Gentoo is Cool

I’ve been working hard over the past several days to get Gentoo Linux up and running on a VMWare machine. After about two solid days of compiling, I finally ended up with a bootable machine. And damn it’s cool!

If you’re not familiar with Gentoo, it is a Linux distribution that is entirely based on source code. Whereas distros like Redhat distribute pre-compiled binaries, Gentoo is designed to automatically download the package in source form, and then compile it with specific optimizations for your hardware. The net result is an extremely configurable, optimized, flexible operating system.

And it’s super simple to do all of this. For example, I just installed Mono on my install. It was as simple as typing emerge dev-dotnet/mono. The code was automatically downloaded from the fastest Gentoo mirror that could be found, compiled, and installed, including all dependencies! How cool is that?