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.

Comments

Cool, but

[Coocha]

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.

Re:Cool, but

[temojen]

Sometimes there are differences between the documents and reality. Also, the documents tend to assume that everything went according to plan and your system has not been customized (bad assumption with gentoo). I.E. the documents for the recent changes to the config file layout for apache2 assumes you're not using mass virtual hosting.

Very Cool

[Comatose51]

That's really cool but I've always found the Gentoo community to be extremely supportive. That's one of my reasons for using Gentoo. I've learned so much from using Gentoo and just getting help from the community. Before Gentoo, compiling the kernel scared me but the Gentoo Handbook was excellent. When I screwed up because I forgot to compile my NIC drivers, I was able to get help from the forums on how to to boot with the LiveCD and start from where I left off. I've had another user with a similar problem as me on how to use Kerberos with AD. After he found the solution, he messaged me to offer to lead me through it.

Unbelivable community unity.

Re:Interesting quote...

[moranar]

Yeah, not to mention the "Hystorically" bit... It's one of the newest distros around, for chrissakes!

Re:Customer Support...Beta!

[s.d.]

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...

Re:Interesting quote...

[surprise_audit]

(I choose Gentoo because of it's flexibility)

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.