Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

My progress towards an AMI for Amazon’s EC2 has hit an unexpected snag. This evening has been one ‘gcc internal error’ after another. Not in the dom0 machine, but in the domU machines. I wasn’t having this problem last week.

I won’t be able to order any replacement RAM until mid-October, so here’s hoping that it’s a software problem.

One of the pieces of feedback I’ve had about the stage4 releases idea is that we’d be putting Gentoo into direct competition with rPath, the “Linux appliance” company founded by ex-RedHat folks (including Erik Troan, the author of RPM).

Rather than post yet-another-long-article about this, I’m going to keep this one short (well, short for me ). I’ve got a challenge for anyone who’s interested in seeing us produce stage4 tarballs for our users. I’ve spent the day taking this challenge, and I feel I’ve learned from it.

The challenge is simple: head on over to their website, read their docs, look at the rLinux package repository, download one of their applications and play with it.

See what your answers are to these questions:

1. What is rPath doing right that we’re doing wrong?
2. In what way are rPath’s appliances better than the equivalent manual Gentoo install?
3. Would you use an rPath appliance for what you’re passionate about using Gentoo for?

Then compare them to your answers to these questions:

1. What is Gentoo doing wrong that makes you look at alternative distros?
2. To get your system right, what do you have to do that Gentoo doesn’t do for you?
3. How good is Gentoo at what you’re passionate about?

That’ll give you a personalised idea about how much of a competitor rPath is to Gentoo, and how well Gentoo really matches up to what’s important to you.

Tip to save you a bit of time: use vmware server to test their appliances. qemu doesn’t build on gcc-4.1 systems, and none of the appliances I looked at ran under Xen.