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We've been discussing this on the gentoo forums just now, and we've found that:
1) Their example is from the IA64 port of linux 2.4 (its not in 2.6)
2) Their example can be traced back to 2.11BSD
3) The greek in the sco code is actually english, with the font changed to english (Stupid obfucation attempt) heres what it says:

"As part of the kernel evolution towards modular naming, the functions malloc and mfree are being renamed to rmalloc and rmfree. Compatibility will be maintained by the following assembler code: (also see mfree/rmfree below)"

We're still discussing it on the gentoo forums here

There is a forum thread about them pulling the Gentoo ebuilds, and also a lot of interesting commentary, is here.

Redhat
Debian
SuSe
Apple
Linux-Mandrake
Gentoo
FreeBSD

At first part students must understand very deep details of OS design and they have to understand that by practicing: kernel configuration, disk partioning, filesystem choice, init scripts.

If you will promise your students that OS has a kernel with drivers they won't understand it. If you will shouw the control panel of some driver configuration in Windows they will remember it as a control panel. But if they will configure the kernel in Linux and build it to see the difference between configurations - that will give them a much better picture of the kernel design.

As for Gentoo, it will be a great step for a student after a lot of manual work with LFS to learn how to automate some aspects of system installation, what are system and application packages. and what is their life cicle. Gentoo's Portage demostrates the most fine-grained control of package dependencies. Making own ebuilds for existing open source applications will teach various application building techniques.

After playing with many application packages on both LFS and Gentoo a student will have a very deep understandig of what is networking, document processing, databasing, graphics, music etc. A student will remember it in concepts rather than in screenshot images of control panels, like that would be after close-source OSes like Windows or OSX.

• The tech support Red Hat is able to give. At least when things fscked up, the IT staff is able to point their fingers at Red Hat. Imagine if you install Debian or Slackware and you arent able to solve a problem that crops up. Imagine the steam coming out from your boss's ears.
  
• Most business people tend to to associate Linux with Red Hat, whether we like it or not.

"The one thing I've never understood is the relationship between OpenDarwin and the distribution concerns."

"GNU-Darwin almost seems to be hindering the entire Mac OSS unix community."

"This almost surreal splintering can do nothing but harm the overall effort of ported OSS software for the Mac."

"If we can't agree that the PPC is the heart of the Mac, than what can we agree on?"

Yeah. There are no find - download - click - install routines.

Consistency? RPM could be considered something which most people would know how to install -- be it by a graphical installer, up2date, or on a command line. All of these packaging systems work basically the same. Download a package. Install package. Run program.

RPM+APT is a lot easier than the BS with the void that is Windows library dependencies. I can't tell you how many times I've downloaded some crappy little app for Win32 that is missing this or that dll. RPM+APT takes care of all that garbage for you.

Look no further than across the pond, my friend! Faster downloads than iBiblio, and it's run by this guy. So dig in!

Personally, I used Slackware, Redhat and Debian almost equal time (2 years each) before I found Gentoo a year ago. With Portage in my hands there is no way I'll return back to any of those three my previous distros. And I am not a zealot - I am a software developer often responsible for deployment, I need a fine-graine package management tool (something like Portage) for living, not just for personal installation.

Personally, I used Slackware, Redhat and Debian almost equal time (2 years each) before I found Gentoo a year ago. With Portage in my hands there is no way I'll return back to any of those three my previous distros. And I am not a zealot - I am a software developer often responsible for deployment, I need a fine-graine package management tool (something like Portage) for living, not just for personal installation.

Does anyone in the know have any inklings that it might be like BSD ports?

I'm no BSD ports expert, but from what I hear the Gentoo team is porting their Portage system, which is heavily inspired by the BSD ports system, to other platforms (OS X).

Portage does support the things you mention, system-wide upgrades and tracking installed packages.

Checkout the Gentoo website for more information.

I'm an intelly user and that used to annoy me too, until i followed this guide
Now my mouse works Perfectly in any program, it back/forwards in mozilla,opera,konq etc. and i can configure it to work in other programs by editing a simple text file, all in all the interface is better for me than the intelly driver in windows.
Oh, and btw. it works with other mice, not just intelly.
Hope it helps, it certanly did for me.

Then use Gentoo....

