While downloading Gentoo Linux in the background I read that Rafe has just installed it. Something in the ether? Since I've got my Solaris box which I can fiddle on from the office, I don't really have much use for my third PC at home, a crusty P5 (what the kids today would probably call a P1) languishing with a two-versions old install of FreeBSD. But I'm probably going to be teaching some Unix sysadmin stuff in the next week or two, so I figured I'd use Gentoo to teach on.

Why Gentoo? Because it seems like the cleanest Linux distribution, and I want to start with a stripped down box and build it up by hand. If you're going to teach a class on cooking, you wouldn't show your students how to put frozen meals in the microwave, you'd want them to know how to make dishes from scratch.

I would use FreeBSD or OpenBSD, but most of the students (my coworkers, actually), have at least tried Redhat Linux at home, and especially in the Turkish and European markets, I think "Linux" is better CV fodder. It's one thing for me to run a niche-market, high-testosterone system for my own purposes, but I have a responsibility to my students. Gentoo should give me the brand value of Linux combined with the dirty-hands learning experience of *BSD.

I'm still working out how to structure my "Unix From Scratch" course. Maybe the best thing is to sit down together and install Gentoo on a PC, then create user accounts and customize their dot-files. After that we can add stuff to the box like Apache and other apps, and eventually get into snort, crack, ipfilters, etc. I think the best approach is hands-on, where I'm learning and figuring some stuff alongside them, so they can see how the process of figuring stuff out works.