GeNToo FAQ - Gentoo on the NT kernel FAQ (April Fools)

1. Frequently Asked Questions

Who are you guys? 

We are a group of Gentoo developers who do not agree completely with the ideology pursued by the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman. We believe a good, working product is preferrable to one that is "ideogically pure" (whatever that may mean). From our point of view, Linux doesn't give us enough power yet.

Marius Mauch is one of the "real" Portage hackers. He has consistently pushed quality-improving patches into Portage, making it much more reliable and performant. When he heard the rumors of GeNToo, he couldn't wait to hack on something new. His contributions to Portage/NT and the patches for the linker made our life a lot easier.

Patrick Lauer started work on the Gentoo/Cygwin project a long time ago, but due to the abysmally low code quality found in Cygwin, it never got to the point where it was even remotely useful. He studies CS in Aachen, Germany and works on whatever tickles his fancy in Gentoo.

Karl Trygve Kalleberg is the instigator and main developer of the GeNToo project. He has even written most of the documentation! When not doing GeNToo, he is leading the Gentoo Java Team on new adventures (interested parties are invited to join!) and working with Marius on maintaining all Gentoo-specific tools such as Gentoolkit.

You must be kidding! 

No, we're quite serious. Finally you can get the best of both worlds! The Win32 subsystem is such a mess, the Linux kernel is a mess. Once you have the GNU tools on the NT kernel, you get a very solid OS that even rivals Solaris 10 in many respects.

You'll get sued for that! 

That has to be decided. We've made enough of our material available to a lawyer/hacker we know quite well. We are still awaiting his verdict, but we hope to be able to release our work under a reasonable license. But, since we do not release any copyrighted material, we are very certain that it will be possible.

Infidels! Linux rocks! 

<rant>Yes, it rocks that much that we are looking for stable alternatives. Especially the 2.6 kernel has been *ahem* interesting. If the kernel hackers got their act together and released a really stable version of the 2.6 kernel we might want to use it. But they don't so we don't.</rant>

When will this be integrated into Gentoo? 

That will take some time. Even the Gentoo/BSD project, which has been operating much longer than us, has not yet been elevated to a first-class supported system. Maybe in a year or two. At this stage, we feel that operating on our own relieves us from the political infighting and release deadlines. This allows us focus on delivering a good product when it's done.

Cool! I want to join you! 

We are not recruiting at this time. But if we get to that point, it'll be announced. Keep watching!

What can we expect in the future? 

We don't know. There are many cool ideas floating around, but before feature additions can happen, we need to work a lot on polishing GeNToo so that it can be easily deployed and administered. Also some components need porting and/or improvement (We don't have any hotplug, some drivers have dependencies on Win32 dlls, NTFS support is still mildly buggy).

If everything works out as planned, we might be able to offer xorg/NT. Once that happens, Desktop Environments like Gnome or KDE will be possible. For now, we are a text-mode only outfit.

What about the free Windows clones? 

Projects such as ReactOS try to emulate the robust interfaces offered by the Windows kernel, but are usually combined with emulators for the Win32 API, such as Wine.

We specifically want to avoid the Win32 part, having a strong preference of POSIX over Win32. We believe open-source is about choice, so we of course encourage both abovementioned projects. In time, we hope to offer the ReactOS kernel as open-source alternative to the NT kernel on GeNToo.

Why so quiet about the project? 

Due to the moral implications and the anticipated flamewars, we kept this project quiet until we had a prototype that gave us confidence in the viability of this project.

We are now certain that the project is technically feasible (we have code to prove it!). Furthermore, we have received encouraging feedback from our legal counsel. Together, this warrants the announcement of the project.

Once the final legal barrier has been passed, we will be good open-source citizens and adopt the "release early, release often" dogma, as the other Gentoo projects have.