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Gentoo 1.4 Final Released
markds writes "After a long wait, the Gentoo team has finally released the latest version of their distribution.
Gentoo Linux 1.4 is now available. 1.4 includes automated kernel builds, CFLAGS generation, the Gentoo Reference Platform, and support for netless installation." And Beost writes "It looks like our favorite disto gentoo has released two of the new v1.4 LiveCDs. Enjoy!"
Reader Luke-Jr points to the list of official mirrors and "unofficial (though created by developers) BitTorrents." (Of course, you can also buy CD sets for a variety of architectures from the Gentoo store.)
You do not need to reinstall. Gentoo version numbers only refer to the install CD. emerge -u world and you'll be in the same place you would be with a 1.4_final install.
Changelog, hot off the press!
(Now I wonder how long it will be before someone posts the "Gentoo Linux Zealot Translator"?)
Bash script for FP whores
ask for help in forums.gentoo.org if you have installation trouble. I'm sure we could have gotten you up and running easily.
actually it was. :-) Thnxs to the Gentoo reference platform (collection of pre-built stuff) a 20 minutes or less install (with KDE/gnome,X,apache,sql...) is possible
Or emerge openoffice-bin and get it for the time it takes to download :-). Of course, I'm using FreeBSD right now..
PS. Good job on reaching 1.4! Go Gentoo!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sigh, whatever Distro can upgrade the entire OS (in place!) with a single command: emerge -u world.
Of course, some pressed discs would be nice for posterity.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Just reading the forumabout 1.4 release, seems AMD-XP CD2 has problems.
"GRP CD2 for Athlon XP is not available currently. Frankly, we've had all sorts of problems with the Athlon XP build.
Athlon XP users can safely use the i686 set."
Dude I thoguht you where kidding, but I checked. Sweeeet
Well... I chose SuSE because of its very nice KDE and office-type applications integration, and YaST2(3,4, whatever they have now). In other words, it's pretty, I can be productive right away on it, and all that. Same reason why I have licensed MS-Windows versions, too, of course. I'd like to play around with Gentoo Linux because of the speed appeal and the almost-rolling-my-own, but it's going to take a while to get it going.
Get off my launchpad!
Odd. The only times I've ever had CDs burned from ISOs fail is when the burner failed to burn the disc properly.
There is, of course, a simple way to check that it did burn properly. Assuming you burned it as MODE1 with one data track and no additional postgaps you can do this:
Then compare that with the md5sum of the ISO. If you added a postgap, then specify the number of 2048 byte blocks that make up the ISO with count=XYZ
Another method is to use find and md5sum redirected to a text file, something like:
That works a bit better in cases wher you have intentionally added/deleted/modified files and want to make sure nothing else got changed. Note that you may or may not need to pass that through sort; I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader.
It is based on neither. Gentoo uses (and basically IS) a packaging system called portage, which is similar to FreeBSD's ports. It is the nicest package management suite I have seen within Linux. All dependencies are handled for you, and optional support can be defined through a USE variable. Say if you want php but don't want support for gd or java, you could set the USE variable to -gd and -java, and then simply "# emerge php" and all patches, dependencies and options are retreived, configured, and compiled for you with one command, based on what you want your system to be. Aside from an install not designed for newbies or the lazy, gentoo is IMHO the easiest distro to use and maintain, perhaps even for newbies, once installed.
To me the optimization is secondary to the amazing package management system, and the fact that it stays out of my way and let's me decide what I want my system to be.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
That is because the packages are build against the *stable* ppc tree instead of the unstable tree :-). Unstable has kde-3.1.3 et al, just set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to ~ppc
"...a distro that for the first time brings parity between the x86, PPC, and sparc architectures."
Debian has had a synchronous stable version for Alpha, ARM, Intel x86, Motorola 680x0, PowerPC, and SPARC since mid 2000.
Most recent stable release supports 11 architectures.
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Installing Gentoo is pretty much just typing in a laundry list of commands. (see the Gentoo x86 in guide to see what I mean)
You also have to edit some of the configuration files, but I think the documentation explains it pretty well.
While I don't want to take anything away from the Gentoo project, as it obviously satisfies a need or interest in the community, but I am sick and tired of the untrue stereotype being propogated that Debian is not recent.
If you bother to read the documentation, just barely, even the simplest overviews on the Debian website, you would know that you can also use Debian testing and unstable; you are not limited to stable.
(Yes, sometimes it is appropriate to limit yourself to stable, and when you do, what you get is a system that is very stable, and very closely scrutinized for bugs; look at Debian's own bug-tracking system even).
I am running: GNOME 2.2, Firebird 0.6 / Mozilla 1.4 / Epiphany 0.8, Nautilus 2.2.4, GIMP 1.3.17, OpenOffice.org 1.1, Abiword 1.99.2, Evolution 1.4.3, Gnumeric 1.1.19, XFree86 4.2.1, etc.
No this isn't "cutting edge" if you consider cutting edge to be following development branches and cvs snapshots. Of course not, but I don't want that.
Within reason, it is very recent, and it is stable; as stable as the upstream source, which is all that you can expect from any distribution.
My base system is almost entirely out of Debian stable. The rest of the system is out of testing/unstable only as required to satisfy the dependency versions for these applications.
I have never had the state of my installed packages corrupted by using testing/stable.
There is probably a better way, but this is enough for me (please post if you have an even easier way, as I'd love to know):
"apt-get update" to update the package information from the repositoriees.
