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Daniel Robbins Resigns As Chief Gentoo Architect
bdowne01 writes "Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list."
Tester adds "But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo. The initial board of trustees will be appointed by Daniel, but next year they will be elected. The membership of the foundation will be open." Reader burnitall points out a note on the Gentoo homepage reading "... We are extremely sad to see Daniel Robbins depart, and we both wish him the best in his new endeavors and promise that the door will always be open for his return." Robbins' message also indicates he hopes
to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo.
... it's still compiling.
To see Daniel go, but at the very least, the copyrights have been entrusted to a nonprofit foundation, which gives me at least some peace of mind.
I can say that Tony Robbins will be sorely missed for his inspirational Linux self-help books.
A free distro?
;-)
What?
A free distro?
Oh right, yeah. But beside that, what has he given us?
Technical support?
Oh yeah, that goes without saying...
Infrastructure?
Yeah, oh yeah it was much worse before...
Ok ok, beside a free distro, technical support and infrastructure what has he given us? That's right, nothing...
The copyrights to the distro?
Oh shut up you!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Obvious desperate attempt at a valid looking FP.
I have learned more about how Linux works in the last year with Gentoo than I had in the previous 3 trying RH, Debian and Suse.
That's probably not so far from the truth.
As much as Linux is near and dear to Robbins' heart (and our own), it just doesn't pay like an industry job does, much less what a major player like Microsoft or IBM or Apple could pay.
We'd all like to be doing what we love to do, but sometimes we learn to grow by doing what makes us more money and ultimately more leisure time to spend with friends and family.
I have been pwned because my
1) Leader resigns
:(
2) Developers don't agree on future features, etc.
3) Gentoo goes down the crapper.
4) Distro gets forked.
5) Both go down the drain.
Pitty
I hope they will have a member responsible for coordination with other GNU distros i.e. Debian.
Linux has better chance to prosper with a coordinated development thus avoiding unnecessary duplication...
He actually meant to resign last Friday but it took some time to compile his letter of resignation.
1. Open Non-Profit Organization
2. ???
3. Profit!!!!
I think that it goes more like this;
1. Resign from overseeing a linux distibution that requires long hours and thankless mind-numbing work.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Daniel was an important, driving force behind Gentoo and his absence will undoubtedly be felt on the team. That said, he has laid the groundwork for a Not-for-Profit organization, lead by a Board of Trustees that will continue to ensure that Gentoo Linux remains a vibrant, capable distribution.
For those of you concerned about this change, I remind you that Gentoo is one of the few remaining community-based Linux distributions. We are as successful as our community makes us. Thus, the best thing you can do to ensure the future success of Gentoo is to participate in its development, whether it be through testing ebuilds, writing documentation, fixing bugs on bugzilla or any one of the thousands of myriad tasks that make up Gentoo Linux.
I'm not sure what Daniel's plans are for the future, but I wish him the best in whatever he chooses to pursue.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
OSS is dominated by developers, which is a strength when it comes to the quality of the software. But that's not all they need, and we know that developers want to spend their time writing code, not managing growing projects.
Perhaps we should find some zelous people to grow pointy hair and act stupid to be the OSPHBs.
6)???
7)Profit... (But whom is the question)
"Gentoo Linux has experienced rapid growth in the past year--much to the credit of Daniel Robbins, the founder and Chief Architect of the project. Earlier today, he announced his resignation from his role on the gentoo-nfp mailing list.
After 4 years of compilation and rapid disk usage growth, the build was 98% complete when the hard drive became full and the the build failed. Daniel Robbins was then struck by a wave of despair and tendered his resignation. Last we heard of him, he was in a house for the mentally disabled, installing, formatting then reinstalling Mandrake and Debian on a 486 box over and over again, banging his head on the wall, munbling incomprehensible things about "precompiled" this or that...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Should one wear a "tux" to a Linux distro's funeral?
