Josh Saddler

Gentoo is not about choice.

It's not. Despite the fact that you'll see this repeated ad infinitum by users and some developers alike. Take another look through all of our documentation and the About Gentoo and Philosophy pages on the website. Nothing in there about "choice" at all, is there?

Let's take a look at what we do see. Words like adaptability. Tools. Not choice. So, what is the strength, the purpose of Gentoo?

Flexibility.

This is readily apparent in several ways. You have a good number of choices -- in packages, in initscripts, in where to place config files. It shows in the configuration tools like emerge --config and rc-update, and other tools that serve the user. You can adapt Gentoo into anything you like. It's flexible enough that you can even strip out Portage, the heart of Gentoo, and install a tiny operating system on your embedded device. Or you can scale Gentoo up and run it on networks of thousands of servers. You can tuck it away in your living room as a combination HTPC and game station. You're a programmer? You're in luck; half our tree consists of development tools.

It's this kind of flexibility that makes Gentoo strong. It's not limited to traditional roles as a 'server" or "desktop" or "firewall" distribution. Instead, it's something else, something that can't be defined as easily as Ubuntu or Red Hat. It can be any of those things, all of them at once, or something else altogether. How easy is it to build a customized distribution designed for some sort of specialized application out-of-the-box if you're using Ubuntu? Not very easy, if you're trying to set up an exotic webserver. But it's easily done in Gentoo.

"Yes, yes, I know all about about how flexible Gentoo is," you might say. "But what about when the developers take choices out of our hands by removing XMMS from the tree and making vanilla-sources and stage 1/2 installs unsupported?"

That's a common enough whine. But you've forgotten that the same flexibility is still there. Dig into our publically available CVS to find that XMMS ebuild you want. Drop it into your overlay, and two commands later and you now have your favorite old-school media player installed once again. Same thing for vanilla-sources -- they're still around. Stage 1/2? We still have installation instructions in our documents (something nearly every user forgets), and release engineering still provides tarballs; go browse one of the mirrors.

It's all still there; it's never really gone. To me, that's pretty incredible. If some RPM-based distro like Fedora or Mandriva removes a package from their repositories, it's pretty much gone. You'd have to scour the internet to find it again in some unofficial third-party repo. That isn't the case with Gentoo. Whatever you're looking to do, you can still do it.

That's some kind of adaptability and flexibility. You can choose whether or not to only use packages from Portage, you can choose what you're going to turn your system into, you can choose many things. But choice itself isn't the be-all and end-all of Gentoo Linux. All these choices come from our goal of flexibility.

It doesn't get much more basic than that.

SCALE 2007 was a blast, as some have already reported. My wife and I arrived late Friday night, whereupon we met a few Gentoo devs, including Pete, Christel, Josh, Dan, and Mike. Hurray for the bar! I proceeded to get loaded with two (2!) Sprites, with ice. Yes, fizzy sweet nonalcoholic beverages are my drink of choice. Mmm, sugar. Diabetics should probably not read this blog. More devs, users, and random folks from other FOSS projects dropped by. And, of course, the merits of double-doubles...Christel ordered a double rum and coke, and I jokingly told the waiter "make it a double-double!" He obliged, and she didn't realize it until 15 minutes into her drink! . We also discussed the merits of paragliding versus paraFALLING, and the (relative) merits of buttplugs -- not for any of those present, but for certain people in other countries.... Anyway, we had a blast until 1AM or so, when it was time to crash.

Saturday came far too early. Seven hours of sleep, ugh. Headed downstairs to face the line for a bit at 9:30, until some kind SCALE organizer pointed out that since I was an exhibitor I could just head right in. Met up with Pete, who was the first on the scene. David showed up a little later I think, and then a general crowd of Gentoo devs showed up. We set up various desktops and laptops on the table in our (all too small) booth, and when I dodged upstairs to get /dev/snacks (as I affectionately labeled them), I came back to discover the mother of all booth attractions...a 28-someodd inch widescreen LCD TV hooked up to a Playstation3 running the Gentoo/PPC64 livecd. This was courtesy Dan (dostrow) -- oh man, it was so sweet, and proved to be quite the draw for the rest of the event. Even had a "Powered by Gentoo" sticker on it. One of those stickers was later slapped on my butt by a mischievous Christel. Actually, that same cheek was repeatedly groped by Josh and by my wife at various opportune (read: someone had a camera) moments, with predictable comic effect.

I caught two talks on Saturday, Jono Bacon's How to Herd Cats and Influence People (aka Heckle Gentoo and Get Heckled Back!), as well as Alex Ionescu's ReactOS talk. I had one question...."Can it run StarCraft?" His answer: "Yes." I'm sold!

Once Saturday was finished, we ended up going out to a nearby Thai restaurant...so good! So yummy! There were about 22 of us once we all got there (turns out that GPS is in fact a bad thing). All of us devs, my wife, some Freenode staff, Gnome developers, and some attendees who'd just arrived from San Diego. I chatted with them for a bit, since they work at the UCSD library (fellow library-types! yay!), so it just goes to show I'm not the only Linux-type who works in a library.