Gentoo Forums are the most amazing techincal resource. People on there are friendly, and you can pretty much get any question answered.

But yes, many Linux people take the "1337er than thou" approach. There are people out there willing to help.

Why do you put up with it then?

Gentoo (my choice of distro), Debian (just make sure you run 'unstable' if you want the latest stuff), or of course any one of the *BSDs. (FreeBSD)

the latest kde packages (3.1.3) are still marked unstable in portage, so unless you want to compile KDE twice in a week wait until the kde packages move to stable.

Can't think of anything else to wait on though.

the biggest reason of all, I want to support Gentoo.


then just donate directly. There's a link to paypal at the gentoo homepage. $10 in donations far outweights buying $15 of CD's.

Personally, I prefer installing a minimal, graphic Mandrake 9.1 system, using the install disk partitioner to setup the partitions required to install Gentoo to mount automatically at boot. Once I'm inside Mandrake, all I have to do is the following: 1) open up a console terminal 2) >mount -t proc proc /mnt/gentoo/proc 3) >cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf 4) >cd /mnt/gentoo 5) >chroot /mnt/gentoo bin/bash 6) >env-update 7) >source /etc/profile 8) download a stage tarball 9) start building 10) ???? 11) PROFIT!!! So I can browse the web, check my mail, play freeciv while my system builds on my machine. Beat this, Microsoft! More information ca be found here. Gentoo is basically Linux Lego. Just remember not to swallow the small plastic parts.

...but it's going to take a while to get it going.
Don't worry. I used to run Debian but switched to Gentoo and installing it was very, very, convenient (and the instructions are good). If you already have a partition, on which you'll install it, just chroot to that and let Gentoo compile in the background whilst you use your SuSE installation until Gentoo is complete - which, if you compile X, KDE and so on will take 24+ hours unless you have an extremely fast computer, mine is a P3 450MHz and a complete compile to a desktop from scratch took almost 36 hours. So in the end, installing gentoo on a different partition whilst using a another Linux installation in the mean time was the most convenient (although configuration-wise not the easiest) Linux-installation I've ever done and the result was an OS I could boot into straight away and still compiled specifically for my system :) After using Debian I was impressed by the speed increase with Gentoo 1.2 and I'm looking forward to an even bigger speed increase with 1.4 since I'll be compiling it with pre-linking - instructions can be found here, if you want to try that straight away (and thus avoid a new compilation from scratch later). Happy compiling!

I wonder what those of us who purchased the Athlon XP CD set are going to receive.

Installing Gentoo is pretty much just typing in a laundry list of commands. (see the Gentoo x86 in guide to see what I mean)

You also have to edit some of the configuration files, but I think the documentation explains it pretty well.

Here's a 2.4 to 2.6 guide.

Just reading the forumabout 1.4 release, seems AMD-XP CD2 has problems.


"GRP CD2 for Athlon XP is not available currently. Frankly, we've had all sorts of problems with the Athlon XP build.

Athlon XP users can safely use the i686 set."

Bullshit. My friend who never touched a CLI before, or a programming language managed to follow through the line by line instructions on the gentoo website.
disklabel is one hell of a lot more confusing than Linux' fdisk, as is the forgiving network configuration (the entering netmask in hex froze me for a minute).
Gentoo is for a new class of newbie: one that has time to fiddle and not just click install.
And how does emerge kde (to install everything required by kde) teach you how the kernel works? Or partitioning? Or newfs? Or /etc/resolv.conf? Or how the C libraries work? Or how the system is based?
It doesn't, it's just a time consuming load of hogwash leet wannabees jump onto to say 'I use a source distro!'

Changelog, hot off the press!

(Now I wonder how long it will be before someone posts the "Gentoo Linux Zealot Translator"?)

The only real problem I have had with portage (emerge) was caused by a prematurely released tcl that pooched the requirements for tclx. The discussion took place here. An overheating laptop was crashing during long compiles too, but not the fault of portage or gentoo. Overall my impression is much better than I had trying to track down rpm dependancies with redhat and mandrake over the years. I have run most of the popular distributions since 1994 and still have most of my servers on redhat, but like gentoo for desktop use and am now starting to use gentoo for specialized server installs. It is much easier to run portage/emerge remotely than either up2date or rpmdrake. Apt is pretty good, but I never caught the debian bug like some of my friends.

I'm not knocking debian, just saying that portage has been great for me so far. You probably had an easily corrected problem with gentoo but are more comfortable with debian so why learn more methods of doing the same things.

My applications do this too. As soon as I install them, I get optimized binaries for my architecture, and fast load times.

Check it out.

In fact, the particular system I run has been doing this for a long, long time.

Of course, I can imagine that it would be useful to make this transparent to both the programmer and the end user, but I digress.

prelinking in gentoo

Here's a script that helps you determines which CFLAGS are compatible with your CPU:

Although I never actually *measured* anything, I have been moving all my boxen (except for one Duron on which I have found it quite impossible to compile Gentoo) to Gentoo 1.4rc4. I was actually in the process of building my own compile-in-place GNU/Linux called "Q-Gnu/Linux" when I discovered Gentoo did it all, and did it better. I was all RedHat before that (going so far as to wear a red fedora on parties - I have two of those). I find Gentoo as opposed to RedHat quite impressive, at least. My professional workhorse (on which I'm currently typing) is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300:

model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 597.077
cache size : 128 KB

..with 384MB RAM.. and was becoming annoyingly slow in things requiring major GUI complexity, like OpenOffice, and at compiling many Java classes.

Compiling Gentoo on there allowed the machine a third chance at life, the second one being when I got it (already old then) and installed RedHat on it, over that would-be-OS it came with. It just feels that much faster again. I am no longer annoyed by it at all. It took more than 4 days to compile all I wanted from the Gentoo 1.4rc4, but it was *well* worth it.

I moved my personal little server, an Athlon Thunderbird, with the same impression. Currently running

emerge system

on my brand new Athlon XP 2600, expecting much from it.

Bottom line: Nothing but Kudos for Gentoo, wondering what went wrong during the tests described, or whether somehow the subjective speedups I have experienced are just auto-suggestion. I think not. I have been staring at CRT's since 1980, thats 23 years folks! And I tell ya compiling stuff yourself is worth it. So if you have time on your side, go for LFS, which I did, and slowly ground into Q-GNU/Linux. If you have some time, but not *that* much time, go for Gentoo, if you have no time, you poor shmuck, either get a life, or install SuSe :-), and pretend.. :-) :-)..

I've tinkered with various distributions over the years and the main reason I like Gentoo is the package management system, Portage. It is by far the best package mgmt system I've ever used in a Linux environment. The thought of RPMs frighten me.

It's hard to say if it feels more optimized than say RH 9 or the latest Mandrake, but it's perfect for my needs as a desktop system. I am able to play Warcraft III under Transgaming's WineX without a hitch.

Also, with the install process and actually compiling from sources, you will learn more about linux and how it works in the first week than in the first few months with other distros - my opinion/personal experience of course.

Sites to help you get started:
Gentoo Installation Guide for x86
Optmized CFLAGS for compiler - Be wary of Pentium 4 options. See forums for more information.
Gentoo Forums - arguably the best linux support site on the 'net

I've tinkered with various distributions over the years and the main reason I like Gentoo is the package management system, Portage. It is by far the best package mgmt system I've ever used in a Linux environment. The thought of RPMs frighten me.

It's hard to say if it feels more optimized than say RH 9 or the latest Mandrake, but it's perfect for my needs as a desktop system. I am able to play Warcraft III under Transgaming's WineX without a hitch.

Also, with the install process and actually compiling from sources, you will learn more about linux and how it works in the first week than in the first few months with other distros - my opinion/personal experience of course.

Sites to help you get started:
Gentoo Installation Guide for x86
Optmized CFLAGS for compiler - Be wary of Pentium 4 options. See forums for more information.
Gentoo Forums - arguably the best linux support site on the 'net

You totally missed what makes gentoo a great distro: the USE flags.

The USE flags are roughly equivalent to compile time options, like ./configure --enable-foo --disable-foobar

USE flags are set system wide in a configuration file (/etc/make.conf), and / or can be set before installing a single package
ex: USE="alsa -opengl" emerge xmame
will compile the package xmame without the opengl renderer but with support for the alsa sound system.

And portage takes your USE flags into account when it determines the dependencies for a package.
In the previous example, we requested alsa support for our program; if alsa wasn't already installed, then emerge will install it before compiling and installing the program that depends on it.