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
I think the step of resigning is the means of profitting. i.e., 1. start linux distro, 2. quit linux distro, 3. profit...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Its well enough. It goes to show that talent is something you cannot fake, not even with a committee. When I saw Gentoo three things really stood out for me,
1) It was a truely refreshing outlook on a distribution
2) It is source based
3) I was free from being unwitting pawn in the software binary release freedom debate
When I ran and got to know Gentoo I saw genius was at work, the light nimble free-floating kind of genius unencumbered by committee. Much of that was DRobbins shining through (as shown by his technical writings of frontier Linux applications for IBM.)
I will be sad to see him go, but to me it looked as if his inspiration was diluted by so many faces long ago. Don't get me wrong Gentoo is still my favorite and I run it exclusively at home. I think its gained much from Seemant and the others. But you just have to admire sometimes what individual talent can do on its own.
I think Daniel made a very wise decision. Gentoo is his child, and it looks like the child is reaching maturity and it's time for Gentoo to move out of the parents' house.
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no masked or unmasked ebuilds to satisfy "chief_architect".
!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
linucks root #
From the article:
Copyright Assignment to Gentoo
Gentoo Technologies Inc. Copyright Assignment Form
Gentoo Documentation Issues
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
We'd all like to be doing what we love to do, but sometimes we learn to grow by doing what makes us more money and ultimately more leisure time to spend with friends and family.
Participation in the dog-eat-dog struggle is almost entirely unnecessary for most people. The poverty level in Western countries exceeds the upper middle class of most other countries.
One could, if one were willing to give up one's lifestyle, live cheaply and have leisure time for friends and family in abundance. A trailer home in Kentucky can be had for $1000, and a diet of ground beef, flour, spices and vegetables can sustain a family for less than $5000 a year.
You are not working for leisure time, don't kid yourself. Almost any working American today could retire and move to a 3rd world country and live comfortably forever. You are working for DSL, the new Radeon, that huge TV, the laptop, your spiffy car, fancy dinners, nice clothes and every other element required to 'keep up with the Joneses'. You find those things more valuable than pursuit of what you love, if you are not doing what you love.
Is that how YOU live?
Would you WANT too?
How many families making $5000 a year do you think actually like it that way?
Hello?
When you get fed up, we'll be here.
I think the parent may have been in reference to this web site.
Out of curiosity, has drobbins given any explanation as to why he has made this decision? Too much work? Change in priorities? It's definitely sad to see him go... Gentoo forums don't seem to have an answer yet, and they're usually the first source of any gentoo news..
/.? The time is now!
On another note, is Gentoo ever gonna get it's own icon on
Eh? You want to live in a trailer, in Kentucky? A trailer? Your house is a plastic and metal, leaking, easily damaged, tin can, placed in a nice open tornado attracting flat area... nice
Yeah... and I suppose you love the crime rates and toxic liquids in your back yard.
You need a car to get to that job? A junker maybe? You know, something you spend more time working on than being with your family. Nice.
I suppose you don't need cloths either.
Insurance? Screw that!
Investing for retirement? No fucking way! You'll be dead before then anyway.
No need for that dentist crap. You got some K-Mart plies, right? Rock-on!
Diem kids ain't got no use for no schooling books. Right?
Braces? Eh, diem kids teeth with fall out anyway.
From OS News, Posted on 2002-05-14:
Does Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies, Inc.? If so, conversion to non-profit status may be easy (though having the IRS recognize it as non-profit for tax purposes may not.) If others own some of the stock, it conversion may prove problematic as they might have to agree. Otherwise, there might be a shareholders lawsuit for corporate waste (i.e., in this case, making a gift of corporate assets without compensation).
Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit company? It doesn't make sense. Since it was not a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to Gentoo Technologies, Inc. were not tax deductible. (Hell, it may have been the case that the donors were legally, albeit technically, responsible to pay gift tax on any donation over the annual limit.)
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Here's a snippit:
Naw, it's obvious why he left. It's to go join the family business to give out free ice cream on Wednesday night.
... more free ice cream here on Tuesday.)
(Psst
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Have running water? Then your standard of living is too high. How can the US IT industry possibly compete with India if they demand such frivolities?
