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Gentoo 1.4 Final Released

Posted by timothy on from the assimilates-your-pc's-soul dept.

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.)

31 of 398 comments (clear)

  1. Great release by dook43 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. I don't mean to whore....but.... by mao+che+minh · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by Artifex · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!
    2. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by EvilStein · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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. :)

    3. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by EvilTwinSkippy · · Score: 5, Interesting
      What's a long time in computer terms?

      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
    4. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by Jimithing+DMB · · Score: 4, Informative
      I needed to know the CDs weren't going to fail on me like a copied ISO might.

      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:

      dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=2048 | md5sum

      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:

      cd /mnt/loopbacked_iso
      find . -type f -exec md5sum {} \; > ~/known_good_md5
      cd /mnt/cdrom
      find . -type f -exec md5sum {} \; > ~/cdrom_md5
      diff -u ~/known_good_md5 ~/cdrom_md5

      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.

    5. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by Ig0r · · Score: 5, Informative

      "...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.
    6. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by arkane1234 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
    7. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by innosent · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    8. Re:I don't mean to whore....but.... by An+Ominous+Cow+Erred · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

  3. To all 1.4_rcx users by Unregistered · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:To all 1.4_rcx users by Zork+the+Almighty · · Score: 5, Funny

      As a Gentoo fanatic, I do this monthly, which is roughly the amount of time it takes to finish.

      --

      In Soviet America the banks rob you!
  4. Changelog! Getcha changelog! by James+A.+A.+Joyce · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  5. Wooohooo! by RealityShunt · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's time to finally start that Gentoo install with the 2.6 kernel series that I've been putting off.

    I've been seriously too interested in the outside this summer. I have an actual tan, a girlfriend, and have put enough miles on the bike that I have to replace the tires. Enough! It's time for this insanity to stop!

    Time to download and emerge! Bring on those multi-hour computer sessions! Woot!

    --
    Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate.
    1. Re:Wooohooo! by phyrestang · · Score: 5, Funny

      Forget the bike, how many miles on the girlfriend?

  6. Re:Tried it, will try it again by Unregistered · · Score: 5, Informative

    ask for help in forums.gentoo.org if you have installation trouble. I'm sure we could have gotten you up and running easily.

  7. Ask And Ye Shall Receive. . . by Farley+Mullet · · Score: 5, Funny

    Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

    Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

    "Gentoo makes me so much more productive."

    "Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

    "Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"

    "Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

    "I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."

    "Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

    "Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."

    "I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

    "...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."

    "...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..." "You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."

    "I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

    "All the other distros are soooo out of date."

    "Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

    "Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."

    "OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

    1. Re:Ask And Ye Shall Receive. . . by MBCook · · Score: 4, Informative
      That's cute and all, but if you get scared off by the FreeBSD or Debian install process, RUN LIKE HELL FROM GENTOO. I use Gentoo myself, and it's great, but it's not an install for the newbie. That said, after you've gone though the full install (I'm talking stage 1, none of that stage 3 wimp stuff) you will have learned a LOT more about how Linux works than you will from a text based installer.

      PS. Good job on reaching 1.4! Go Gentoo!

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    2. Re:Ask And Ye Shall Receive. . . by Xabraxas · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

      --
      Time makes more converts than reason
  8. Gentoo has a new USE flag by snkmoorthy · · Score: 4, Funny

    USE="-SCO" emerge gentoo

  9. AMD-XP Watch out by BrookHarty · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."

    1. Re:AMD-XP Watch out by EvilTwinSkippy · · Score: 4, Informative
      I'm running 1.4 on an Athlon I built from stage 1. The trick is to use mem=nopentium. There is an errata between the Kernel, GCC, the Athlon XP, and possibly some mother-board memory controllers that causes the 4 to not play nice. Before I stumbled on the solution on the forums the machine would lock up randomly.

      YMMV.

      --
      "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
      --Dr.W.Edwards Deming
  10. Re:The funny part is... by Pros_n_Cons · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sigh, whatever Distro can upgrade the entire OS (in place!) with a single command: emerge -u world.

    redhat: apt-get dist-upgrade
    debian: apt-get dist-upgrade
    yum: yum update

    I upgraded from Redhat9 to the new beta this way.

    --

    -- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
  11. Re:Gentoo... by Our+Man+In+Redmond · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or, do what I did.

    1. Set your Athlon XP 2000+ box up with Gentoo

    2. Optimize everything for the Athlon

    3. Set out a plate of milk and cookies.

    4. Start the openoffice emerge running

    5. Go to bed

    In the morning the milk and cookies will be gone and the OpenOffice elves will have left you a copy of OpenOffice, tailored to your machine.

    --
    Someone you trust is one of us.
  12. Re:What is Gentoo based on? by xchino · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  13. gentoo topic by quannump · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --

  14. Re:Gentoo Trolls by lightcycle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

    --

    The stars that shine and the stars that shrink
    in the face of stagnation the water runs before your eyes
  15. Debian *is* very recent, while still stable by The+Revolutionary · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  16. Easy Slashdot karma formula by WalterDGeranios · · Score: 5, Funny
    OK, feel free to mod me down now.

    Step 1: Make a comment.

    Step 2: Type "I know everyone is going to mod me down" or "OK, mod me down everyone."

    Step 3: Those tricksy Slashdot readers outwit you and mod you up!.

  17. Reverse dependencies by normalperson · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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).

  18. Re:LiveCD for Apple PowerBook 17"? by Drakon86 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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