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

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.

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 ;)