Who is using Gentoo?

Fafner · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Sweden

Hi!
I'm writing my master thesis about an OpenSorce project, and I have chosen the Gentoo project.
I would like to know who is using Gentoo? Are there any organisations or companies that use Gentoo?
Or is Gentoo just for the experienced hackers/geeks?

Why have you chosen to work with Gentoo? Because of the openness and the community or simply because it is free? (As in free beer)

Thanks in advance!
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Moriah · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 9:46 am Post subject:

I am a professional computer consultant who does mostly embedded real-time software development. I have my own consulting company. See the link to my web page in my profile on this forum.

I started using Unix in 1986. In 1989 I put Interactive Systems' 386/ix port of AT&T unix on a 386 box that ran 20 MHz and had 12 MB or ram. That was a real screamer for a PC back in those days. It had 80 MB of SCSI disk too.

I started using Linux in 1993. I started out by downloading the original slackware distribution via a 2400 baud modem. That was -- if I remember correctly -- 76 floppies! Shortly after that, I upgraded to a 19.2 kbps Telebit Worldblazer modem. My internet connection at that time was a middle of the night long distance call using uucp to exchange mail and usenet news.

In 1995 I put up my first full-time internet-connected machine, and ran the NSCA web server and sendmail on it. I upgraded to apache shortly after that.

Sometime in the mid to late 1990's, I tried a bunch of distos, but settled on Red Hat, mainly because that was what most of my clients were using. Red Hat had just bought Cygnus, so all the embedded gcc stuff was supported there.

A couple of years ago, Red Hat made my angry by suddenly announcing they were dropping support for their free version of redhat linux, rh9 at the time. All my machines were running that, and I did not have much time to choose a new distro -- only a couple of months -- before redhat was going to drop support for my machines. Never mind how many tens of thousands of dollars I had steered to them for support from my clients, I still used the free version on my boxes.

Well, after some serious searching and evaluation, I decided on Gentoo because of the flexibility it gave me. I am doing things with gentoo that would have been much more difficult or nearly impossible with RPM based distributions and their ilk. Gentoo is more work to learn to configure, but it is really easier to administer -- especially if you have a lot of custom requirements.

I am developing 2 products now that will run on gentoo platforms because of this versatility to put together just the system I need. I have also used Slackware, Redhat, SUSE, Mandrake, and a bit of Debian. I definately like Gentoo best.

Gentoo's portage system is good, but it is certainly not perfect. I plan someday -- when I get the time -- to put together a quality assurance system for upgrading and maintaining gentoo boxes on my network. I need a way to easily revert back to what I had before an upgrade, and a way to insure that when I do an upgrade on a test box, that when I deploy that same upgrade to other boxes, that I really do indeed get thje same exact version of portage. This will require setting up my own mirror, and syncing that mirror up before an upgrade cycle, then doing an trial upgrade followed by testing. Once I am happy, I can deploy that same upgrade to porduction boxes and know for sure that they got the same stuff. If I back up my mirror, I can always revert back to an earlier mirror image.

Gentoo is not for the person who just wants to build a linux system and forget about it. It is for developers and admins who need to be live on the internet and stay up to date in a controllable manner, or for developers who need extreme flexibility in an easier to use package that other distros provide given the required flexibility.
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arach · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 5:53 pm Post subject:

Who uses gentoo?
People who know what they want and idiots who think that having a three-lines $CFLAGS and $LDFLAGS and recompiling everything from sources or using overpatched kernel sources speed-up anything significantly.

(I do not intend to insult anyone but truth is usually painfull.)
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srlinuxx · l33t Joined: 22 Nov 2003 Posts: 627

Earthwings · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 7:24 pm Post subject:

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Gentoo Chat.
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Genone · Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject:

If you search a bit in the newsletter you'll find several stories about people/organizations using Gentoo.

sugar · Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 10:03 pm Post subject:

Seen this?

http://dev.gentoo.org/~cshields/survey/survey.html

Its got a good number of respondants!