Gentoo 1.0 Released

Spider[DAC] writes: "Gentoo Linux 1.0 is finally released. see their homepage for more details, or skip directly to the installation instructions. Gentoo is a up-to-date distribution that uses 'portage' (a system similar to the BSD ports) to download, compile and configure the installation process."

Comments

explanation needed..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a BSD user, can somebody explain to me what the following means? How does one download, compile, and configure a program's install process??

"Gentoo is a up-to-date distribution that uses 'portage'...to download compile and configure the installation process."

Nice to see, but...

[Zrealm]

other than the portage system, this seems to be a moderatly unexciting distro. User-mode Linux is somewhat interesting but doesn't seem compelling enough to change from slack\SuSE\debian, etc. Is that a compelling enough feature to consider this an important step in the evolution of Linux, or, as is more likely, is this simply going to go by the wayside...

I still like sorcerer better...

[jdwilso2]

From lookin at the changes to 1.0, I still like Sorcerer GNU Linux better ... Its just cleaner and easier to use in my opinion.

But don't get me wrong, a source based distro is a great thing, and I really hope that one day in the near future (rather than trying to maintain this binary package management hell) all the major distros will wake up and realize that source management is *much* cleaner and nicer to the user. I'm really hoping for the death of RPM, but I'm sure I'm not so lucky...

jdW

Not slashdotted yet, but getting there....

[RevCheswollen]

The ISO is only 103 MB. Tres coolito. However, I'm watching my download get slower, slower, slower....... --The Rev

Just curious...

[redhatbox]

The underlying concepts for this distribution seem fantastic. Browsing through the Gentoo site, I noticed verbiage to this effect in multiple places:

"Gentoo Linux is a versatile and fast, completely free x86-based Linux distribution geared towards developers and network professionals ..."

Are there any similar projects in the works for other computing architectures (Mac, Sun, etc)? Not trying to open another can of worms, just thought I'd ask... :)

So is this a distro for broadband users ?

[dnaumov]

I really really DON'T think that it's wise to the base distro so small. The ISO is just 103 MB and offers only the very basic system. If you want most of the apps provided by the distros like RedHat / Mandrake / Debian, you will have to download them. This is pretty much like a net-install. Sure, it's great for those with broadband, but what about those who don't have broadband ?

Make it 1CD, make it have X, Gnome and some nice apps come with the distro itself and I might reconsider trying this.

Re:So is this a distro for broadband users ?

[martissimo]

umm if you read their website you would notice that Gentoo is targetted for developers and network proffessionals...

no offense but most of thoose people have access to more than a 56k.

and really when you consider that you still cant buy pre-burnt ISOs from em (though they say this is coming soon), wouldnt a more compact ISO that includes no fluff and lets you choose which apps you do want to download on your own be better for a 56k'er?

you would surely spend more time downloading most other distros, and when its all over you would have probably downloaded a bit of stuff you may not even use. With this setup you will only spend the time after the install downloading what you want. If their CD they eventually offer for sale doesnt include any other stuff than the 103 megs you might have a point.

Just Like Sorcerer?

[Webz]

Is this somewhat like Sorcerer Linux? The mention of automagical scripts and optimized installs made me think of it right away... Since I'm no Linux guru, anyone care to shed some light?

Gentoo's portage is nice...

[rsidd]

I mainly use FreeBSD and when I wanted to install linux on my second partition, I picked gentoo because of its "BSD-like" ports system. Personally, it has some nice features and improvements over the FreeBSD system, the flip side is it may take more disk space. For example, it seems to automatically figure out the contents of the package, by first installing in a dummy area and then copying it all to the real destination. (That's basically what you're recommended to do when creating a port in FreeBSD, but it's not automatic.)

The number of ports available doesn't compete with FreeBSD (or, I imagine, the other BSDs) at this point, but that could change quickly.

On the minus side, some of the author's tuning instructions are dubious, or downright silly. He recommends using "noatime" in the filesystem everywhere -- now that may be ok for /home, or for /usr, say, but for /var, which holds mailboxes, it's not a good idea -- the atime is used to tell whether you have new mail. (In fact, the default partitioning doesn't even create a separate /var or /tmp, and the install guide doesn't suggest you do it. This is not unique to Gentoo, it's a common attitude in the linux world, but it looks like a bad idea to me.)

Also, the global CFLAGS sets -O3, which looks overambitious to me -- the only change -O3 has over -O2 is function inlining, which sometimes helps and sometimes hurts, you definitely don't want to build your system with it. (The FreeBSD project doesn't support anything beyond -O, though I generally have no problem with -O2.)

Anyway, it's easy to fix these small caveats. (Another good thing is Gentoo doesn't clobber your config files when you upgrade; however, something like FreeBSD's "mergemaster" for upgrading /etc would certainly be welcome.) That apart, Gentoo looks like a nice system and I'm happy with it.

Re:Gentoo's portage is nice...

[be-fan]

I never really understood the rationalization for having seperate /var or /tmp partitions on a single harddrive. It just makes filesystem space allocation less dynamic and flexible. In general, most installations don't bang /var and /tmp hard enough to necessitate putting them on seperate drives, and its a little unreasonable to expect documentation writers to cater to those with very specific needs for /var and /tmp (like news servers). Also, I don't quite understand how lack of atime can effect whether you have new mail. If mail is stored in one big file (which is an evil practice that should be relegated to the dust-bins of history) then mtime is what should be read. If mail is stored as seperate files, then its the mtime of the directory which should be read.

Guidance, please?

[n2dasun]

I always liked that I could run Linux on old hardware. Is there anyway that I can install Gentoo or Sorcerer Linux on an old 386 with 16mb of ram? The posted minimum specs to install them are a little more daunting than this.

First person experience

[CyberDruid]

As a Gentoo-user since, hmmm, early november I think (when rc6 was just released anyway), I can testify that it *ROCKS*. Thinking back to the time when I had to bother with the dirty RPM's of Mandrake, I don't think I could ever go back. In this way, all I have to do to keep my system updated with the latest versions and the latest security patches is type 'emerge update' or if I'm not gonna touch the computer for a while, 'emerge update --world'. The entire dependency nightmare from using RPM's is also gone. If you emerge something that needs a lib or whatever, the program neatly emerges all dependencies first.
Also, the guys behind the distribution definitely seems to know what their doing. In conclusion, if you are not afraid of compiling your own kernel and you can live with having to edit a few of the files in /etc for customisation, you should definitely give this distro a try.
Mmmm.... I can feel myself growing into a zealot ;)

GARsh that's cool!

[Syberghost]

A Linux distribution with a BSD-like ports system. How revolutionary.

Why I like gentoo...

[Raleel]

I'ma fairly die-hard redhat user, but I wanted to try out gentoo.

What impressed me most was the speed once you installed it. It was astounding. My desktop is a 1.2 Ghz athlon with 1/2 a gig of ram, and I saw _huge_ performance gains. I am guessing about 20%, maybe more. Granted, this is not empirical, but it really did feel much faster. Compiler optimizations rock!

Anyone know of a nice system to be able to rebuild all your rpms with all optimizations? I'm looking for a script that figures out what's on your system, downloads the dev packages it needs, and then recompiles all the .src.rpms with optimizations...