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Gentoo is a Linux distribution based on the Portage
package management system.
The development project and its products are named after the Gentoo penguin. Gentoo package management is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, flexible, and optimized for the user's machine. Packages are normally built from source code, continuing the tradition of the ports collection, although for convenience, some large software packages are also available as precompiled binaries for various architectures. Gentoo was initially created by Daniel Robbins as the Enoch Linux distribution. The goal was to create a distribution that was built from source code, tuned to the hardware, only included required programs, and
decreased maintainer workload through scripting.
At least one version of Enoch was distributed: version 0.75, in December 1999. Compilation issues revealed problems with the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), used to build from source code. Daniel Robbins and the other contributors experimented with "forked" versions of gcc, finding a version that gave a 10% to 200% speed increase over the "official" gcc.
At this point, Enoch gained a reputation for its speed, prompting the name change to Gentoo Linux (the Gentoo species is the fastest swimming penguin). The modifications eventually became part of the official gcc (version 2.95), and other Linux distributions experienced similar speed increases. After problems with a bug on his own system Robbins halted Gentoo Linux development and switched to FreeBSD for several months, later saying "I decided to add several FreeBSD features to make our autobuild system (now called Portage) a true next-generation ports system." Gentoo Linux 1.0 was released 2002-03-31. Robbins had wanted Gentoo Linux to become a commercially successful project, but found an appropriate business model difficult to achieve.
In 2004 he set up the non-profit Gentoo Foundation and transferred all copyrights and trademarks to it and stepped down as Chief Architect of the project; he later worked at Microsoft's Linux Lab for almost two years. The current board of trustees contains 5 members whom were announced (following an election) on October 21, 2006.
There is also a subsidiary 7 member Gentoo Council whose members decide on global issues and policies. The current Council members were elected over the period of August 17, 2007 to September 17, 2007
by 117 active Gentoo developers. Although originally designed for the x86 architecture, it has been ported to many others and currently runs on the x86, x86-64, IA-64, PA-RISC; PowerPC, PowerPC 970, SPARC64, MIPS, DEC Alpha, System Z/s390,
PS3 Cell Processor and SuperH architectures.
Official support for 32bit Sparc hardware has been dropped.
Gentoo was the first distribution to offer a fully functional 64-bit Linux computing environment (user space and the kernel) for the PowerPC 970. There is also a "Gentoo for Mac OS X" project which allows Mac OS X users to use Gentoo's Portage to install packages, similar to the way provided by Fink.
Although still a work in progress, this project can coexist with Fink because it uses the same environment as Mac OS X instead of creating a new one. Portability toward other operating systems, such as BSD-derived ones, is under active development by the Gentoo/ALT project.
The Gentoo/FreeBSD project already has a working release, while Gentoo/NetBSD, Gentoo/OpenBSD and Gentoo/DragonFly are being developed. There is also a project to get Portage working on the
GNU Hurd although development is slow. Portage is Gentoo's package management system. It is similar in idea to the BSD ports collections: the original design was based on FreeBSD ports. In contrast, the Portage tree does not contain directories of Makefiles, but of so-called ebuilds, bash scripts that describe separate functions to download, configure, make, install and remove a package and additional functions that can be used to set up the operating environment for a package. Portage is also the name of Gentoo's default
package management utility package.
This package provides, among other useful scripts, the emerge utility, which is written in Python and can be used by privileged users to easily inspect and alter the set of installed packages on a Gentoo operating system.
Whereas emerge used to operate in a similar way to other ports collections, by entering a directory in the tree and using emerge (instead of make) to perform package management operations, it now reads variables from the file /etc/make.conf (again similar to ports) to determine where the
Portage tree is kept. Recently, alternative package management utilities like Paludis and pkgcore have seen heavy development.
Both are intended to be used alongside or in stead of the official Portage utilities in both development and practical use.
As both competing projects intend to replace the official utilities, an effort has been raised to standardise the application programming interface of ebuilds for all package managers, in a project called the Package
Manager Specification or PMS. Gentoo's init system is another important feature.
It is similar to the System V init system that most Linux distributions use, but uses dependency-based scripts and named run levels rather than numbered ones. It also includes a command called rc-update which manages runlevels. Gentoo startup scripts use the runscript shell interpreter, rather
than a more traditional shell. A faster init system known as initng is available and under active
development on the Gentoo forums. A new baselayout, baselayout-2, version is nearing completion, that moves core system scripts from bash scripting to C code. This change should make boot time and other lower level services faster. Gentoo may be installed in several ways. The most common way is to use the Gentoo LiveCDs. As with many Linux distributions, it can also be installed by most LiveCDs and existing Linux installations. Installation of Gentoo can be completed by following the Gentoo Handbook. Additionally, several other methods of installation are listed in the Alternative Installation Method HOWTO; most of which are targeted at experienced users or users unable to boot from the Gentoo live CD. As of version 2006.0, the Gentoo Foundation has released a GTK+ based installer to greatly simplify the process of installing
the distribution from scratch.
More advanced users will note that the new installer also brings back the stage 1 installation (see below) as a common installation method.
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