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...

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.

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.

One of the articles Tyler passed me this morning was a brief post on three problems with Gentoo by Dion Moult. There are a few things he’s mentioned that I definitely agree with. Having used the distribution for a little over a month, some minor changes would go a long way to making the experience less painful and more usable.

Using Gentoo Linux, you have to get used to things just breaking, especially in the last couple of years. Portage is probably one of the best package management systems in the open source community. I have been quite impressed with Portage 2 the last couple months. Things seem to be improving. Yesterday I woke up to check some email. Later I needed to do some web development for an NGO.

Gentoo Linux has had a rough time of it the last few years. James Bellenger has briefly detailed the migration from Gentoo (See Table), and some reasons why it is occurring. He wonders where all the Gentoo users are going.

Having the right people in the right places pursuing the right goals is key to Gentoo’s success. Keeping in mind the Pareto principle (20% of the effort produces 80% of the results), I’ve come up with some ideas.