About Gentoo
Gentoo Linux is a free open source linux distribution and comes with some precompiled large packages such as Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice. But you guys may ask, what does Gentoo mean? This powerful linux distribution is named after the fastest-swimming penguin, the Gentoo. The Gentoo Linux distribution is developed by Gentoo Foundation Company developer and it is released under the GNU General Public License. The Gentoo package manager is easy to maintain, portable and it is designed to be modular. Gentoo has been ported to many architectures and currently it is officially supported and considered stable on x86, x86-64, IA-64, PA-RISC, PowerPC, PowerPC 970, SPARC 64-bit and DEC Alpha architectures. I have to admit that Gentoo Linux is one of the most advanced operating system in the open source world.
History
Gentoo was initially released on March 31, 2002 under the name of Gentoo Linux 1.0, but before this release another release was done by Daniel Robbins. Daniel created the Enoch Linux distribution with the goal of creating a distribution without precompiled binaries that was tuned to the hardware and only included required programs. Then, after Robbins experimented with a fork of GCC known as EGCS developed by Cygnus Solutions he changed the name of Enoch linux distribution to Gentoo Linux.
A cool thing to know about is the fact that there is a a seven-member Gentoo Council. The Gentoo Council takes care of technical issues and policies of Gentoo Linux. Each member of the Gentoo Council is elected for a period of one year by the active Gentoo developers. The Gentoo Foundation is registered in the State of New Mexico as a non-profit foundation but by May 2008 State of New Mexico declared that the Gentoo Foundation was free to do business.
Installation
As many other linux distributions Gentoo Linux can be installed in several ways but the most common way is to use the Gentoo minimal CD. You can also use unetbootin to create a bootable Gentoo Linux usb and after boot your machine from it. A graphical installer was released with 2006.0 but it stoped being developed because it did not gain enough development support.
