<michael <at> michaelshiloh.com> writes:
> > If there was a Gen_bunto CD for older p2 and p1 machines, all of the > > kids in my hood would be using gentoo........ > ROTFL - thanks for the laugh James. Gen-bunto - what a concept. My two > favorite distros right now are Gentoo and Ubuntu, and I wonder about the > philosopical implications of liking what seem to be polar opposites. Human > nature, perhaps. Hello Michael, Actually, it's not as far fetched as one would anticipate. There are quite a few wikis that show how to build a cd for lower speed processors from a faster machine. Someone with skills would only have to define what's different, between a 200MHz AMD vs a P2 and set up thoses few different files once. As different older machines are added these few files would be customized for the various (common) arch's of the various older machines. Then lots of admins could each manage a few machines for the kids in our neighborhoods. I'd do mine over wireless ethernet and thru the local cable tv network. I've collected up lots of old hardware for this purpose....oneday. CFengine would be keen to push/manage binaries down to these machines over TCP/IP. Distributable CDs would be great for recruiting new members to the Gentoo community. Therefore we would not have to perform all of the compiling on these machines, just distribute binaries at night once a month or so, or print/distribute a CD to the kids and others with lesser skills/resources. The only trick is to put up a light-weight desktop, that would be appealing to many. With an open-mosix kernel, we could even cluster these machines for aggregated power, once open-mosix stabilizes on 2.6 kernels. That way, a group of gen_bunto users could pool their individually meager resources into something special, or as more old machine become available, each kid could build their own cluster: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_Mythtv_With_ Diskless_Workstations_in_an_OpenMosix_Cluster That's the gentoo differential: if the gentoo community was to embrace this effort, it could easily put together something awesome and unmatched by any other distro/operating system, anywhere. Here in the US, there are lots of place that will give you working machines, if you just show up to haul them away. That number increase exponentially, when you are willing to spend $5-25 dollars. Eventually, the gentoo community will get around to this need for a binary distribution for categories of similar/common machines. Recruiting kids into gentoo, would be the smartest move possible, for the future of Gentoo, in my opinion. It's easy for me to motivate schools/clubs/groups of kids to use linux, it's just difficult to organize and time consuming, under the current gentoo semantics. After using Gentoo for a few years, I'm getting rid of my openbsd and debian boxes..... I like the concepts that drive *buntu, I just strongly prefer gentoo. James -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
