My God, he uses a series of tubes.

I wonder if this could be used as a form of advertising.

This is more a get rich quick sceme by its "mentors". Work for the dole scemes are ment to have positive outcomes which include a % of the participants gaining employment and they are funded by the federal government. I don't see this helping anyone but the people running it. You require the skills and the equipement to be involved, and you do it from home. The mentors only guide you and check the code before they submit it to the appropriate places.

As a Gentoo MIPS dev, thought I would chime in here to say that I've been quite happy with my Indy (ip22), Octane (ip30), and RaQ2 with Gentoo. I started out with Debian and followed the ML for awhile before hooking up with Gentoo and have been hooked. We have got the art of automation down to the point where it is almost fantastically simple for anyone to create their own cross-dev tool chain up and running. The Indy with the help of tcman has helped tremendously with accelerated X driver for newport. It flies now. You can see his work posted here: http://www.mindwerks.net/~dbehr/newport and talk to him in #gentoo-mips . He even plans to work on the O2(ip32), and eventually the Octane to get an accelerated X driver for it as well. There are some very talented people using all sorts of distributions, tcman just happens to use gentoo among others. What keeps me using Gentoo is the community which has lead me to become a developer and start giving back my spare time, at least what little time the wife lets me. *grin* It has been both a learning experience and fun, and I hope it continues to be that way. I used to test all my work on my machines and basically gave up and let all the grunt work be done on my other more powerful machines via distcc and crossdev tools. I have the Octane running n32 userland with an o64 bit kernel, and to test the other ABIs just open up chroot into o32 userland. It was quite a treat to have KDE running on the Octane (un-accelerated, but still quite useful). Most of the problems that exist with Linux on MIPS based machines are no longer distribution dependent because we all share information so if it doesn't work on Gentoo then it won't work on Debian either.

I'm quite proud of what has been accomplished thus far by all involved. Seeing the detractors make fun, poke, or otherwise look down their noses to Gentoo in general saddens me. Its bigotry, plain and simple. You use the right tool for the right job, granted Gentoo isn't the solution for everything, and it never had that goal. Why let prejudice influence your thoughts, keep an open mind, we are all learning and if you don't like it, stop complaining and start helping. Stop being armchair critics and get off your collective lazy asses and make yourselves useful. (Personal note: This is why some of you will never get it and will be flipping burgers for the rest of your life. Get with the program.)