Gentoo Linux Turns 10

In the fall of 1999, Daniel Robbins decided to create his own distro, one that focused on a non-binary packaging system, and was designed to be built from the ground-up, on a per-user basis. This distro was first known as “Enoch Linux”, but due to complications with how the compiler fared with the package manager, “Gentoo Linux” didn’t show up until early 2002. Why the name change to “Gentoo”? Why, it’s because Gentoos are the fastest swimmers of all penguins. Likewise, Gentoo Linux aims to be the fastest distribution available.

Although Daniel is no longer in charge of the distro, nor has really anything to do with it anymore, Gentoo Linux sticks to its roots and remains as a source-based distro, offering users the ability to fine-tune their OS to their liking, not someone else’s. Just how configurable is it? To better explain, I’ll point you to a review of one of the Gentoo releases I posted just over three years ago, as I explain the basic perks there.

So what am I getting at? Well, just a few days ago, Sunday, Gentoo Linux turned 10, and since I’ve been a long-time user of the OS (more than three-and-a-half years as a full-time OS), I can’t help but get a little excited at knowing just how far the distro has come since it’s first version. Its development has been a roller-coaster ride to say the least, especially over the course of the past few years, but as it stands today, I can confidently say that things have shapen back up, and development is more active than ever (just look at the upcoming version of Portage… it’s more than just a simple upgrade).

If you happen to be a Gentoo Linux fan and want to give praise, you can head over to the official 10th anniversary forum thread. If you want to check out a variety of screenshots that were submitted for a celebratory  contest, you can go here. If you are unfamiliar with Linux, I highly recommend checking that out, since you can see the OS in a wide-variety of configurations. For mine, you can look no further than the screenshot below (KDE 4.3.2 on Gentoo using the 2.6.31 kernel).

The Gentoo-Ten LiveDVD is available in two flavors, a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64-only version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-10.0 will work on x86 or x86_64. If your arch is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64 boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64bit kernel and install a customized 64bit userland while using the provided 32bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-10.0 version is for x86_64 only.