Conversion to Linux

[Billy Crook]

You're not implying Gentoo is a derivative of BSD, are you?  It is
not.  It just does a few things similar to how FreeBSD does them.
Read http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/making-the-distro-p3.xml
for more info about how/why Gentoo uses some FreeBSD practices.   It
no more branches from FreeBSD than does SuSE branch from RHEL.  It
just emulates FreeBSD to some extent, as does SuSE emulate RHEL to
some extent.

Gentoo is from the Slackware ancestry of GNU+Linux, though it's
changed alot.  Any distro in the Slackware tree has changed and
branched widely from its original roots.  These distros are used and
developed by enthusiasts, who actively try to break with the past and
do new and awesome things.  There's a lot of churn, and I don't think
the derivative distros so much care about retaining compatibility with
their parent distro's practices.  At least not as much as say, Ubuntu
retains compatibility with Debian stuff.  Gentoo is extremely fun if
you like digging around in the innards of things.  However, most
sysadmins don't want to dig that deeply on every system in production.
 There's something to be said for knowing you are running exactly the
same program as 10,000 other people.  And when all of your binaries
are compiled uniquely to you, nobody else in the entire world might
have a similar system, and that makes support extremely difficult.

If you want to install gentoo, follow these instructions:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/


On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 16:04, David Nicol <davidnicol at gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess BSD doesn't get included because Gentoo isn't "major."

BSD didn't get included because BSD isn't a distro.  FreeBSD, NetBSD,
OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD are distributions.  BSD belongs in a group with
Linux, Plan9, OSX, NT, OS/2, DOS, and other TYPES of distributions,
because that's what it is; a TYPE of distribution.  BSD is (obviously)
more different from Linux than any Linux distro is from another Linux
distro. I didn't bring it up because we weren't talking about BSD, or
OSX or Windows, and because I'm not as familiar with BSD as I am with
GNU+Linux.

Gentoo didn't get included because it's also not so much an distro as
it is a formulae and laboratory for constructing your OWN distro.
Gentoo has install media, but you can install Gentoo from any shell
with wget and an internet connection.  It is also, unambiguously, not
major.  Especially not in companies that depend on their computers
being up and avaliable all the time.

I heard of one company, a law firm, that used gentoo on a server.
Their admin was interviewed on a podcast I listen to.  I think it was
The Linux Link Tech Show.  I tried to find the guys name while writing
this email.  I think the law offices were what became the Software
Freedom Law Center.  Alas, I was unable to locate the episode, but did
find this humorous quote from TLLTS' listener chat logs:
"21:14 < aaranya> Using gentoo is like trying to find the square root
of pi -- in Roman numerals" #techshow on thelinuxlink.net

Being that Roman numerals can not express decimals, I'd say that
numerical exercise is a little more difficult than installing and
using gentoo on a day to day basis.  If your boss' first impression of
GNU+Linux was Gentoo, and a single thing wasn't done completely right,
he'd run screaming and never, ever consider Linux again.  Ever.
Throwing a Newbie into Gentoo would just be cruel.  Gentoo's greatest
asset is it's forums and wiki, which often document various GNU+Linux
software and practices extrenely well, and agnostic enough to
distribution that you can apply that knowledge to other distros.
Recently, the gentoo wiki suffered massive massive damage though, and
is being rebuilt. http://gentoo-wiki.com/