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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.)
I'm glad that my favorite distribution has finally gone retail. I will definitely be among the people that shell out $15 for the two pressed CDs and the printed installation manual.
Been using Gentoo for my linux boxes since late 2001; I couldn't be happier.
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
Although I had some major problems with Gentoo not booting after install on one of my test systems at work, I was still impressed with the relative ease presented by a system still so powerfully configurable and tweakable (I was installing from a Stage 1 1.4 (RC2 I think) build). I will definitely keep it on my list next time we have a box ready to roll out. I do wonder whatever happened to that one guy who wanted to fork Gentoo... did he ever follow thru with his plans?
I am looking forward to seeing the Gentoo fork (Zynot) release some code.
My rights don't need management.
You're not whoring. The reasons why I went ahead and bought the CD set when it came up, even though I'd already downloaded the ISO, were a) I was lazy b) I needed to know the CDs weren't going to fail on me like a copied ISO might, and c), the biggest reason of all, I want to support Gentoo.
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. But Gentoo seems to be about much more than Linux: from what I understand, they're working on platforms for other OSes out there, and that greatly increases the probability that many more people will benefit from their work on Portage and the rest.
Oh, and just in case someone thinks I'm karma whoring, myself (like I should care?), let me say that I also broke down and ordered an OEM version of Windows XP Pro yesterday, along with a requisite piece of hardware to meet the licensing terms, etc.
Get off my launchpad!
Use Gentoo all you want. But Gentoo is *bleeding edge*. I don't know a single sysadmin who uses Gentoo on their servers. Further, I don't know a single one who WOULD use Gentoo on their servers.
Gentoo is a project, a hobby, a desktop OS. It's a fantastic product, don't get me wrong, but it's just not getting into the professional world, and even the die hards I know acknowledge that. Whereas Debian is definitely used by many in the server room, my perception is that Gentoo hasn't crossed that line yet. RH, SuSE, Conectiva, and a few others seem to have that area locked up (for now).
No, its commercial distributors like Red Hat and SuSE, and also hardware companies like IBM and Intel, that have made 'Linux' what it is today. By funding development, contributing technology, providing professional support, and developing products installable by end users. These things help expand users of Linux beyond the small base of geeks who have been using it for the last ten years.
Gentoo is none of these things. The installer is a step backward from, say, Slackware from 10 years ago, in that there really isn't one. 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), is like Debian's, but the quality control process is basically non-existent in favor of a philosophy of throwing up immediately every new release regardless of whether it is broken or not. Its a distro aimed at the typical slashdot user, with no hope of ever being useful to anyone else. Even developers are more likely to use a professional distribution such as Red Hat, since they are the standard platform their software should run on. 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. 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.
though, using distcc with a cluster of about 16 nodes, you should be able to cut that down to an hour. of course, not many people have 2 free computers at home, let alone 16.
I write code.
Actually, it appear that there are more Gentoo users than Debian users at the moment, and Gentoo is the fastest growing distro. It's hardly a "minority" distro.
Face it, we have Intel and AMD on the cusp of major architecture changes AND the migration to the 64 bit processor. Both changes require a complete recompile of your system to exploit the improvements.
At the same time, you have a distro that for the first time brings parity between the x86, PPC, and sparc architectures. Plans are even in the works to port portage to Cygwin, BSD, and MacOSX. The GCC compiler is getting good enough at building across architectures that a new hardware platform could have a Linux port in weeks.
Computing power and RAM are plentiful in PC's. People bicker about 19 hours to compile OpenOffice, but I can remember a time when (assuming it was possible at all) a compile like that would take weeks.
All of these factors are pointing us to a world in the near future where binaries are an afterthought. Even if the hardware you are running on can't compile on the fly, you can plug it into a server farm that CAN.
Gentoo may be a half-assed Linux distro. But it has the potential to completely change how we distribute software.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
As I understand it, that's only because it was easier to register a for-profit company when Gentoo was started. I think we are trying to change to non-profit, though.
Luke-Jr
I was going to benchmark this by loading OpenOffice before and after compiling it with -Os. On a cold boot, the -O2 load time was 12 seconds, and 3 when it was in cache. So I re-emerged, and I ran out of space! OpenOffice takes over 1.6 GB to compile! Perhaps lack of -Os isn't the problem.
Litigious bastards
is it too much to ask for gentoo to get its on topic category? its got a pretty cool logo. jeez even turbolinux has one.
I installed Gentoo at several of my customer sites. Some of the installations replaced Windows servers, others replaced Red Hat installations, and some are brand new servers.
I can tell you, without a doubt, that real, serious businesses are using Gentoo very successfully. Granted, someone less familiar with Linux could very easily have slapped up a RedHat9.x server for them in less time, but with Gentoo I was able to give the customers exactly what they wanted. I was able to give them a very robust, secure solution thanks to the minimalist nature of Gentoo. No features they didn't want, no services they didn't want, and everything went without a hitch (with the exception of one customer's PHP 4.3.2 thanks to his programmer naming some functions the same as the native PHP functions... duh).