On top of that your "diet" including ground beef is for rich Americans. I'm not sure if you really know what poor people eat.
Ground beef is extremely expensive, out here it's $3-$4 per pound (california). But you can get some tougher meats for $2-$3 and you can get tofu or whole chickens from the asian grocery store for $2 . Sometimes I can get steaks when they are on sale for the same price as ground beef, and they have less water and fat in them to cook off than ground beef so you end up with more cooked meat for every pound of raw meat.
As somone who had to live on a tiny amount of money with no job I can tell you that buying raw ingredients isn't usually the cheapest way to go.
I really enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables. But to save money I often bought frozen or canned veggies and things like macaroni and cheese. Turns out you can get fiber and vitamins from fruit roll-ups for a fraction of the price of fresh apples or oranges.
Canned fruit can sometimes be a good deal if you go with a generic brand. And you can save the syrup and make a sweet sauce to put over pancakes. pancake mix is really cheap, maple syrup or cane syrup is not cheap. boil some syrup from canned peachs and/or pears and it's like a treat over maple syrup and you can pretend you aren't actually poor.
If you are living without electricty because you bounced too many checks you can get fast food cheaper. Often fast food is cheaper than buying the ingrediants and making it. McDonalds sells double cheese burgers for $1 each. (regular cheeseburger is $0.99, so spring for the double and just buy half as many as you normally would) If you get a double cheese burger, and split a biggie fries and a bottle of Shasta with a friend you can have a hot meal for under $3. The trick of fast food is never pay the $1.50+ for the drink. And beware of menu items that have advertisements.
Taco bell is also quite cheap. KFC is not that cheap unless you only buy sides or you buy a large bucket and split it with a few people.
Frozen pizza is another option, often you can find the generic brands for under $3. Sometimes they will go on sale for only $1. If you still have electricity you can pick up 8 of these, and when you find some fresh veggies on sale you can slice them up and add them.
But the all time best way to save money is beans. not canned beans, those are expensive. But go to a mexican store and they will sell bulk beans, rice and other things. You can get a 10lb bag of beans for couple dollars, and it will end up making 20lbs+ of food. I'd beware of beans in a little plastic bag they sell at most stores. They are generally 4x-5x the price of buying them 10lbs at a time. The only problem with beans is you have to soak them for a few hours before cooking them and you have to clean the stones out of them.
Another helpful hint to living on the cheap is to simply eat less food. you can live fine on 1200 calories, and it's easy to get that many with hardly any food at all. Generally energy dense foods. fats and carbs are the cheapest food. And many things are vitamin enriched now so children don't get rickets or scurvy because thier parents are too poor to buy them healthy food. (that's not to say rich/normal people bother buying healthy food).
Come on...that made me spit my soda.
1) Open non-prophit distro 2) Compile 3) Compile 4) Compile 5) ??? 6) Compile
This is from the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:
"While Daniel Robbins is busy converting Gentoo into a not-for-profit
organisation on his side of the Atlantic, the German Gentoo developers
have finalised all the necessary steps for registering an almost identical
legal entity, called "eingetragener Verein" (registered association) under
the German law. It'll take the commercial courts another four to six weeks
to acknowledge the setup, but the association[11] is already operational,
has opened a bank account, and started raking in bushels of money via
their new online shop[12], whose main advantage over the Gentoo store[13]
in the US lies in its comparatively low-cost deliveries to customers in
Germany."
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
this comes on the heels of Seemant Kulleen leaving the corporate side of Gentoo. could this mean Gentoo really isn't good for corporates?
1) It was a truely refreshing outlook on a distribution
2) It is source based
3) I was free from being unwitting pawn in the software binary release freedom debate
Thank goodness FreeBSD began the ideas behind Portage. People have been using BSD's ports tree for years and years.
I actually prefer Portage, though...would be nice if it was ported to BSD
The parent is most than reasonable, it is a Fake.
