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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.
Their documentation is already pretty good; between that and the forums, I don't see how useful live support would be; Gentoo has always seemed like the hobbyists' distro to me (disclaimer: I run it, and know people who use it in production environments). It just seems to me that if support is important to a person/firm, they'll pony up the $50/$100/$whatever for a license that offers support as well.
May the threads progress competently.
<sarcasm>Yes, because their are just such a pethera of other ways to make any money selling Linux that getting rid of the tech support side of the house would make everything a lot simpler.</sarcasm>
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B.F. Skinner
Well exactly, it's two weeks free support while they get their tech support lines running correctly. Or, alternatively, it's two weeks free support in return for a front page posting on Slashdot.
I'm slightly curious about the original poster's assertion that "I certainly hope this catches on." What does (s)he hope catches on; that distro companies offer free service while beta-ing their service? Seems an odd thing to wish for, since it's a one-time offer that's hardly going to set the world alight.
Unbelivable community unity.
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... they would fix all of the broken ebuilds. Of all of Gentoo's issues, support is not one of them, their forums are really the best I've seen. The biggest problem is the portage is not scaling well, largely due to the high number of crappy submitted ebuilds, and the low number of testers and devs. It feels like its got much worse in the past year or two, with broken packages often making it to 'stable' and critical apps staying hard masked (the delay in MySQL 4.1, PHP5, and all of the Apache issues are my favorite examples).
I do love Gentoo & Portage, but so long as 'emerge -upD world' will fail consistently even on the most conservative use flags & keywords, I'll be using another distro.
My Gentoo system is so out wack from time to time and something always needing to be re-compiled that I haven't gotten around to yet. If a system like mine is all over the map how can live Tech Support really help me? Sometimes I try to ask a question in IRC but even that becomes tricky.
I'll admit I had jumped from Win-world to Gentoo and kind of learned on the fly. I imagine tech support will have to deal with moderate noobs like me at the start of the call. Like ask a few qualification questions first.
"You don't know that [obscure command]? Read a book or two then please call back."
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
Yeah, not to mention the "Hystorically" bit... It's one of the newest distros around, for chrissakes!
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Actually, the business is geared towards smaller outfits. Maybe not one without an admin, but perhaps one with only a single admin and older computers. In fact, at their presentation at the Gentoo Developer Conference after LWE:SF, they specifically mentioned older machines in their presentation. You can view their entire presentation online at http://devconference.gentoo.org/ (warning, streaming video). They were last in the afternoon session.
I'm slightly curious about the original poster's assertion that "I certainly hope this catches on." What does (s)he hope catches on; that distro companies offer free service while beta-ing their service? Seems an odd thing to wish for, since it's a one-time offer that's hardly going to set the world alight.
While one of the other responders to you is correct, and the email address from the submittor is a gen-ux.com email addr, I think the "I certainly hope this catches on," comment in the post comes from the editor. /. tends to quote a submittor, and then non quoted text is from the editor, in this case, ScuttleMonkey. The posting looks like a GenUX person submitted a story saying, "we got this thing," and from the rest of the post, it looks like ScuttleMonkey called them up, checked it out, and posted his feelings on the topic, with no real commentary by the submittor in the posting at all. Anyway, that's how it read to me...
I chose Gentoo because, at the time, it was one of the few Linux distros that support Sparc. Redhat gave up around 6.1, which prompted the switch. I realize now that this is probably a bogus impression, but it seemed back then that Debian was behind the times, with packages older than Redhat's, and several different package managers, all of which struck me as a bit weird. In comparison, Gentoo's emerge seemed amazingly easy to use. So now I've got a bunch of x86 & Sparc systems that present an identical user experience and never mind the radically different architecture underneath.
First off, Gentoo can be very stable if set up correctly. If you're running ~x86 then yeah, it might not be the stablest. But Gentoo's whole principle is that it is based on *choice*. You can choose to run a very stable, very powerful OS. In fact, that is how it comes by default. If you start unmasking things, and installing packages that have not been extensively tested, well... it's your computer. Again, choice. As far as "historically" (yes, spelled with an "i") goes, Gentoo has been around since _at least_ the end of 2001. I think that 4 years is a decent amount of time to compare it to other distributions. Gentoo has undergone several different versions, and a couple of major revisions, like any other distro that's been around for a while. Through all the changes, some things have remained constant: the popularity, and the ability to have a stable system. Finally, like the quote said it's for the power linux users. You cannot come here and bitch and moan about how Gentoo is "ghey" if you are just now "trying" to switch from Windows to Linux. Yes, there are distributions out there that "just work". Power users are not content with those. Gentoo's philosophy is that the enduser should have control over their system. Yes, this requires a bit more work, maybe, but the rewards can be enormous if you know what you are doing. Again, Gentoo, and all of Linux to an extent, is about choice. There is a distro out there that is right for you. For some it's Gentoo. For others, it's Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever. You can go ahead and run what you like, but bashing other distros, just because they weren't suited for *your* needs helps no one.
The answer:
Setup KDE's arts to output to your headset, then:
artsdsp -m teamspeak
artsdsp -m ut2004
Which will give both teamspeak and ut2004 emulated memory-mapped (mostly what people mean when they say hardware controlled) sound output. It does consume a small bit of CPU, but today sound mixing is not that big a deal.
I also believe that the above could probably be done by other software mixers, possibly esd, but I don't know how to set them up off the top of my head.
Hope this helps.