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.)

Comments

I don't mean to whore....but....

[mao che minh]

For 80% of the responses Most people that read this article will say to themselves "Gen-what? Big deal, my *insert distro here* has already done all of that!" or "Wow, so some Linux distro does a few things that *insert Mac or Windows version* has been doing for months, or even years".

Just keep in mind this much: Whether you are a Red Hat user, a Mandrake enthusiast, or a Slackware zealot, we have all "been there". And like it or not, distros like Gentoo and Debian keep hope alive and stay true to the Linux and open source "roots".

No, I am not a Debian or Gentoo user. In fact I am a Red Hat and Windows 98 user. I recognize valiant efforts and righteous grass roots development movements when I see them, however, and I pay my respect and homage to them.

So, despite how bad this post may come off as a karma whore (and you all know that I love to write karma whores), just keep in mind that it is people like the Gentoo team that have made Linux the phenomenon that it is. OK, feel free to mod me down now.

Re:I don't mean to whore....but....

[EvilStein]

"My primary experience with Linux in the home has been SuSE, and I know I'm going to find Gentoo painful to start up and might even go back to SuSE at this stage in the game."

Don't say that just yet. I was in the same boat but after following the directions and asking the friendly folks on the gentoo-user mailing list and forums.gentoo.org, I easily found everything I needed, and life is good. :)

Re:I don't mean to whore....but....

[bogie]

"just keep in mind that it is people like the Gentoo team that have made Linux the phenomenon that it is"

Err not really. Gentoo came along way way after linux became a "phenomenon". Its also very much a minority distro. If you want to thank someone, thank Slackware, Red Hat, and Debian who have been giving and giving for years now.

Nothing against Gentoo, but let's give credit where credit it due. It's going to be a long time before Gentoo can be lumped in with the above distros.

Re:I don't mean to whore....but....

[Kevin DeGraaf]

I needed to know the CDs weren't going to fail on me like a copied ISO might

Uhm... you do know about md5sum, don't you?

Re:I don't mean to whore....but....

[arkane1234]

They said "people like the Gentoo team".
Not the Gentoo team, themselves.
They're right, it was people who wanted to better Linux, make it more configurable and give the user more options.

Re:I don't mean to whore....but....

[Xabraxas]

The package system, aside from the fact that it builds from source by default (which has now been proven to be of no meaningful benefit to most users)

That's not entirely true. Building from source gives you control of what support you want to add. The USE variables are the upside to this method.

And no self-respecting corporation would install an unmaintainable distribution consisting mostly of beta and untested software that 24+ hours of dedicated, hands-on attention to install on typical hardware.

Actually there is an unstable branch to Gentoo for beta and untested software. I use Gentoo stable and never had a single problem with it. Most "self-respecting" corporations that do use Gentoo tend to have a seperate build machine where they can build binaries and emerge them on the other machines.

If the efforts of Gentoo developers were put towards improving an existing non-commercial distributions such as Debian, or improving the open source programs themselves, it would clearly be advancing the cause of Linux -- instead they are duplicating existing work and stepping backward in time, producing a product that almost no one wants, and no one at all needs, and this doesn't help linux at all.

This is just garbage. Gentoo is not Debian. Gentoo is after a different market. It is about fine-grained control, it's not just a non-commercial distro with good package management. Those two things just happen to be an added benefit. The control Gentoo offers is powerful yet simple. That's what people like. To say that Gentoo is something that nobody needs or wants is very naive. It is positively something people want since it is growing rapidly. I would hope it is something people need, since it was created to fill a need.

Re:I don't mean to whore....but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the stable version of debian takes so much time to get out because synchronizing all these platforms takes time (especially as most of the new linux developpers these days are working on x86 machines exclusively).

good news!

[dcstimm]

I want to thank Drobbins, Seemant, and All the gentoo developers! Thanks for your hard work for makeing linux even better!

Please support gentoo by going to gentoo.org and buying the livecds...

The number on reason for using Gentoo...

[Dante333]

Its a great learning exprience. I learned more about linux installing gentoo (way back in the old days when it was still using gcc 2.95) than using Red Hat for a year. It may take a while to install and update, but it does teach you whats what on a linux system. That and portage just rocks. There is even a NWN ebuild

Re:Ask And Ye Shall Receive. . .