This is the personal's page for this element:
http://groups.msn.com/danandstef
All parent with the Chief Architect of Gentoo is pure coincident.
This might be an appropriate time to ask... how exactly do you pronounce Gentoo anyway? Is it a hard G? Or is it more like gen- as in generator?
>>KFC is not that cheap unless you only buy sides or you buy a large bucket and split it with a few people.
better create a trust fund for your bypass as well.
you'll need it a few years down the road
"hello! it looks like you're resigning from your open source project. would you like to:
Send a resume to Microsoft?
Get help writing an angry mailinglist post?
take a bath?
Seeding honeypot, please ignore collector@honeypot.id.au
www.gentoo.org
:-( need I say more?
jump into the forums and see the community, they welcome all with open arms.
Read the *complete* documentation, and if you still don't get it, ask the question in a forum. No one will answer with an elitist attitude, just a gentle nudge in the right direction.
High Speed, Cross Country, Linux - just what my processor with all those silly extensions I paid for (SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!) needs.
Compile times? Check out distcc - www.distcc.org
Want binaries? no problem - Binary installs also supported.
Stable - oops, Fedora crashed again during an update, switched to Gentoo and never looked back. If your Gentoo crashed, that is because you used the wrong mask - RTFM - I know, cause I did it.
Hardware Support - ANY BSD I tried
Hopefully the community can handle the shock, but Dave Robbins has a family that needs him as well.
To Dave, best of luck. We will take the torch and do our best to keep it burning, trolls be damned!
Birukun
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
Gentoo is the only linux distro I have used that impressed me enough to move a few machines from freebsd.
But at least the community is strong, I don't think this will have any effect on gentoo's future.
___
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
this is about all the info available right now.
"Why?" .config files, they want to click 'Yes' or 'No'. I personally don't mind, but I have a geek-ish bent that goes back to high school; ran my own BBS on software that I mostly wrote myself.
I ask this in all seriousness. It seems to me, an admitted outsider with little Linux exp., that the more I hear the more fragmented it seems. What with this distro and that distro, KDE vs Gnome vs. X11 w/ IceWM or whatever, apt-get vs. portage (I think...) vs. compile-from-source, apparent binary incompatabilities, etc. etc. etc.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for F/OSS in principle. I first tested the Linux waters in '99 with SuSE 6.x; tried installing it on a Compaq 486 box. Never got it to go, but was later successful with a homebuilt K6-2. And it was nice! I got the xserver running, played around with different window managers, became aquinted with the CLI. And it worked better on my sketchy hardware than Win98SE (which had the typical problems) and Mandrake 7.x (which would hang during install while trying to query the PCI bus).
However, even now it seems like there is too much choice for the layperson. The average Joe doesn't want to have to mess around with
Until the Linux community comes together and agrees upon a standard interface, be it Gnome, KDE, or whatever for desktop distros, then it isn't going to make it mainstream.
Let the flaming commence.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Flamebait?
Hey fanboy, it doesn't change the truth! MORON!
If you study some history you will find that many people went into debt for their ideas. Some of them for far worse ideas than what Gentoo has become.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
gentoo = tennis?
You mean "she" and "wife's", don't you? The quotation marks, man. The quotation marks.
Yeah man, I remember back in the redhat days, someone there talking to someone else about something... or something.
I'm not entirely sure who said or did what and with whom and what were the results, but yeah man, those redhat guys are some sick fucks..
Gentoo is a toy for undersexed geeks. Unless a developer is using it to test how things will work with experimental dep's, I really don't see how it's useful at all. Some of it's tools are useful though, so I do hope that Daniel Robbins and Gentoo have bright futures. I hope those useful tools make it's way into the real linux OS, Debian.
gentoo is fassst, sure you could compile everything but you dont have to, even a lot of the portage tree is avaliable as a prebuilt package. its a terrific distro thats worth the extra effort and it stays quite true to bsd which is an extra plus i suppose.
All these gentoo zealots swearing by gentoo. . .
Just wait, three years and gentoo will be Debian all over again, a wasteland of abandoned packages.
