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Gentoo Linux 1.2

Posted by michael on from the worthy-competitor dept.

MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"

3 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Install from floppy. by MartinG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the attractive features to me is that everything is built from source and optimised for the machine it is running on. The reason this is attractive is because I have a number of older machines which I want to "squeeze" as much as I can from.

    However, being older machines some do not have cdrom drives, only floppy drives and network connections. Given that most of the gentoo install is done on the network anyway, it's a shame the install discs provided are only cdroms.

    If anyone has a "HOWTO install gentoo from floppy" I would be happy to know about it.

    --
    -- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu
  2. Gentoo Baby by bdowne01 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion. I've installed it on every machine in my house, and on a CVS server at work.

    Quite possibly the best feature is the ability to update critical packages with a single command. When the latest OpenSSH hole was discovered, the Gentoo developers had a new ebuild package up on their rsync mirrors within a few hours . All it took on my Gentoo boxes was a simple:
    emerge -u openssh
    And it was done. My collegues on their HP-UX boxes were spending their day looking for patches from HP's site while I was back relaxing a reading /. :)
    --
    -brain
  3. Two Things I don't like about Portage... by Ivan+Raikov · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've been using RPM-based distributions for a long time, and while I like having the ability to build everything from source, I miss a couple of features that RPM has:
    • Ability to check what package a certain file is in (like `rpm -q -f file').
    • Ability to list all installed packages (well, you can do that with portage and grep, I guess).

    Oh, yeah, I also couldn't get KDE to compile with `-O3 -mcpu=i686' on a fairly new Dell Xeon machine. I'd get all sorts of random errors like 'Illegal instruction', so I had to build all KDE packages with "-mcpu=i486", then I tried i686 again and the kdebase package compiled successfully this time! The mailing lists just advise to play with the compile options in order to get KDE working. Weird.
    --
    Bush Lies Watch