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Depends on what you mean by difficult. Try hacking the RedHat 6.1 installer to boot on a thinkpad with 16MB of RAM, and a modern PCMCIA network card.

And this was last year, because 7.+ refuses to even LOOK at a machine with less than 32MB. The boot from scratch and do everything by hand approach I ended up learning by my self through weeks of excruciating trial, error, and usenet clippings.

Then of course there is the wonderful habit the RedHat installer has of mounting my RAID as /dev/sda during installation. When the new OS starts, it moves to /dev/sdd, completely frelling the /etc/fstab file. I ended up booting those server off of floppies for close to a year. It was only until I played with the Gentoo installer that I learned enough about the boot process to permanently fix that problem.

Point in click is nice. But I generally find it doesn't make my life any easier. But then again, my world seems a little strange to outsiders.

Re:Gentoo Trolls

[lightcycle]

I'd have to agree, but add that there also is a fair amount of anti-gentoo trolling in connection with every gentoo related story on /.
Gentoo has strong and weak points, just as every other distro, and just as every other distro it isn't for everyone. This gentoo/anti-gentoo trolling is counterproductive as well as ashaming to every serious linux user, and I would like to see the discussion hitched up just a few notches above the sandbox level it's currently at. If we could do that, a balanced discussion might help users find the distribution best suited to their needs. After all, having choices will only benefit linux.
Oh well, end rant...

Re:Ask And Ye Shall Receive. . .

[Xabraxas]

It doesn't, it's just a time consuming load of hogwash leet wannabees jump onto to say 'I use a source distro!'

Must

Not

Feed

The

Trolls!

Oh I just can't help it. First of all...NO. You'd be surprised to find out that there are many experienced Linux users using Gentoo. It's about choice and it's about control. Gentoo gives its users the most fine grained control of any Linux distro and it does it in a very usable way. See my sig for details.

Gentoo does force a lot of people to learn more about Linux than they do whether they like it or not. This is not to say that it's not possible with other distros but there are no gui utilities for Gentoo and so the users are forced to use the CLI much more and are forced to edit config files much more, giving them a crash course education in Linux. Whether this is the best way or not is debatable, but whether or not people tend to learn more with Gentoo, well, that is not debatable. Read the forums. Personally I'm happy that a lot of newbies are jumping in with Gentoo and learning a lot more off the bat than they would with Red Hat or Mandrake. To each his own. Let's not fight about distros, at least we're all using Linux.

I don't think it's fashionable to use Gentoo although it seems quite fashionable to bash Gentoo.

Re:Obvious flamebait

[omega9]

The biggest advantage of (the option of) compiling on your own box is customization of the package, which far outweighs the speedup from being a local build job. For instance, say you want to install a package that has four USE flags. They are all mutually exclusive and each calls it's own dependancy. In Gentoo, you're able to build that package with only the options and dependancies you desire, possibly none (single package, no USE settings). In a binary distro you would have to offer 16 (2^N where N=number of USE flags) different packages and still have to worry about deps.

While I believe there is a genuine advantage to compiling on you own hardware, I also believe people incorrectly prioritize it above the level of potential customization.

Reverse dependencies

[normalperson]

Is unmerging a package safe yet?

Do packages that depend on the package I'm unmerging also get unmerged automatically or do they stay installed (and broken?)

Of course, I tend to like to try out new software on a whim a lot and frequently install something to use for a few hours before I decide whether or not it's worth keeping on my system (usually not).

Oh Please...

[Kjella]

While the contributing code was perhaps localized at first, it's impossible to know how the code /around/ it would have evolved had their IP never been introduced. All of Linux from that point on is tainted by their code, and thus is their IP.

That's about as realistic as the MS programming monkey that once copy-pasted two lines of Linux 0.01 into Windows would now make all of Windows the IP of Mr. Linus.

Derivative works are more than just inspiration, I can't create a story in the Star Wars universe but I can certainly make one in a *different* galaxy far far away. It's not like any other story involving being in another galaxy would be "tainted" and the IP of George Lucas, just because I saw the movie.

Kjella

Re:Ask And Ye Shall Receive. . .