I empathize. I started a Linux based company in late 1999. We got VC, hired people, tried to get the business going, expand it, realized that Linux was not going to peak any time soon in our geographical area, had to lay off people, went almost entirely broke... well, you know the deal. It's been over 4 years now, but we're still hanging in there, and now the Linux landscape is starting to look better, things are picking up, and who knows?
I understand the dilemma of a new family and a lot of debt. Been there, done that. But I think we're just on the cusp of something grand. I hope Daniel doesn't get so far out that he can't come back and reap some of the rewards when this thing pays off. I know it will! Gentoo and Linux are just too great to write off. And I hope that once a lot of the bottom feeders (myself included) making a living off X free distro, start taking responsibility, and budget R&D funds, maybe then we'll see some joy. We at least are looking ahead to make it part of our budget, a percentage of each sale.
Good luck, Daniel, hang in there.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
The story of Daniel Robbins and Gentoo Linux seems to me to be an example of software as art and Daniel as a starving artist. And yes, I realize that many other people were involved in the Gentoo project. But one of the leading forces behind Gentoo seems to be leaving because he can't afford to take part in the project anymore.
The world does not owe artists, writers or software engineers working on open source/ Free Software a living. But what is interesting to me is that if, for the sake of argument, some commercial entity, like Red Hat, were to come along and start selling Gentoo at some point in the future, Daniel Robbins and the rest of the Gentoo developers would get as much as the Linux developers got from Red Hat going public (e.g., very little).
If software engineering jobs were not moving overseas and our income was not under constant downward pressure this might not be such a big deal. There is a lot to be said for doing something you love. For many people money can't replace this. But when it gets to the point where you can't pay your bills or are unemplyed, survival becomes the important issue.
Speaking for myself, the current state of our industry throws into question any open source project that can be picked up by slick marketeers and resold to end users. Since I'm not independently wealthy, why should I work for free? I have to wonder if Daniel Robbins is not asking himself similar questions as he looks at the state of his finances.
For more on this see my essay Freedom Can be Slavery
I'm guessing Gentoo has brought more U.S. desktop users to Linux any distro in the last year or more. I'm making this statment simply by the fact I know of at least 20 people who hated Linux until Gentoo and now use it for everything. You might be complaining about compiling a lot, I complain a lot more that my Redhat X.X machines are no longer supported and to keep the box secure I have to wrangle with a mixure of RPM and source packages or take them down and reinstall a new OS. No thanks, its source distro for me from now on thanks.
At work we have a shared drive where compiled binaries go so if your the first to emerge a giant world update, binary packages are made available for the whole office. Nothing like coming back from vacation to a fresh set of Athlon-64 KDE 3.2.2 packages.
emerge sync && emerge --unmerge drobbins
You can take your personal criticisms of Dan and politely ram them up your ass.
Let me make something clear here. I don't know Dan. Never met him, never talked with him. What I do know, however, is that he fits a mold i've seen over and over again in the past 10 years. There's a certain spirit of selflessness and altruism that underpins pretty much everything "major" going on in the Linux community. People like Dan give hours upon hours of their time, building, creating, fixing, and helping people they can't even see, and know they will never meet. They do it because it's fun, and they do it because it makes them feel good to know they're helping someone else. That's all there is to it.
Just incase you weren't in school the day they taught this, here's basically how it works: Criticizing the character or works of someone who shows charity, thoughtfulness, and selflessness makes you a royal fucking asshole. Infact, ANY form of criticism of people like Dan aught to be promptly rejected, returned, then rammed tightly up the ass of it's issuer.
You, the beneficiary of the hard work of people like Daniel Robbins and the Gentoo development community, have absolutely no right to complain, question, or laugh at any decision he happens to make in regard to his own life. Looking back at the Linux community landscape over the past 5 years, we can see what happened to people who continually gave blindly, and asked for essentially nothing in return. Dan's decision to pull back from the front lines is one of the smartest moves he could possibly make at this point of the game. Criticisms about software are one thing. Commentary on someone's financial status are something entirely different, and something you have no fucking right to criticize..Especially from someone who did nothing but give you shit for free.
