Linux - dead gateway detection

I have been working on trying to get Linux to pick any of the default gateways specified and have come around to this problem of dead gateway detection. It looks as if there is no support for it in Linux kernels 2,4 or 2.6. Generally all the tutorials require you to have iproute2 installed and then do some heavy kernel patching. Had a bad experience with the second part so am not keen on patching if i don't have to. What i want is to have lets say 4 different gateways specified on my Linux system and want the system to pick one of those (does not matter which one) in case the default gateway is down. Now in windows this is easy to achieve by specifying multiple gateways but in Linux is a real pain. Also does BSD kernel support this? I will Google for it but if someone has done it in BSD, i would really appreciate some guidance on where to look or tools required for the job.

You should use a routing protocol for this.. RIP, OSPF or something else..

Surely there will be support for this in Linux at some stage. I mean i cannot belive its not there i tried patching, now, with couple of tutorials online but its sooo messy and it just does not work properly. I am willing to switch completely to BSD if the function is there. I dont think network is that big that would require OSPF or RIP it might be a little bit of an overkill. There is certain hardware pices i looked at to do balancing and basically then would not need to have this functionality but that hardware costs like $3500 which is silly. How would you go about doing it just in few lines?

What are the gateways running? If these are Linux/BSD based you may want to look into CARP.. If they're Cisco, VRRP..

Yeah looked at that already for Cisco unfortunatly don't have the latest IOS my version is like one down from the one that supports VRRP anyway thanks gonna go and look into that CARP but i was kind of hoping for a quick win. And yeah you get some greenies thanks for that :).
Apparently i have to spread my points before giving them to you again.