Tin Hat is a Linux distribution derived from hardened Gentoo which aims to provide a very secure, stable and fast Desktop environment that lives purely in RAM.

No, seriously. I’m not trying to be ironic because the title of my blog is “Brindle on Security”, which I should probably change to something more creative anyway.

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 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...

"...To cater to my brother's P2P needs I decided to install MLDonkey without X11 support leaving only the core with both telnet and web interfaces. The target computer was my 1.3GHz Pentium-M laptop headless server (faulty display) running Gentoo Hardened located at my parents house..."

CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.

"The most customizable GNU/Linux distribution: Gentoo, canceled the 2008.1 release due to a change on its factoring release phase. As shown in the “New release strategy to provide more current install media” posted by Gentoo: ..."

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.

I finally finished re-installing Gentoo 2008.0 on my desktop. This was the first time in several years I actually got a fully functional Gentoo system.