And even if that weren't the case here....that he's turning the reins over for a totally different reason...WTF have you done that gives you the right to criticize him, or anyone who in his position?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
From this post, it looks like Daniel built up quite a hefty debt working on Gentoo.
How 'bout some support? Visit the Gentoo homepage and click the donation button in the upper left corner.
The man's got to feed his family after all.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Robbins didn't imply that he will work in release engineering. He said that he wants Zheng to continue to work in release engineering.
See now, you just killed off a humorous hypothreadical skit entitled "The Four Yorkshiremen Get Their Gentoo On."
I hope you inadvertantly enter the door marked "Abuse" when searching for the Argument Clinic and never find your way out, you insensitive clod!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The puppet council appoited by Robbins is
a joke. We do not accept its authority.
Daniel Robbins needs to withdraw his forces
from Gentoo's servers immediately. The
United Nations should dispatch envoy
Lakhdar Brahimi to oversee the creation of
a new governing council for Gentoo. It's
odd, but I feel two competing urges: the
desire to compile my own kernel, and the
wish to strap dynamite to my body and take
out a bus load or two of children in Basra.
Funny how open source will do that to ya.
right. i'm not sure which 3rd world country you're dreaming about, but the $20,000 debt daniel robbins has isn't going to let him live comfortably anywhere forever. how do you live off of negative money?
not to mention he has a wife and kids. i don't think you can support a wife and kids for less than $5000 a year.
before he switched to Fedora like the rest of us.
Bjorn Borg was a pus. Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe made him look like a little girl with epilepsy on the court.
Go fly a kite you Euro-trash.
Re-elect Bush 2004.
What? Gentoo Linux is dying?
FreeBSD: Because Computers Can Be Fun... Again.
Isn't Gentoo all GPL and or OSS with compatible liscences?
If it wasnt for gentoo being so easy to setup, and working very very well, I would still be using Windows XP. Ive made the switch to linux because of Gentoo. My server, main box, and Laptop now run Gentoo. The other Dist. (ex: SuSE, Mandrake) are for people that have no clue about there system or really know what there doing.
Certain companies/groups just give you a bad feeling.
Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Gentoo, they're all shady (mostly due to their leaders).
Mess you up!
..but dude, your sodium level will be higher than that of the Red Sea in a matter of months. :P
I guess you can dilute it with some Pabst Blue Ribbon, tho.
i agree.
i know Bowie doesn't speak much anymore.... but when he does he means it
whatever happened to him
MOD PARENT UP
A trailer home in Kentucky can be had for $1000, and a diet of ground beef, flour, spices and vegetables can sustain a family for less than $5000 a year.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
But apparently it's still not often enough when you know to the hour the last time it was. People who it it regularly would have just said "this morning". But that 6:57AM quickie must have been pretty special.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
This is the end of the Gentoo monarchy. I fear as its greatness shall plummet without the guidance of its great ruler, and become engulfed in the powers of beaurocracy. -Alex
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wish to thank Daniel Robbins for all his hard work and creativeness. Gentoo Linux is really a gem and I'm glad I tried it. I'm totally sold on this fine piece of work that makes my everyday maintenance tasks on my Linux box a breeze.
I hope your next opportunity or idea is as well received.
Thank you again!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Yes u gain some extra performance (im certain far more than the 2% estimates some have given based on my experience). The great benifit of gentoo as i see it is the ability to maintain a soft of preference profile between your use flags, cflags and world file and keep it as up to date as any other system out their with a single command. Its also nice to be able to avoid the bs surounding media players dvd capabilities and other contravercial (legally uncertain) features. I used to run suse and i had a list a page long of packages which needed to be installed manually because suses was either really old (mozilla 1.2 when 1.6 was out) or altered (xine/k3b). I like to know my system is always up to date essentially with packages as the author wrote them with the options and optimizations i want with that one magical command to unleash the dark magic of portage
emerge world
PS. Yes the install is a pain. deal with it or help make the new graphical installer
I installed Gentoo for the first time this weekend. It has an issue with my hardware (NIC drops net connection sometimes) but other than that they were by far the most enjoyable hours that I spent using Linux since 1999 when I first gave Red Hat a try.