"apt-get -u upgrade"
"n" to see the packages available for upgrade from all repositories.
"apt-get -u install x" to upgrade package "x".
I could just answer yes to "apt-get -u upgrade", yes, and I recommend others to do this if they don't want to be bothered further, but I prefer to make the decision each time when I want to keep a package from stable instead of testing or unstable.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
Perhaps he looked at Distrowatch?
Money for nothing, pix for free
I didn't have any problems getting into Gentoo, and [...]
I agree. While Gentoo is certainly not the easiest distribution to install, the install guide documentation is quite good, and even inexperienced Linux users won't have much problem installing it. Even starting from stage1 (where you have to build everything), the most difficult part for inexperienced users is compiling the kernel, but if you can handle a kernel compile, you'll have no problem with Gentoo.
Once you're used to the system, you'll appreciate the fact that announcements like this release don't matter, since you're only two commands away from the latest versions of all packages on your system ("emerge sync" to update the ebuild [packages] list, and "emerge -u --deep world" [--deep gets all dependencies, not really necessary] to update every package on your system, except the kernel).
It may seem like it would be difficult to install an entire system from source, but it's really quite easy, just pay attention to the USE flags, and be patient, because it will take a while to compile everything. One more tip, there are a few packages (OpenOffice.org especially), where a binary version is available, and this will save a ton of time if you don't care that it's 100% optimized for your system, and/or don't feel like spending longer to install an office suite than it took to compile Gnome and KDE combined.
So try it, it may be exactly what you want in a distribution, and if it isn't, at least you know it isn't. As an added bonus, you'll probably learn something new about Linux.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
Unfortunately the parent poster here clearly doesn't understand the danger inherent in assuming a CD-R is good if it simply reads correctly.
When you burn a MODE-1 ISO-9660 data CD-R, it's not simply writing your data out directly to the disc -- it's being encoded through no less than three sequential error detection and correction systems. Audio discs and discs that use MODE-2 without ISO-9660 error correction still go through the two sequential error correction and detection encodings inherent in the CD design.
The actual data on the disc is always riddled with errors -- the pits/lands (or in the case of a CD-R, the stained areas of dye) are simply too tiny and numerous to not have them obscured or distorted by microscopic scratches, bits of dust, tiny bad patches of dye, cosmic rays, etc. When you read a CD your CD-ROM drive is constantly correcting errors on its base level (C1), and if there is even a tiny visible scratch on the disc it's probably having to rely on its secondary error correction system (C2) to read the disc properly.
In normal operation your drive doesn't even TELL you about these errors -- the only way to know about them is to use special equipment or use a few special brands of drives that support reporting this information (C2 errors are reported by a number of drives, but C1 errors are only reported by a few drives (Plextor Premium, and recent Lite-On drives come to mind) and not in a standard way).
ISO-9660 MODE 1 (and MODE 2 with correction) adds a third layer of error correction to protect your data if all else fails, that's why a somewhat scratched disc still works.
What I'm trying to say here is that simply comparing the md5 sum of your cooked (i.e. ISO-9660 error corrected) data track is not a way to judge the quality of a burn. Your disc might read fine today but die tomorrow.
dd doesn't know the difference between a well burned disc with only a few C1 errors and no C2 errors, versus a badly mismanufactured disc that might've been exposed to the sun at some point that is riddled with errors that only your ISO-9660 third-level error correction is managing to fix. The first disc will probably last quite a while, while the second disc is already on its last legs and will probably not be readable in a month.
Analyzing these "hidden" errors is key to getting a good burn and making trusted archival copies.
(Unfortunately it seems that CD-Rs are nowhere near as durable as they are supposed to be. Many cheap brands of discs burned only 6-7 years ago are becoming unreadable now! So far my Metal Azo Verbatim Datalife Plus discs are holding on like troopers though -- knock on wood -- but even on those I can see C1 error counts creeping up over time).
To be fair, the ebuild was installing from the CVS tree which was provided for the use of developers, not for massive numbers of downloads.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Hello! You should download livecd-ppc-1.4.iso to get a bootstrap system. Then you may choose the GRP CDs for your appropriate architecture to get a wide range of precompiled packages. Sincerely, Alex
Well Spoken. One only has to visit Distrowatch to see that there is a distro for (any)everyone's needs.
Personally I looked into it along with a number of others. Installation time was a major factor for me so I ended up with VectorLinux. For me, that was
-my- best choice, for others, another distro.
About the easiest way to set Gentoo up is on a system with free space already up and running any other Linux system. You simply partition and format the space, and using your existing system download a stage1 and unpack it there.
You then "chroot" into this new install (of course still running RedHat or whatever) using a terminal and being building your system, Gentoo's install docs are pretty good these days.
One thing makes me wonder about Gentoo though, just how much redundant compilation is going on here - surely many people compile effectively identical binaries every day, it's not as if there's a million different instruction sets / archs / etc, and I wonder how much collective cpu time could be saved (read: not wasted) by using platform-specific binaries.
You can say all you like about rpm, but installs of them are sometimes hours faster. But at the end of the day, the only thing I'd change about Gentoo is it's extensive use of Python, I think it's a slow dog. Bite me.
the latest kde packages (3.1.3) are still marked unstable in portage, so unless you want to compile KDE twice in a week wait until the kde packages move to stable.
Can't think of anything else to wait on though.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.