Gentoo

What is Gentoo?

Gentoo GNU/Linux is a distribution that excels at compile-time customizability. As a rule, all packages are compiled from source code. Binary packages are rare and reserved for cases like OpenOffice.Org, which can take hours to compile on modern machines.

Local Mirror

Virginia Tech provides a Gentoo mirror at http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub/gentoo/. You can make use of it by modifying the GENTOO_MIRRORS variable in /etc/make.conf. An example setting for the variable is below.

GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub/gentoo/ http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo/ http://distfiles.gentoo.org/"

Virginia Tech also provides a portage mirror that you can 'emerge --sync' to:

SYNC="rsync://mirror.cc.vt.edu/gentoo-portage"

(Note that the via rsync the URL has no /pub directory but via http the link is http://mirror.cc.vt.edu/pub/gentoo-portage.)

NTP

Virginia Tech has NTP servers. See the NTP article for details.

Email

It is easy to download your pid@vt.edu mail in Thunderbird, Evolution or your other mail client of choice. See VT Email article for details.

Wireless

Connecting to VT-Wireless using WPA_Supplicant is easy. Below is an example wpa_supplicant.conf entry. See the VT-Wireless article for full details.

network={
    ssid="VT-Wireless"
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    eap=TLS
    identity="PID"
    private_key="/PATH/TO/NETCERT.p12"
    private_key_passwd="PASSWORD"
}