I used to be a just-get-RPMs-that-work guy, and hadn't even compiled a kernel until 2 days ago. Now I enjoy every bit of each kernel compilation and emerge. I think I've learnt more about Linux in the past 2 days than I did the 4 years before.
The community behind Gentoo is as strong as I've seen (both in IRC and the Gentoo forums). It's been great to have joined the Gentoo bandwagon.
I didn't even know who Robbins was until I read this article, but now that I know just let me say this: Thanks, thanks, thanks.
He (she?) said "WHO IT IT". Now that's fucking gold!
While he certainly was the driving force behind Gentoo, it wasn't all good.
To put it bluntly, Mr. Robbins is an utter PITA to work with. Many of the same things that have been said about Theo de Raadt (true or not) could be said about drobbins. This has alread caused a fork in Gentoo. My very limited exposure to dealing with Mr. Robbins left me with such a bad taste in my mouth I just decided to drop it rather than put up with it.
Gentoo is a wonderful distribution, which I still use. But like several other open source projects (*cough*xfree86*cough*thebsds*cough*), those running the project were operating disconnected from their user/developer base. It isn't that central control is bad (Linus keeps control of final say) but that a central control that doesn't play nice with others is going to spell trouble.
I hope that Gentoo will end up better for it.
Honestly sick of the gushing praise for what is basicall Linux From Scratch + a buggy clone of bsd ports system. Here's hoping the hype will die down!
I WANTED to like linux since I started using it in 1998, with Debian. I always dual-booted with Windows though, no matter what distro I used because Debian, Redhat, and Mandrake would always be just short of what I wanted, they were either too bloaty or too cryptic.
The Gentoo install system taught me more about *NIX in the course of a few days than three years of other distros did. I fell in love instantly.
It didn't hurt that I could FINALLY build binaries tuned for my CPU, while other distros were much more 'generic'.
I stopped using Windows in 2002, switching my small network of a Mac G3 server, an Athlon, a PIII laptop, and whatever else I had laying around totally to Gentoo.
It was the best thing I ever did with computers. Ever.
Now I live in the blissful world of roaming profiles that work between Windows, Macs, and Linux boxes, automatic synchronizing and updating with emails telling me when config files need to be updated, and universal config files (XF86Config anyone?) that dynamically adjust to whatever host they reside on.
I've switched a few friends over to Linux using Gentoo, they really dig how I can call up all sorts of window managers and apps compared to whatever Microsoft foists on them. I've even sold some Gentoo boxes to small businesses as file/print/domain servers, they're so stable that I have to charge the customers for when I _DON'T_ have to go service them.
I had an NPTL/2.6-based distro built on gcc-3.3 and 2.6 headers WAY before anyone else did. Gentoo lets me live comfortably on the 'frontier' in a 'mobile home' that I had 'custom built' and it's truly exciting, and it helps pave the way for the rest of the people who need bugs shaken out and versions pushed.
I don't think I'd ever be able to do all this if I hadn't learned the 'basics' from a Gentoo install.
Thanks Daniel!
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
1. story gets posted on slashdot 2. numerous posters mimic undewear gnome's profit scheme 3. pray to get modded up 4. profit?
good riddance
a year supply of ground beef, flour, spices (no curry please) and vegetables for a family ...
Oh shut the fuck up you tree hugging moron!
It is sad when a business has an IPO and becomes a traded company. Sure the owners make off with a big amount of money, but the customers might suffer. I mean that when ever the board of directors can elect them selves-it gets hard to keep a company in the same path. When money hungy people just want money...Granted not all companies are run that way, but some just don't need it.
Yes, I'm only kidding.
> whatever happened to him
You got me wondering... google led me to:
http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/microblogger/
an up-to-date blog which should answer your question.
