COMP 3000 2011 Report: Funtoo Linux

This section should detail background information about your distribution.

Please describe: The name of the distribution, its goals and target audience, who develops it, how it may be obtained, its approximate size, and its heritage (what other OS distribution(s) is it derived from.

Also include any other background information that you feel is relevant for understanding the rest of your report.

Background

Funtoo is a distribution that aims to improve the core technologies of Gentoo. It is a source-based distribution which features a git-based Portage tree, GPT/GUID boot support, enhanced network configuration and native UTF-8 support. <ref>http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=funtoo, </ref>

Funtoo's history is closely tied to that of Gentoo. Daniel Robbins was the project creator, chief architect and project leader of the Gentoo development team until April 26, 2004, where he had to leave because of personal issues. <ref>http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.nfp/65</ref> Before leaving, Daniel created a non-profit foundation, Gentoo Technologies, which would hold all of the Gentoo copyrights.

Here's a snippet of the official announcement: As mentioned previously, Gentoo Technologies is in the process of becoming an official 501(c)(6) Not For Profit organization. This will place the stewardship of Gentoo Linux into the hands of a Board of Trustees, who will act as gentle caretakers of Gentoo.

Downloading Funtoo

• Funtoo Wiki http://funtoo.org
• Funtoo Github https://github.com/Funtoo

Funtoo development is done by a team of core developers, lead by Daniel Robbins.

Source-based distribution

A source-based distribution is a distribution that all of the packages are downloaded as source and compiled, as opposed to downloading a precompiled binary. <ref>https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions#Source-based</ref>

Advantages of source-based distributions (ex. Gentoo, Funtoo)

• Packages are optimized for your hardware.
• You can exclude unwanted features from packages in order to minimize dependencies and reduce the binary size. For example, if your system uses Gnome, in most cases you will never need the KDE component of a package. In Funtoo/Gentoo, you are able to do this via 'use' flags.
• Improved security: You can actually inspect the source of the package instead of trusting that the binary your distribution provides is not malicious.

Advantages of binary-based distributions (ex. Debian, Fedora)

• Much faster to install large programs such as Firefox.
• More user-friendly, since the user does not have to deal with compilation issues.

References

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