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Gentoo Linux (pronounced JEN-too) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the specific type of computer. Precompiled binaries are available for some packages. Gentoo runs on a wide variety of processor architectures. For the full list see table on the right. Gentoo package management is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, and flexible. Gentoo describes itself as a meta-distribution because of its adaptability, in that the majority of users have configurations and sets of installed programs which are unique to the system and the applications they use. Gentoo Linux is named after the gentoo penguin, the fastest swimming species of penguin. The name was chosen to reflect the potential speed improvements of machine-specific optimization, which is a major feature of Gentoo. History Gentoo Linux was initially created by Daniel Robbins as the Enoch Linux distribution. The goal was to create a distribution without precompiled binaries that was tuned to the hardware and only included required programs. At least one version of Enoch was distributed under that name: version 0.75, in December 1999. Daniel Robbins and the other contributors experimented with a fork of GCC known as EGCS, developed by Cygnus Solutions. At this point, "Enoch" was renamed "Gentoo" Linux. The modifications to EGCS 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 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 on March 31, 2002. In 2004, Robbins set up the non-profit Gentoo Foundation, transferred all copyrights and trademarks to it, and stepped down as chief architect of the project. The current board of trustees is composed of five members who were announced (following an election) on March 2, 2008. There is also a seven-member Gentoo Council that oversees the technical issues and policies of Gentoo. The Gentoo Council members are elected annually, for a period of one year, by the active Gentoo developers. When a member of the Council retires, the successor is voted into place by the existing Council members. The Gentoo Foundation is a domestic non-profit corporation, registered in the State of New Mexico. In late 2007, the Foundation's charter was revoked, but by May 2008 the State of New Mexico declared that the Gentoo Foundation, Inc. had returned to good standing and was free to do business. The creator of Gentoo - Daniel Robbins, left the project in 2004 and 2007 because of conflicts with other developers. Features Gentoo appeals to Linux users who want full control of the software that is installed and running on their computer.: 402  People who are prepared to invest the time required to configure and tune a Gentoo system can build very efficient desktops and servers. Gentoo encourages users to build a Linux kernel tailored to their particular hardware. It allows very fine control of which services are installed and running, including the option to choose between systemd or OpenRC as the default init system. Memory usage can also be reduced compared to other distributions by omitting unnecessary kernel features and services.: 386  Gentoo's package repositories provide a large collection of software. Each package contains details of any dependencies, so only the minimum set of packages need to be installed. Optional features of individual packages, such as whether they require LDAP or Qt support, can be selected by the user and any resulting package requirements are automatically included in the set of dependencies.: 386  Inasmuch as Gentoo does not have a default look and feel, installed packages usually appear as their authors intended.: 387  Portage Portage is Gentoo's software distribution and package management system. The original design was based on the ports system used by the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating systems. The Gentoo repository contains over 19,000 packages ready for installation in a Gentoo system. A single invocation of portage's emerge command can update the local copy of the Gentoo repository, search for a package, or download, compile, and install one or more packages and their dependencies. The built-in features can be set for individual packages, or globally, with so-called "USE flags". Pre-compiled binaries are provided for some applications with long build times, such as LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox, but users lose the ability to customize optional features. There are configuration options to reduce compilation times, such as by enabling parallel compilation or using pipes instead of temporary files. Package compilation may also be distributed over multiple computers. Additionally, the user may be able to mount a large filesystem in memory to further speed up the process of building packages. Some approaches have drawbacks and are not enabled by default. When installing the same package on multiple computers with sufficiently similar hardware, the package may be compiled once and a binary package created for quick installation on the other computers. On December 29th, 2023, it was announced that Gentoo will offer binary packages for download and direct installation. For most architectures, this will be limited to the core system and weekly updates. For amd64 and arm64 however the availability of binary packages reaches over 20 GB. Portability As Gentoo is a source-based distribution with a repository describing how to build the packages, adding instructions to build on different machine architectures is particularly easy. Originally built on the IA-32 architecture, Gentoo has since been ported to many others. It is officially supported and considered stable on IA-32, x86-64, IA-64, PA-RISC, 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, 64-bit SPARC, DEC Alpha, and both 32- and 64-bit ARM architectures. It is also officially supported but considered in-development state on MIPS, PS3 Cell Processor, System Z/s390,. Official support for 32-bit SPARC hardware and SuperH have been dropped. Portability towards other operating systems, such as those derived from BSD, including macOS, is under active development by the Gentoo/Alt project. The Gentoo/FreeBSD project already has a working guide based on FreeSBIE, while Gentoo/NetBSD, Gentoo/OpenBSD and Gentoo/DragonFly are being developed. There is also a project to get Portage working on OpenSolaris. There was an unofficial project to create a Gentoo port to GNU Hurd, but it has been inactive since 2006. It is also possible to install a Gentoo Prefix (provided by a project that maintains alternative installa.... Discover the Sven Vermeulen popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sven Vermeulen books.