After that, we returned to the hotel and went our separate ways for a bit. A bunch of us headed to the roof of the parking lot to watch the planes land nearby at LAX, but they weren't going for the closer runway, and it started to rain. Back inside, then ... only to discover Christel&co getting friendly with Mr. Vodka and Mr. Laptop. (Licking ensued, the video is on YouTube somewhere). Merriment! Eventually we giggled our way into the hall, and Pete had the great suggestion that we play Tremulous. Oh man, that game is intense. The aliens totally have an advantage over the humans if used right. Eventually, they wouldn't let me play as aliens anymore, even when it was me vs. them (blackace, latexer, calculus and I took turns on 3 machines). Bah. I scared the **** out of them, though. "Where is he?!? Where is he!! AHHHHheATEmyarseoff!" --> this was Pete screaming like a little girl. I stumbled off to bed at 1:30, feeling like I had a cold.

This was justified; I spent all Sunday feeling sick. I think some SCALE attendee gave me a cold, so I manned the booth despite feeling terrible. Met users, other FOSS project members, folks curious about Gentoo, etc. Thanks to James, Pete, and David we had lightscribe CDs to give away that day, not just our handwritten, limited-edition one-of-a-kind Sharpie CDs. The lightscribe discs looked really terrific!

We intermittently ran a networked Tremulous game on Pete's AMD64 and my laptop as part of the demo, and Steve (nerdboy) brought his k'neXBox (as I dubbed it) out. Didn't get that working; it had hardware issues, but it got some attention anyway, since its case was made of K'nex parts. Sunday didn't feel quite as busy as Saturday, but it was still a good time. I finally went swag-hunting with David, and had to deal with some crazy old guy who monopolized our entire booth. Grr. He dragged out a chair, plopped into it, and proceeded to tell stories about everything imaginable, while blocking access, trapping all our devs at once, and drove off attendees all at the same time! And he ate all our candy! All our other visitors were nice enough, though one guy asked us "What is Gentoo? Who are you guys?", and instead of listening, proceeded to use our PS3 to look up wikipedia's article. Ummm, okay? I'm told Linux events have their share of wacky folks, so I guess this is to be expected.

Anyway, on the last night, we went out for dinner at a craptastic Pizza Hut before going our separate ways. I came away with a better sense of who these people are that I work with. They're a fun, awesome group, and it's too bad we can't hang out in person more. At least we have IRC. Of the devs who were supposed to attend, only Chris, Elfyn, and Steve didn't make it. The rest of us had quite a huge party going at all times.

Looking forward to the next time all (or some) of us can get together in person. FOSSCON is just around the corner...

Still reading? Man, you're focused. Go get yourself a cold drink or something, and remember to blink!

In just an hour or two we'll be off to SCALE 2007, once the traffic from SD to LA dies down. I'll be bringing snacks for us hungry booth staffers, and a laptop and some CDs to burn as well. Note, if you're coming to SCALE and want a CD, we only have 2006.1 CDs to give out. And my laptop takes about 20 minutes to burn 'em, so don't expect me to turn out too many. I'll do my best, though.

So tired....had 5 hours of sleep. And I now have a massive migraine to match. Perhaps I should treat it with a pre-SCALE party tonight? Yes! Just what the doctor ordered.

We'll allegedly have some sort of wired/wireless internet, so if I can I'll post from the booth. Man, too bad my laptop doesn't have any batteries to speak of; it just now occured to me I should take notes during the talks I'll be going to. I plan to catch Jono Bacon's talk on "How to Herd Cats and Influence People" as well as the ReactOS presentation from Alex Ionescu. On the second day I may or may not attend the wireless networking basics talk; doesn't seem to offer me much, but wifi is just so cool I may attend anyway.

Otherwise, I'll be at the booth more or less the whole time, possibly raiding -- er, visiting -- the other exhibitors. And yakking with my fellow devs about any number of things, beginning with world domination (of course).

See you at SCALE!

Whoo! My wife and I hung out with Pete (latexer) and Christel (christel) tonight....it included a Mongolian BBQ with another three dudes, including a user (DJ someone), and then we went bowling! And I won the last round! Well, only because it was the end of the hour, and it powered down. ^_^ Otherwise, my wife and Pete were kicking some serious tail for the first two games. After that, there were a few quick rounds of pool aka billiards, depending on where you're from.

We learned a few things...Christel has trouble with her "wees", Pete plays "Wii bowling" (euphamism? you be the judge!), and, of course, that after a story involving Tijuana and the Pennsylvania Dutch, we agreed that "Los Amish" would be an awesome band name.

Also found out how the nick latexer came into being, and the the taillight of a Cadillac placed over your ceiling lamp instantly turns your double-wide mobile home transforms it into a Red Light District. Oh, and that vi(m) > *.

Anyway, we had a TON of fun. Especially bowling and then the pool games after the bowling. Pete + my wife OWNED the lanes. Actually, possibly Christel owned them more, not because of her score, but because of the way she stared them down. Intimidating the pins is the key to the game, it seems. I'm just glad I was able to play; my back didn't give me any trouble, though my thumb's a little swollen.

Us SoCal devs have got to get together more often. Any visiting Norwegian-cum-UKians will be granted honorary SoCal conspirator status. Can't wait for SCALE now! It's going to be such a blast. We'll need a huge hall just to fit all of the Gentoo devs, and an even bigger one for all the partying to follow, I'm sure.

Linux Genuine Advantage.

It's amusing, yet it does hold up something of a mirror to the crazy WGA world we live in.

And just like that world, it's already been cracked.