Gentoo Linux очень нравится, хотелось, конечно бы на десктоп себе FreeBSD поставить, ибо знакомо все, но также хотелось бы и иметь рабочую версию Zend Studio4 beta иметь, а она, как я ни плясал с бубном вокруг FreeBSD - не встает, хотя может плохо плясал. ASP и Fedora Core не хотел, Mandrake не хотел, Suse не хотел. Gentoo захотел - понравилась система пакаджей и были отзывы интересные. Установочный процесс сначала не особо порадовал, все ручками, никаких ncurses based приложений, кроме конфига кернела, а после вошел во вкус, по крайней мере за 4 часа базовой установки с системой “пришлось” познакомится вплотную. Если бы ощущениями можно было сравнивать OS, то FreeBSD - она такая… жесткая, черная, плотная. Gentoo - чистая, шустрая.

и потом (http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20050207-newsletter.xml) - там описано кое-что интересное

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2. Future Zone

Gentoo/FreeBSD

The Gentoo/FreeBSD project officially started in August 2004 as a set of system ebuilds based on FreeBSD 5.2.1 and a portage overlay provided by Grant Goodyear (g2boojum). As the release of FreeBSD 5.3 became imminent, the project slowly ported base system ebuilds to this new version, which is the actual base for our project.

The Gentoo/FreeBSD project, as its name implies, is an effort to have the whole set of Gentoo components running on top of a FreeBSD base system. This means that, for example, instead of having a Linux kernel and GNU LibC, one will have FreeBSD’s kernel and FreeBSD’s LibC. In addition, the project is also working on porting baselayout to Gentoo/FreeBSD in such a way that makes the management of startup services as easy as in Gentoo Linux.

Although this project is fairly young, a fair amount of progress has been achieved. The most important accomplishments include:

Portage now runs without needing to be patched.
the set of ebuilds that downloads and install specific FreeBSD system packages is now almost stable and the process of building it is, in general, painless.
we have defined a system profile as well as some non-FreeBSD packages that should be available.
At this moment, we are working on stabilizing the content of source tarballs in such a way that they provide all the reasonable things for their category (system sources tarballs, in Gentoo/FreeBSD are separated by category, like freebsd-lib, freebsd-usbin, etc).

Our efforts with baselayout have mainly been oriented towards getting Gentoo’s dependency-based init system working with FreeBSD’s userland. Unsurprisingly, certain parts (mainly involving gawk) have been problematic, but we currently have a package that can bring up a functional FreeBSD system, and should allow the initscripts in the main Portage tree to work unchanged. More work is needed to write initscripts for the less common parts of the FreeBSD system, and possibly to update the system to baselayout 1.11 when that becomes stable.

Goals for the immediate future include a set of stages that will be used to install Gentoo/FreeBSD, completion of the baselayout port, and finally, a release.

In a separate effort we are also looking into porting the glibc and GNU userland to the FreeBSD kernel. If you are interested in working on this, contact Dylan Carlson. (see also the post by Robert Millan to the gentoo-dev mailing list referenced below).
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так, что пытаем Gentу