The beginning of the month, I loaded Gentoo on my old PII 400 and I wouldn't mind giving a dev a shell account also.
I have been having a blast geeking out on my Gentoo box, (Thanks to Trump for recommending it several months back) but I too wish the EMU would compile on it.
For the other gentoo guys, I wonder how hard it would be to roll a gcc 3.2 compatible emu source into an ebuild? It just occurred to me that an ebuild and a little scripting might make it possible to have an auto-updating EMU server. It's probably more trouble than it's worth... it's super easy to upgrade now as it is, a couple of make and copy statements, and maybe a little database tweaking... which is usually scripted anyway.
ok, the beer is flowing, the ideas are rolling...
This is getting longwided... sorry. But I like to let ideas roll around in my head and the thought of a server or two that is always up and running the latest stable version might help other aspects of EMU:
1) A unified database for NPCs, items and even quests. There are several talented people doing excellent work populating the world. It seems to me that a machine that the world builders can all expect to be up and stable can devote their efforts to maintaining THAT database, and less time either integrating their work with others or porting their local databases to the latest patch. It would also help if/when we incorporate data from other EQ projects, and it takes someone to have to manually remove any dups, errors, and what-knot.
2) A (hopefully) reliable server for people who just want to "play". New update/patch comes out, they just have the proper eqhost file and play again when it's possible.
3) An encouragement for people who develop their own databases. If someone comes up with an idea... EQLive or not, that was good, they can make it work on their own server, and submit it to the worldbuilding forum. It gets accepted and becomes part of the EQEMU "cannon".
For example, I saw a post where someone was remarking on how much fun it was to have a quest to receive level, setallskills, and such. If there was a "cannon" database at the time, a SQl dump could have immoralized just such a quest, and maybe even had others build on it and we all could have been enjoying it. Such quests would also help test and enhance world building AND developing. Now you have people actually using and testing things that might have heretofore gone unnoticed. And any problems are repeatable by worldbuilders and coders alike.
eg I have never zoned 3 or four times to get somewhere since I had the #zone command at my disposal. It was one of my peeves of EQ Live. Taking so much time just to do a corpse retrival, and (usually) because I asked myself, "Wonder where that goes?" And I was three zones from my bind point.
4) Regular updates. With a stable server, everyone knows what it is running, and when the developers add (and test) their changes, everyone knows it works, and is there to stay.
5) Capacity testing and development. My machine could never hope to be a good server (mysql, world and zone), but it might be good at running a big zone. Put three or four of these boxes together and we have a "world" that could be quite exciting to play in.
6) It hasn't been done yet....
Some of these points might be good, others might be beer induced... but I have a vision of a stable, (maybe HUGE) server that does MORE than EQlive and is developed, ran, supported and maintained by those that just love to play...