Basically to sugar coat it, it appears that health concerns appear to have gained his focus.
Man I am going to miss him, I first learned about D Robbins when he was writing for IBM, and he really had some great ideas on how linux should function. He then surprised me by building one of the best distros I have ever used. He has even gone as far as helping me personally in the irc chat rooms, and I even helped him once with a DECSS issue he was having with xine and dvdnav. I truly think he was a great person, I have even donated to gentoo linux just because I wanted to help D Robbins idea grow and for him to find gentoo worthwhile. I am sad to see him go and he will be well missed, but Im sure we will see him in the #gentoo-dev forums when he is bored. :-) I love you drobbins!
keanmarine.com
Does Gentoo have an installer, or not?
(Personally, I use Slackware.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"you're".
Note the apostrophe.
It's "you're".
Note the apostrophe.
You should have installed the STAGE 1 BINARY build.
You should have used emerge -k when you installed your packages.
I guess Gentoo linux is not really for you, because you didn't RTFM enough to find out about these basic options.
To blog is sublime
Come on now, what the hell is up with "(Score:1, Insightful) "???
If the parent comment only deserves a score of 1, then everyone else deserves a score of -5,Stupid
Most of the comments here that get modded up are only exaggerating things about Gentoo or making personal attacks against Dan.
People need to read the parent's message.
Watch out! Those zealots have modpoints!
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
There's a piece at LinuxWorld on Daniel's resignation, quoting how Nicholas Petreley made Gentoo his favorite distro a year ago...
Changing to a NFP costs a lot of money $7,000 - $10,000. Daniel already has debt around $20,000 due to gentoo. He has a young family to support, and no savings. He needed to remove himself from becoming a larger financial black hole.
Maybe if people were to DONATE this would not have happened.
Get a free ipod.
I would just like to send a big thank you to drobbins. He has laid out the foundation to one of the best distributions out there for us tinkers. There is no doubt that portage has taken computing a step further. To always be able to have the latest without reinstallation is something ive always dreamt of and is now a reality.
Just because he doesnt do everything everyone wants just because they say so isnt any reason to bash the man. Someone have to take decisions and if people doesnt like them they are free to fork. If they are right about their complaints people will follow the fork, else its just going to be a stub fork without users.
Forks is for incompabilitys amongst developers and i think forks is whats best about Open Source.
Whiners on the other hand is something i cant stand!
HTTP/1.1 400
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is silly. his reasons are clear - he's taking care of what comes first, his family. i have to assume that > 70% of you have no idea what kind of responsibility and self-sacrifice is required of parents of small children, but maybe someday you will...
this man deserves a pat on the back as he leaves, not a finger in the air...
i have never used this Genitools, so I wont post a comment
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
You mean:
"You mean "she" and "wife's," don't you?"
apt-get install lyx-qt
Don't you like qt? Ok, great.
apt-get install lyx-xforms
If you don't really care about it, just apt-get install lyx, and one of them will come. Which one? Depends on what is easiest for your system.
Two points (I know I'm feeding the Anonymous Troll ,but):
1) Show me the statistics that show that you can feed a family of four for less than $5000/year.
2) As a multiple-business owner, and family man this kind of post is just disgusting. Part of what made the United States as comfortable, powerful and sucessful entities in the world was simply the pursuit by her citizens of something better. Remove that single aspect, replace it with your belief and this country will fail.
Most people in the U.S. were born and raised with the luxury of living in the most powerful country in history. Because of this, there is an unawareness of why our forefathers worked as hard as they did.
Personally, I'm going to work my ass off while I'm young so that I can retire early. Yes I'm on track to do so in 10 years.
Then I'll watch in retired comfort as the radical people that thought they were making a difference by not doing anything are in their 60's with $400 in the bank with medical expenses no place to live.
I suppose I'll be supporting them via taxes anyway. So it is that the buren of the lazy is placed on the hard-working.
-brain
Gentoo outsourced him to India because free wasn't cheap enough!!!!