"When Daniel Robbins recently spoke to 30 or so students and professors at Stanford's Computer Systems Lab, he didn't have to waste much time explaining what his baby, Gentoo Linux, was. Most of the audience seemed to have at least one Gentoo playbox each. And those who gathered around the project's founding father after the talk seemed pretty happy with how Daniel's distribution has been shaping up.
"Instead of going into the details of Gentoo that have made it so popular -- the distribution's preference for source packages compiled by the user over binary packages, its ultra-configurability, the heavy automation of Gentoo's emerge build system--Daniel sat down and spoke on the lesser known aspects of Gentoo: where it came from, what problems and opportunities Daniel was seeing these days, and his opinions on where the future might take it.
"Gentoo's genesis was, like so much open source software, as academic as the talks' setting. Robbins was working as a system administrator for the School of Medicine at the University of New Mexico when he first started playing around with Linux..."
