One of the reasons scientific programmers love Linux is its less-is-more philosophy. We can configure it to be anything from a desktop replacement with USB port support to a blade in a large SMP compute engine to a powerful Web server. Although Linux's market penetration in these various sectors remains to be seen, plenty of people are pumping resources into the Linux world. In this article, I?ll explain why Gentoo Linux (www.gentoolinux.org) is a good choice for scientists, and how its structure gives us the flexibility and ease of management we need.