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Free Gentoo Technical Support
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that GenUX is offering free technical support for anyone using Gentoo Linux. I spoke briefly with one of their support staff and he assured me that it would be completely free Gentoo tech support for approximately 2 weeks to help them 'work out the kinks' of their new support system. GenUX is offering this support through both web-based chat and the traditional phone call. I certainly hope this catches on.
Form the press release: "During the initial release of this program, GenUX will be in a testing phase, and will be offering free support during this time"
Support is free for few weeks, then you have to paid the traditionally high support costs
http://www.gen-ux.com/catalog
What OSS Piracy did GenUX commit? Talk to any Gentoo Dev that works with us and you will see all of our code except the closed source (gpl free) compile farm has been released one way or another back to the community. GenUX has even funded paying for Bugs in Gentoo for almost 8 months.
Once your addicted, the price goes from free to... well... not free.
;-)
Anyway they're still doing the right thing, since Gentoo is the-one-and-only Linux distro
Gentoo has excellent documentation for installing their OS whether you are choosing the more difficult installation or the canned installation. Not only that, if you have a problem the forums that they have set up is superiour. It seemed like any question I had was answered within a few hours of asking, sometimes minutes.
The Technomancer
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-
...in a corp IT environment "answered within hours, sometimes minutes" doesn't cut it. If you wanted to deploy Gentoo in any serious company setting you need to know that there are people you can call 24-7 who know how to fix whatever's not working.
I've never used Gentoo before (fedora man myself) but for it to be taken seriously for hosting critical apps this type of service is required.
You and I both know any competent sysadmin worth their salt will know how to diagnose and fix problems but PHB's want to be able to phone a vendor and vent down the phone, it's like a comfort blanket to them.
I am NaN
I just tried it out, because I've got some burning gentoo questions that nobody on the forums can answer.
First off, their web chat interface was crazy broken. It just reloaded a thousand times a second.
Their phone support was actually really good. I was surprised that it wasn't slashdotted. I didn't have to wait at all. The sad part is that calling them was about the equivalent of calling myself on the phone. They did the same google search that I did and found the same stuff I did. This is really only good for people who don't have a geeky friend who knows as much as I do. For now it's free call them with everything you've got. But it wont be worth paying for because they are no better able to answer the burning ultra hard questions than you or I.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that GenUX with an e-mail address of hparker@gen-ux.com?
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
2. Give away support for Free - including using Slashdot for advertising
3.
4. **** PROFIT ****
When will we stop seeing Underpants Gnome business models - Right after we see a spell checker for Slashdot posting I assume
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
This seems to be a recurring problem when people don't use the most up-to-date and unstable versions of things- often there isn't much work put into making sure stable things STAY fixed.
While I've always run Gentoo with the unstable packages accepted (nearly everything works, actually, on my x86... and if something does fail, syncing the next day and updating almost always fixes it), I had a lot of problems when I tried to use -stable freeBSD. Packages failed to fetch, meaning I had to go hunt them down... one or two things also didn't compile. I switched to whatever the next step up from -stable is (don't remember any more...) and the problems all went away. Go figure.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
There are two tips I can give for anyone installing Gentoo:
First, read the handbook. Following it step by step, one should not encounter any errors.
Second, Gentoo forums is the best place to look if you do encounter any errors.
No costs whatsoever (except time and the money you pay to your ISP)
That's interesting. I run Gentoo on *counts* 4 or 5 systems. One of those is my desktop, where I run the unstable arch, the others are servers of varying architectures, but I run Stable on all of them. I can't recall the last time I had an ebuild in the install process that was broken. Every now and then, I'll have issues with the PHP or MySQL ebuilds, but they're getting better, and the issues are usually because I catch them in the middle of transitioning to a new structure, like they're doing right now with PHP, moving it to a single package, instead of seperate packages for CLI, CGI, and Apache Module builds.
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Couldn't figure out how to get slashdot to keep them
Use <(<) and >(>)
HTH =)
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger