080)
    But I use Gentoo, how does this affect me?

  • I certainly hope this catches on (Score:3, Informative)

    by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 ) on Monday October 03, 2005 @01:16PM (#13706109)
    1. Generate a Boatload of VC Capital saying we will support Linux
    2. Give away support for Free - including using Slashdot for advertising
    3. ...
    4. **** PROFIT ****

    When will we stop seeing Underpants Gnome business models - Right after we see a spell checker for Slashdot posting I assume

  • ...they appear to eat [netcraft.com] their own dogfood. [netcraft.com]

    -dhbarr.
  • My Gentoo system is so out wack from time to time and something always needing to be re-compiled that I haven't gotten around to yet. If a system like mine is all over the map how can live Tech Support really help me? Sometimes I try to ask a question in IRC but even that becomes tricky.

    I'll admit I had jumped from Win-world to Gentoo and kind of learned on the fly. I imagine tech support will have to deal with moderate noobs like me at the start of the call. Like ask a few qualification questions fir

  • two tips (Score:2, Informative)

    by c-reus ( 852386 )
    There are two tips I can give for anyone installing Gentoo:
    First, read the handbook. Following it step by step, one should not encounter any errors.
    Second, Gentoo forums [gentoo.org] is the best place to look if you do encounter any errors.

    No costs whatsoever (except time and the money you pay to your ISP)
  • So how does this differ from http://forums.gentoo.org/ [gentoo.org] and irc://irc.freenode.net/gentoo (I don't think /. wants me to linkify it...)?

    The difference with professional support is normally that they have to fix it because you pay them.
    • So how does this differ from http://forums.gentoo.org/ [gentoo.org] and irc://irc.freenode.net/gentoo (I don't think /. wants me to linkify it...)?

      I think the difference is that you get an answer from a developer.. while on the Forum or on #gentoo @ freenode you will get an answer from a nobody.. because very few developers frequent them nowadays.. since there are way too many looser in there.

  • I run Gentoo on two systems (AMD64 and Pentium 4), and I've generally found technical support to be pretty good. I've used Red Hat and SuSE and Debian and Ubuntu and Knoppix, and found the tech support for those distros rather lacking. With Gentoo, I jump on IRC (irc.freenode.net) and usually have an answer within minutes. The #gentoo-amd64 channel is exceptionally helpful.

    Even with technical support, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for a novice. My wife's machine runs Ubuntu, and I used Knoppix on my kids'

  • It's a proven business plan.
  • remember the alamo LinuxCare?

    Didn't they go bankrupt? Seriously, I don't think gentoo is used enough in the business world to support this, but who knows I could be wrong.
  • I thought that Gentoo [uncyclopedia.org] was purchased by Microsoft during the whole Daniel Robbins [uncyclopedia.org] debacle.
  • Works every time! Or, is this more along the lines of the first-crack-hit-is-free model? Not trolling, here. Why does anyone think that free (as in beer) is ever real, when it comes to humans doing work for you? Something always has to give, and the price always has to be paid... so why do people persist in even using the word "free" in this context? It just rings false, and further distorts the use of that word.

    Better to say "no charge for two weeks" or "subsidized" if that's what they really mean - at
  • There are gobs of things I've never gotten to work with Gentoo, like Hotplug. There are other things that break regularly, like audio, which will go away mysteriously and not work again until I reboot.

    My biggest problem with Gentoo isn't a tech support one. It's a big giant bug called "etc-update" that bombards me with over 100 "changes" to config files I've never heard of every time I upgrade a bunch of things.

    I've paid my dues. I've compiled kernels and admin'ed my own box. I think, rather than try to
    • My biggest problem with Gentoo isn't a tech support one. It's a big giant bug called "etc-update" that bombards me with over 100 "changes" to config files I've never heard of every time I upgrade a bunch of things.

      Yes, it's flamebait.

      Sure. And an outdated one.
      use dispatch-conf, not etc-update.
      • dispatch-conf is not something mentioned in standard documentation. And when you update packages, it tells you to run etc-update. As long as it's telling you to run etc-update, my comment isn't outdated.

  • Gentoo users moms (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TwoManAdv ( 919823 )
    I work for an ISP tech support and I actually had a Gentoo user call in one time because she had no idea why she couldn't get online. My job doesn't actually allow me to troubleshoot Linux but this customer was upset because she didn't know anything about linux, so I helped her get back online. Turned out it was a Gentoo users mom who didn't want linux but her son insisted on it because he hates microsoft. This makes me wonder how many of these people calling into their tech support are gonna Linux fan b
  • I'm wondering if I'll be brave enough to destroy the FC4 distro on my laptop for Gentoo! I think i will! I think I can muster up enough courage to get through an install if I have someone there with me to get it up and running! Oh Happy Day! Gentoo here I come!

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