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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.
The press release says you will be able to get support "from a Gentoo developer". Is this accurate? Will you actually get to talk to a developer? Most places have you talk to a tech support person not the actual developers.
Bradley Holt
You mean guinea pig tech support offers that are limited time while they work the bugs out of their system?
While this may be mildly helpful- especially in the latter portion of the trial, how helpful will it really be? Techs fumbling around for an answer, problems transferring calls, long queue times? Either way, those of us who know what we're doing- if the problem is bad enough that we need to call, is our problem going to happen during their short trial?
Either way, hope what catches on again?
Broken builds seem like they should be simple to detect.
Have a machine download the most recently submitted "ebuild" files, then attempt to build the binaries. Any failures would then result in a new bug being filed automatically.
That would be a useful service to offer - if you wished to help.
Sure you wouldn't catch bugs which were in the binaries, like immediate segfaults, or in configuration file options. But a simple "compile it" test should be trivial to script...
My fault for not being clear. GenUX has funded Gentoo Devs to fix bugs in Gentoo.
I've been running Gentoo on 6 machines (workstations, servers, and laptops) for a few years now and have generally found the quality to be outstanding. IME, you get a mildly broken ebuild only once in a while and for me, someone's already got a workaround posted to a forum by the time it hits me. I'm pretty conservative in my use flags and package keywords, but I do "emerge -uDN world" almost every day (on all machines). You might have worse luck if you're running ~x86 or something.
The only annoying thing for me is that every once in a while they change file layouts, such as recently w/ apache2. The change is A Good Thing because the files look more like what you'd get from an upstream source install, but it was still a bit disruptive.
OTOH, no distro is problem free and AFAIC, Gentoo is the absolutely easiest distro to maintain over the long haul.
You obviously don't hang around #gentoo (FN) too often. That channel is basically continuous live support, granted it's to users from users (and developers).
As developers, some of us try to make it a point to help people who are having trouble with the packages we maintain. Any help we can get is welcome, so I for one appreciate GenUX's contribution, even if they make money from it.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
What was your question?
I'm not sure I've ever seen a question asked in a slashdot comment, when phrased as impossibly difficult, that someone didn't post the correct solution to within minutes.
Never confuse volume with power.
I work for an ISP tech support and I actually had a Gentoo user call in one time because she had no idea why she couldn't get online. My job doesn't actually allow me to troubleshoot Linux but this customer was upset because she didn't know anything about linux, so I helped her get back online. Turned out it was a Gentoo users mom who didn't want linux but her son insisted on it because he hates microsoft. This makes me wonder how many of these people calling into their tech support are gonna Linux fan boys mothers.