So what you're saying is totally wrong.
If you wanted multimedia applications that used the most common codecs, all you had to do was to add "quicktime avi mpeg oggvorbis" to your USE flags. The complete list of USE flags and their description can be found at: http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/use-index.xml. And there is no dependency hell, nor the need to recompile everything.

By the way, all of this is explained in the installation manual. A pity you skipped that part because it's what makes me like my gentoo distro so much.

What people are saying on the gentoo forums about this too-brief article.

Looks like someone failed to set their USE flag properly. If you have it set right you will get support for all you want. Or if you do "emerge -vp packagname" before doing an actual emerge you can see what optional flags aren't getting used. People that use Gentoo but don't read the portage/emerge/use documents are asking for this. Gentoo isn't for all, it is only for the willing.

Please go here and reas as much as possible for installing Gentoo so you don't do something stupid.

Portage can be used to install binary (precompiled tbz2 packages of ebuilds).

From emerge --help:

--usepkg (-k short option)
Tell emerge to use binary packages (from $PKGDIR) if they are available, thus possibly avoiding some time-consuming compiles.This option is useful for CD installs; you can export PKGDIR=/mnt/cdrom/packages and then use this option to have emerge "pull" binary packages from the CD in order to satisfy dependencies.

--usepkgonly (-K short option)
Like --usepkg above, except this only allows the use of binary packages, and it will abort the emerge if the package is not available at the time of dependency calculation.

You can also, of course, emerge rpm and install any RPM packages. I'm not sure about debian .deb packages or slackware .tgz packages.

Gentoo is also accept pre-orders for it's upcoming 1.4 release. Information can be found here, at the Gentoo Store.
They even have precompiled packages optimizaed for Athlon-XP's - drool!

Portage can be used to install binary (precompiled tbz2 packages of ebuilds).

From emerge --help:

--usepkg (-k short option)
Tell emerge to use binary packages (from $PKGDIR) if they are available, thus possibly avoiding some time-consuming compiles.This option is useful for CD installs; you can export PKGDIR=/mnt/cdrom/packages and then use this option to have emerge "pull" binary packages from the CD in order to satisfy dependencies.

--usepkgonly (-K short option)
Like --usepkg above, except this only allows the use of binary packages, and it will abort the emerge if the package is not available at the time of dependency calculation.

You can also, of course, emerge rpm and install any RPM packages. I'm not sure about debian .deb packages or slackware .tgz packages.

Gentoo is also accept pre-orders for it's upcoming 1.4 release. Information can be found here, at the Gentoo Store.
They even have precompiled packages optimizaed for Athlon-XP's - drool!

Some of developers also use Xfree under Cygwin to run remotely GUI applications from few Linux servers.

Many our developers use Linux as a desktop at home, does it count?

According to this thread, it doesn't.

For those not wanting to read through the whole thing, the thread starter got his Linux box to encrypt everything except the boot partition. (IE: If you boot off of floppy, you could have your entire hard drive encrypted, including the swap and root partitions) There was also some discussion on how much of a performance hit there was, and while no tests were published, the general conclusion was that it wasn't noticable on modern computers. Take that for what you will.

I am a bit biased because I always like Linux more than Solaris :)

You can read abit about my installation here.

Yes, because the filesystem (reiserfs) is faster, the applications run faster and software installation is easier aswell. Btw, using Gentoo on that Ultra5.

Your best bet to get started is to sign up with one of the free IPv6 tunnel broker services (such as Hurricane Electric or Freenet6), which will allow you to get a boatload of addresses for your own use, as well as provide you with a tunnel to use them through. These services can provide you with over a BILLION publicly addressable IPv6 addresses for free.

The next step is to configure your home router/firewall box as a dual-stack machine, following the howtos for your particular OS. The one for Gentoo Linux is extremely straightforward, based on my experience with it a few nights ago.

The last step is to migrate the rest of your internal machines over to IPv6-only. They will use your dual-stack router for connections to IPv4-only sites (similar to the NAT you're probably already using).

