reasons I like Gentoo

It's in my top five list and growing. It's tied with Knoppix for third choice. Behind Debian and Sidux.

So why do I like it, well Knoppix is taking 5 hours to download, it's only 696.4MB. It'll probably speed up after work.

However... I'm trying to bring "our test" xensource server on line. The person that set it up, was using it for a test box. He had a personal box on there, as well as a couple of company boxes. He left, but guess what. He used his own password for the server, and I don't know it.

I tried fedora live (fedora 8) and it wouldn't boot, I tried the kde version too and it wouldn't boot. I started downloading knoppix but well 5 hours from now I expect to be in a class. So I went back to my distro box, and pulled out Gentoo, it has worked a few other times when nothing else would. So I'm impressed.

I was able to boot into gentoo, as a live cd, and then confirm that the network port was working (question that since xensource's windows client couldn't connect), then I mounted the hard drive with the config files on it, modified /etc/password (there is no shadow file in xensource it appears), and then delted the root password, saved and rebooted.

Lo, root access with no password. Of course I fixed that already.

Which goes to show one more reason to protect your computer with Physical security not just software.