Gentoo: Frightening or Fantastic?

Many many years ago, in the days before the (Intel) Atom and the (AMD) Geode, and when ARM SoCs were too niche to be known of, that left a few obscure manufacturers producing low (electrical) power x86-compatible systems for, err, low power use… Our group was kindly donated a (VIA) EPIA “C3” mini-ITX motherboard and comms-cabinet (thanks Michael) which was morphed into service for the NLUG website.

And thus began my adventure into Gentoo!

Why?… Only Gentoo had the phenomenal flexibility to usefully work on such a system! The C3 processor is rather low power in all respects and also lacks the ‘optional’ i686 “CMOV” instruction and so is only fully compatible with code compiled for “i586” or earlier… That proved to be a little too old and restrictive for easily using most of the mainstream compiled distros and to hope for reasonable performance… However, the compile and optimization capabilities easily configured with Gentoo allowed running “i686”-style code natively optimized for the C3 processor, all despite the lack of CMOV. Also, that very compactly all ran ‘diskless’ using 2x USB memory sticks! Everything worked remarkably well. (The NLUG site has since grown to use WordPress and is now hosted on a 64-bit Atom system with SSD and still runs the original Gentoo but updated and recompiled: Fantastic! 🙂 )

That was many years ago.

And so the story for tonight is:

• Is Gentoo too scary to use?
• Or is it too good not to use?!
• And for what use cases? Where/how?…

Depending on interest and connectivity: This talk/demo will cover what Gentoo is about and possibly demonstrate a Gentoo installation from scratch. It’s your meeting, just ask questions 🙂

All at the newly reopened Falcon Inn at Canning Circus:

7:30pm Thursday 30/01/2014

Depending on numbers, we will be the very visibly obvious geekie group, or we’ll be hidden away in the room upstairs. Please ask the friendly bar person if lost!

(Some of us will be meeting beforehand in the Hand & Heart (facebook: H&H) nearby for food and pre-drinks.)

For all ‘experts’ and non-experts and new starters alike! All welcome 🙂

Cheers,
Martin