[zsau]

That said, after you've gone though the full install ... you will have learned a LOT more about how Linux works than you will from a text based installer.

Nonesense. I use Gentoo. I learnt most of what I know of Linux from my Slackware days before Gentoo, so maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm almost certain that installing Gentoo doesn't teach you all that much. You know mostly what you have installed, but you don't learn of the significance of the various packages when you emerge system or run the bootstrap script. You don't even now how to ./configure --help | less; ./configure [desired options] && make && make install!

Re:Great release

[Anonymous Coward]

For mission critial stuff, I still do not suggest Gentoo. As as example I point to forums.gentoo.org. Which was moved over to Debian just 2 days ago due to security and other issues mission critical issues that infest gentoo.

But for the hobby person or linux guru thinking of testing out a new disto, give gentoo a try, but i suggest doing this on a free (fast) harddisk (hopefully one where you have no critical paritions).

Re:OT SCO: Re:Great release

[gilesjuk]

If they win (by that I mean there really was SCO code in the kernel) the code will be removed from Linux or rewritten. The person who added it will be sued by many Linux vendors for putting it there. SCO's case is with the person who put the code into to the kernel, not with Linux users. But of course by creating this fuss they're hoping to make money and get people to use their crusty Linux distro.

Re:Gentoo on PowerPC?

[axxackall]

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

Then the original poster's point can be re-expressed this way: the stable tree of PPC is far behind the stable tree of x86.

the unstable PPC tree is even more unstable than the unstable x86 one. I've played enough with all of them and I know what I am talking about.

The problem with PPC tree is a lack of developers having PPC in hands. You know, x86 is still dominating, even in Linux world.

Re:Obvious flamebait

[omega9]

For the sake of completeness, my original remark was "While I believe there is a genuine advantage to compiling on you own hardware, I also believe people incorrectly prioritize it above the level of potential customization.". This is important for the fact that I was agreeing that the advantage gained by building locally is often incorrectly billed as the greatest feature of Gentoo.

The attraction to building packages locally comes from the amount of customization available to you. Personally, I enjoy having that level of customization available. We can argue all day about how much CFLAGS can actually impact software performance, but you missed my greater point before and I'm afraid you might miss it again so we'll leave it alone. Interestingly enough, you have a very defined dislike for trolls, but you exhibit the overuse of capital letters, the attitude that your opinion is the only opinion, and site constant misinformation.

It's my observation that Gentoo users in general prefer it for the ease of keeping the system up to date and the amount that it can be personalized in the process. In the same vein, Gentoo is not dissimilar from LFS, a distro that also requires building packages locally. If the issue you take is one of local builds then you would be better off taking issue against the entire genre of source based distrobutions as Gentoo is not entirely unique in that regard. If your issue is with it's popularity, then perhaps it's worth it to reexamine the fact that a source based disto is in fact that popular right now.

"the portage system is very handy though, for easy installing. however the biggest advantages of it(individual compiles) fail on the low end computers where they would be most of use"

The remark "however the biggest advantages of it(individual compiles)" would lend itself to admit that there are actual advantages of individual compiles, just that they're being lost on lower end hardware. If there are, in fact, advantages to individual compiles then I suggest rethinking your arguements against custom CFLAGS, etc. . Also, I'm aware of at least on person who has completed a successful install on a P133, though doing so was for entertaining/educational reasons. I would agree that Gentoo is not the best suited distrobution to use on such hardware, but it is possible if you have strong enough reasons.

"(the biggest advantages of gentoo have been available on other distros for years). the biggest gist in the linux community against it is the over hyping by (newbie)users"

I would argue that if the biggest advantages of Gentoo have always been available, then Gentoo would not be nearly as popular as it is today. It's true that Debian's apt system is a stunning package manager, and ports have been around on FreeBSD for years, but the biggest advantage of Gentoo is not any individual component, but the way they function and are tied together. Maybe what you perceive as over hyping is just the general noise created by a user community excited about a distro they like. Gentoo wouldn't be the first distro to have users with a common aura or excitement (ex. Debian).

"oh yeah, i don't even have a linux machine currently..."

I may be wrong, but now it seems like you most likely haven't spent any time on a Gentoo machine and all your points are purely academic.