Case in point: One local customer had been running a Samba server on RedHat with Win98 clients. They wanted to increase security by establishing a PDC for their domain AND move their website in house (Java-powered site running under Tomcat). I configured the RedHat Samba instance to use LDAP only to find that... Redhat's Samba doesn't (or didn't at the time) support LDAP! A Gentoo installation later (ok... so I went home and came back the next day while the Stage2 compiled... big deal), and it was as simple as 'USE="ldap" emerge samba tomcat' to get them up and running. They recently called me to say that they liked my idea of switching from their (albeit lacking and somewhat poorly designed by someone else) Java-based site to a Plone site. 'emerge apache plone' and away we go.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Don't forget mips!! Gentoo runs on mips as well. Current supported machines are SGI Indy, SGI Indigo2 (R4k), and SGI O2 (R5K). I've got an R5K Indy with gentoo mips, and it works great. Distcc and fast machines with cross-compilers make it really fast and easy too.
Project Steve
Apart from the fact I could have sworn I saw an identical post like this the other day, a quick response from a general linux newbie. Might be a little more deserving of it's mod if it were original.
/dev/hda1 was, and neither was it properly explained.
As a newbie, I didn't find Gentoo difficult to install what so ever. It comes with a step by step instructions that are only difficult to follow if you don't understand English. I'm sure I'm not alone here. The thing that makes text based installs hard is when the developers fail to explain some of the terminolgy they use in the install. First time I installed and put slack on my computer the interface wasn't daunting, but I had absolutely zero clue as to what / or
The reasons why I like using Gentoo are:
a) Better understanding of linux.
I really hated slack when I first used it. Not because it performed badly or anything like that. It was the fact that there was so much to be included in the install that I didn't need or I had no clue as to what it did, and therefore if it was really useful to me. When you don't understand a system it makes it hard to decide what is cruft and what is depended on or important.
With gentoo this was different, I started off with your basic shell, that is the bare essentials of the system that I could add the parts I wanted to. Also when emerging something, the building text flying past didn't help me me feel like I was empowered with the good of open source, but I DID get to see the dependancies of a program as it was downloaded (or using -p to show this without actually downloading any source).
b) To have only what I need, and not what disto's think I should have.
I could do all this with debian and forgo the compiling, but from what I am aware it takes new versions of packages absolutely ages to get into stable Debian releases.
Really, this is just a cry for people to notice the cut&paste reply of the zealot translation.
Okay, I see how having a system entirely tailored and compiled for my own system is great, sorta. Aren't there thousands of other people using AMD Athlon processors? Why should I have to compile a binary that everyone else has already got on their Athlon? I can see having several versions of the binary to cope with INTEL/AMD discrepancies but how much optimisation is really done with a custom compile?
I seem to recall SCO claiming that since the code was introduced so long ago, it has contaminated every build since. 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.
I have not seen the code in question, and I certainly hope that MicroSCOft loses this battle, but should they win, I could really see this claim as having some weight. Linux evolves, and parts of the kernel interact with other parts. You could, for example, take concepts from their code and use those concepts in the single-processor scheduler. It's impossible to know how far the taint has spread since the code was out there for anyone to read. It's fairly safe to localize it to Linux, though, and since this is actually just a money grab, it makes sense. And the logic behind it is fairly sound (as much as I hate to admit it).
you get scared off by the FreeBSD or Debian install process, RUN LIKE HELL FROM GENTOO
Load of crap. Unless you have ADD, Gentoo installation is really just a test of your l33t abilities to read instructions and type things that could be scripts.
Compare to Debian, who's installer barely does anything and leaves one to have fun with modprobe and RTFM.
I don't see how anyone who could have managed to install OS/2 (for example) could have any problem with FreeBSD.
Anyone else hear about how Transgaming forced gentoo to stop having ebuilds of their source? Transgaming said gentoo was making it trivial to install from gentoo. All in the pursuit of profit eh?
Could I convert an existing Redhat server to Gentoo - without rebuilding from scratch? Can I not download "emerge" and start emerging system? Has anyone done it? How did it work? How to get rid of the "cruft"?
I don't have a backup of that server, so I can't go for the wipe and rebuild - also, it is running a 24/7 e-commerce site.
(Of course I have a backup.)
Get your own free personal location tracker
Was I the only one who dropped Gentoo when they went from 1.2 -> 1.3 and you couldn't do a simple "emerge -u world"? There was something like four manual update scripts to run. When that didn't work right off the bat, I decided to punt. Not that I couldn't have gotten it to work, but I was worried that this would happen with every major (or even minor) release.
:-)
Emerging applications was sometimes flakey as well. I particularly recall having difficulty upgrading KDE.
I was also occasionally frustrated with portage scripts lagging the latest tar balls (or not existing altogether), but of course that happens with every package system.
I had always wished the USE variables would get set automatically, too. So that if I had, say, Postgres and TCL installed the --with-tcl configure option gets set without having to fiddle with the USE variable. That's a weak complaint, though, since that feature is pretty unique to Gentoo anyhow.
Now I'm using Red Hat fairly happily. However I seem to spend a lot of time building custom RPMs to get the equivalent of Gentoo's USE. *sigh* Still, grabbing whole suites of packages from jpackage.org et al via apt-get is pretty sweet.
Anyway, not trying to spread Gentoo FUD. With the amount of popularity and support Gentoo has going for it, I'm sure some or all of these issues have already been addressed, right? I'll have to check it out when I finally decide to cannabalize my Windows box!
IMHO, the mere fact that they *have* a Linux distro means they published the Linux source code under Linux's license - which means they agreed to the license (but IANAL)