Installing Gentoo Linux a pdf manual oriented towards beginners has recently been released. The book has a total of 119 pages and contains a lot of background information about installing Gentoo Linux. Pictures are also available to demonstrate the various concepts in the book. Look for more information at the The Professor And Pat website. Click here here a direct download link
Linux.com sports an interesting article today in which they describe how Gold Lasso uses Gentoo to power it’s e-mail marketing business. I found the following quote really interesting, which made me wonder is Gentoo one of the most secure distributions out there?
“One of our previous employees was into Gentoo, and made us believe that it is one of the most secure distributions out there,”
Read the full article here.
I think AllenJB explained very well why Sabayon isn’t Gentoo:
Sabayon is considered ‘close’ to Gentoo, but not necessarily ‘very close’ (atleast in my view). The reason for this is because Sabayon uses its own versions of some pretty major packages (browsing through their overlay, I see packages like grub, xorg-x11 and xorg-server to name just a few).
The problem is not that we (the Gentoo community) don’t want to provide official support, it’s that we can’t (beyond a certain point). Sabayon provides its own version of many packages and these seem to (sometimes) lag behind the official Gentoo tree. A case in example: The other day someone came into #gentoo complaining that nvidia-drivers wouldn’t install with glibc-2.6. Glibc-2.6 no longer includes the nptl and nptl-only USE flags, but the Sabayon package was still looking for them. There’s nothing the Gentoo developers can do about this - it would require commit access to Sabayon’s overlay. There’s nothing much most users can do about this - The only suggestion I could make was “ask in #sabayon or use the package from the official tree”.
Some things never change. I recently installed Windows Vista (for the few Windows games that I like to play). The install was straightforward and simple. After the install I continued to install the necessary drivers and of course games. The next day I was in for a surprise. I got greeted with a bsod. I rebooted, same story, In total I rebooted about ten times, but every time I got greeted by the infamous bsod. Mind you that Windows XP has been running on the same hardware without major problems (probably because I only used it for games). Off course Gentoo has been running without a hitch on the same hardware as well.
A search on youtube learns that I am not the only one. As you can see here, here and here. Apparently Windows hasn’t changed much since the famous Windows 98 live crash 10 years ago. No wonder the Lenovo refuses (link is in Dutch) to use experimental software such as Vista at the Olympic games. On a more positive note this experience has really convinced me leave Windows for what it is, meaning no more dual boots. I will rely on the rapid development of Wine for my gaming needs.
Update
The Dutch Consumer Organization (Consumentenbond) has started a campaign in order to register customers complaints about the Vista Operating System. The bond protests against the fact the Visa is the default OS shipped with new computers. And according to Ewald van Kouwen spokesperson of the Consumentbond “The system is riddled with so many bugs that we demand an investigation”. Report your own Vista woes here.
It is a well known fact that google stores all your searches for a period of at least two year. If you want to know what that means you have to look no further than the AOL scandal. You can search the database of 658,000 AOL subscribers yourself. Just enter a “Search Keyword” and find who searched for it then click on a “User ID” to find what else this user searched for. And remember that it also was very to tie the “User ID” to the person behind this number. Not only did they knew what you were looking for, but also who and when.