The only real downside to this is that your IPv6-only machines will only be directly addressable from other IPv6 machines. You'd have to wait for your ISP to support IPv6 before you can get a fully IPv6 pipe, but upgrading your internal network now-ish sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

NOTE--If you're stuck behind a NAT box that you don't control, you'll have LOTS of problems getting a tunnel to work. If you figure out how to do it, please let me know; I failed miserably at this... :)

Your best bet to get started is to sign up with one of the free IPv6 tunnel broker services (such as Hurricane Electric or Freenet6), which will allow you to get a boatload of addresses for your own use, as well as provide you with a tunnel to use them through. These services can provide you with over a BILLION publicly addressable IPv6 addresses for free.

The next step is to configure your home router/firewall box as a dual-stack machine, following the howtos for your particular OS. The one for Gentoo Linux is extremely straightforward, based on my experience with it a few nights ago.

The last step is to migrate the rest of your internal machines over to IPv6-only. They will use your dual-stack router for connections to IPv4-only sites (similar to the NAT you're probably already using).

The only real downside to this is that your IPv6-only machines will only be directly addressable from other IPv6 machines. You'd have to wait for your ISP to support IPv6 before you can get a fully IPv6 pipe, but upgrading your internal network now-ish sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

NOTE--If you're stuck behind a NAT box that you don't control, you'll have LOTS of problems getting a tunnel to work. If you figure out how to do it, please let me know; I failed miserably at this... :)

It's not a new idea:

http://www.gentoo.org/news/20020916-ut2k3.xml

~Will

From the Gentoo Linux Installation Guide:

ReiserFS is the filesystem we recommend by default for all non-boot partitions.

Now, I'm a little surprised at the strength of this statement, and the various Linux filesystems all seem to have their strengths and weaknesses in different scenarios. But who do I trust most - the people who created Gentoo Linux, or an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot ?

That's just it: we're not talking about secretaries. We're talking about people who have the financial resources to pay programmers like us to make the enhancements they need.

Let's not take the RedHat vs. Microsoft example then. RedHat drops old versions a lot faster than MS.

So what? Users don't need to upgrade to the latest RedHat version just to get individual features. Example: iptables requires Linux 2.4. RedHat 5.2 had (IIRC) Linux 2.0. Nothing stops competent people from upgrading just the kernel to Linux 2.4 with RedHat 5.2. Therefore, if you're happy with RedHat 5.2, except that you want a few more features (like iptables), you have the option of either upgrading to a newer RedHat, or you can get someone competent to just add those features. With closed source software, you often don't have the second option.

And remember all the distros out there are made by companies that care about big bucks also.

I don't remember it because it's not true. Widely-used, high-quality distros like Debian, Knoppix, and Gentoo (just off the top of my head -- I'm sure there are a few others) are all made by people not developing for profit.

Well, you could go the Gentoo route and not provide an installer at all, but provide instructions on how to do it yourself instead.

Or, you could use parts of Slackware's installer. It began as a distro for Pat V. and his friends.....

Once upon a time I wanted an MP3 streaming server, none of the ones I looked at did what I wanted. So I did the standard thing and designed my own.

After releasing my first version to freshmeat I had about five subscribers to the project.

These subscribers gave me patches, feedback, and encouragement.

Doing a websearch for the project name I discovered by accident that the the package made it into Gentoo, and similarly Netbsd without any feedback or involvement from myself!

The next step was my becoming a Debian Developer so that I could upload it there - and not worry about other people doing a bad job without me. (Not a real concern; I had wanted to join Debian for some time anyway).

Now life is good - I've no idea if it's in RedHat because I've not touched it for years, but SuSE include it the *BSD's and Gentoo cover it, and Debian gets the latest versions all the time.

Freshmeat lists 120+ subscribers to the project, and it's probably on the verge of becoming an official GNU package sometime soon.

If you use it and like it buy something nice? </ObPlug>

(please don't tell me I have to switch to debian :-).

use the force luke.
gimme a dollah and i wont tell no one you coulnt do it.

Slackware users and experts can make a vow, on Slackware's 10th birthday, to be more helpful to new users and Linux newbies. Many a new Linux user has been turned away from Slackware because, although a geek friend might have pointed it out, there is no help or regard for the newbies. RTFM/RTFD!!! is the most common phrase heard in #slackware on many different IRC servers everywhere. This is the same situation for Debian. New users to Linux who want an extremely powerful distribution, complete with friendly help and knowledgeable users who aren't afraid to help a newbie, even if they ask a duplicated question, should check out Gentoo.