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.

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.

I just converted from Portage to Paludis about 30 minutes ago on my Gentoo system. Paludis is an alternative package manager for the very buggy Portage maintained by Gentoo. This new package manager is supposed to make it easier to add new packages.

I have been planning to move to Funtoo Linux, a derivative of Gentoo Linux, for over a month now. The install is basically the same as a Gentoo installation. The only difference is that instead of using Gentoo’s Portage, you can choose to just use Daniel Robbin’s Funtoo git-based Portage located at Github.

There are many problems with Gentoo’s QA team, like the lack of proper coordination most of the time, the lack of a real Gentoo-based effort for continuous integration testing, and the lack of an absolute rulebook of “dos ad don’ts” for what concerns ebuilds. The main weakness in Gentoo’s Quality Assurance is developers not giving a shit about quality.

So, I have been asked this question many times. And of course the assumption is that I am some sort of a masochist who enjoys wasting time on compiling packages. However, that is not entirely true. There are some other reasons why, after trying Ubuntu (started linux with it), Gentoo and then Arch I settled on Gentoo.

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 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...