Many people in and out of the Linux community have heard of Gentoo. There are a lot of different perceptions of the distribution. Some see it as the holy grail of customisability, some see it as a meme of bygone years after being told on countless forums to “install Gentoo” instead of dealing with whatever problem they were having. Well I installed Gentoo, and there’s a lot to unpack.

I’m not new to Linux, but I would not say I have a particularly long wizard beard. I’ve lived out of Arch for a few months, and manage some servers at home and work. I’ve troubleshooted a lot of issues, but there’s so much that goes into Linux that it takes years to properly master. But I installed, following the guide, and didn’t get stuck. I enjoyed the install process, which is much like the Arch one, and appreicated the options open to me. Do I want a hardended system by default, or not? Systemd? All of the choices were there, and then I complied. It was interesting setting flags for the kernel, and although I left most as default that’s because most are good enough for the average user. Since I was just testing the waters, I stuck with the CLI and just did some everyday tasks. Installed some software through every method (ports, binaries, etc) and removed some things. It all felt like it was there, just like any other Linux.

I should preface by saying I am in no way good, proficient, or authoritative about scripting in *nix or any other computing environments. But I have had an absolute blast getting started, and wanted to share my thoughts and discoveries. Anyone else who has already been here, feel free to call me a n00b.

It started out when I found myself installing webmin a lot on my new servers. I got tired of going through the whole things time after time, and I thought it made sense to finally start scripting things. I mean, it is very easy to just chain commands like that together into an executable script, so that way my first: a shell script to install webmin. I was hooked after that.

For someone first beginning the journey into IT or computing, in any discipline, the sheer amount of specialised knowledge that one needs to know can seem incredibly daunting. There is a lot to learn, and some of it really is complicated, but there is something that one can do to make the early steps easier: learn protocols.

Much of what people see in computers is built on frameworks, and those usually have a number of common, standard libraries and protocols. HTTP is a prime example; it can be really easy to make a quick web site with Google Sites or Wordpress, but it can be just as easy to write up a dirty file and serve it up with Apache. By seeing the series of steps that make a simple site, using the base protocols, it is easier to distinguish all the other layers that make up modern, complext sites, by adding in one at a time things like PHP or Ruby.

Like many of us out there, I did not start using Linux when I first started using computers, nor did I start using it when I first learned of it. Windows, what I had been using, worked fine and there seemed to little reason to want to switch over. The benefits were not explained properly to me, or I was too inexperience to need anything more than what the Windows desktop offered.

      Linux, or GNU+Linux, has been around as an operating system for every type of device, phone, server, desktop, since the early nineties. Because of the free nature of the software, countless different distrobutions for all sorts of applications have sprung up over the years, some highly specialised, others more capable in different roles. Some popular ones today, such as Ubuntu or Red Hat, have a several concurrent releases at a time: a server and a desktop. Conversely, other projects like Debian and Arch produce a more generic release for end users to build up how they see fit, providing merely the framework. A Linux distrobution in general terms is a design philosophy behind a project; in technical terms it is the software suite included with the Linux kernel.