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Gentoo Linux 2004.0 Released
Quique writes "Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for the x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. Additionally, the Gentoo Hardened team is announcing the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture.
Installation stages, LiveCDs, and GRP sets can be
found on the mirrors.
More information about the Gentoo Hardened project
can be found on its project page.
For more information, please consult the
documentation,
mailing lists,
user forums and official IRC channels.
The new Gentoo
Store has also been announced." I've put more of the release notes below - might also be worth checking out the tutorial for LPI certification done by the President/CEO of Gentoo; there's also a note about Gentoo's newest meta-release tool, Catalyst below as well. Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information.
"
In addition to many bugfixes and security updates since the 1.4 release,
Gentoo Linux 2004.0 contains a cutting-edge development toolchain and user
environment including, but not limited to, Linux kernel 2.6.3, GCC 3.3.2,
GLIBC 2.3.2, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4.2, and xfce4.
Gentoo Linux 2004.0 marks the debut of Catalyst, the new Gentoo release meta-tool. Using Catalyst, developers and users can create and customize every aspect of their Gentoo Linux system; from installation stages, to bootable LiveCDs, to customized binary packages for the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP). For more information on Catalyst, please see the Catalyst project page and online documentation."
That's the best part of Gentoo... the people who care the least about a new version of Gentoo are the Gentoo users. It's a beautiful model... they way Debian was supposed to work.
as if the Gentoo zealots needed any more encouragement to post.
This is just a way to sidetrack them, so they won't be posting to other threads while this one is active.
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
So, zealots, fire away! I might even be convinced to give this one a try - previous Gentoo experiment was short circuited by unavoidable crash on entering X.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The main reason I use gentoo is bugfixing made easy. emerge your soft, if you find a bug you can fix it yourself quite fast by re-running emerge, stopping the merge when make begins, and hacking in /var/tmp/portage/$soft.
Well, it may not be "fast" if it's a hard bug but it's noticeably faster than with a binary-package distro where you'd have to go get a tgz, figure out the configure options you want, and go into bugfix mode - fucking up your distro's package database by the way.
blah
Torrents please...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Does anybody still care about Gentoo? It is like the ultimate poseur distro. Everyone uses it because they want to be 'leet' and 'kewl' and say 'I run Gentoo and not Windows XP so I am a badass.' Way lame.
As opposed to those who run RHEL or SUSE because their boss gets warm fuzzies from writing subscription checks?
As opposed to those who run Debian because they'd rather argue parlimentary procedure and voting rules than have code that actually works on recent hardware?
As opposed to those orphans still running RHL because dammit, Red Hat == Linux, just like Xerox == photocopying and Jello == flavored gelatin.
wow, you've had your comment up for almost 4 minutes and it hasn't been flooded with fanboys yet. Amazing. But seriously, if ease of use is what you're looking for then you should probably stay away from Gentoo. I will admit that it's a dream once you finally get it running but getting to that point takes quite a while. It's quite simply the most masochistic installation I've ever seen. The live cd will dump you to a prompt and then it's up to you to partition your drive, mount it's filesystem, untar all the files manually, set up fstab by hand, compile and install your kernel, manually set up your bootloader, set up your networking, choose which compilation options you want to use, and then start compiling things. (desktop? hope you've got a day or two handy..)
Not all the hardware you might want is turned on by genkernel (notably Video4Linux and tablets are off)
You know, that's the thing I love the most about Gentoo. I installed 1.2 a while back custom compiling everything. Took my laptop a good 12 hours to compile but it was worth it. A rock solid OS in the end. But then again, that's because I can read instructions. The install process takes you through every segment of a linux based OS so you end up learning a lot about how its all put together. A great experience for anyone willing put in the time I'd say.
I have Gentoo running on my SunBlade 100, it runs rather fast, compiled mozilla in a couple hours. KDE failed last night, going to see what happended today.
So far, no problems. I tried linux on my sparc 5 with SuSE, and it was slower than Solaris 2.6. But that was a few years ago.
I'm still running Mandrake on my home boxes, I can't have it down for a day while its compiling. Now if Gentoo just offered a full binary build also.
Hi...
What version of XFree86 is shipping with this release of Gentoo? Any statements about the licensing issues some are having with the latest XFree86 release?
Yeah, it's funny but I like that they are now using a simple and obvious versioning number that isn't marketing based.
man... i can gurantee any prob you had someone else already encountered and was posted and resolved on the forums. You just didn't use all the resources gentoo provides... i.e. the community (forums)
If there is a bug in the code, then using binaries is most certainly not helping. Not to mention IF the person is FIXING the bugs, the binary does almost NO good.
Now admittedly debian may use non-standard patches to fix some things (what distro doesn't? LFS...maybe) and not have a certain problem, but that should be sent upstream, which it is most likely what colinleroy is doing.
Who cares if you don't like Gentoo or BSD or whatever? Just because someone else likes to run them doesn't make them an idiot. Pretty much any current Linux distro or BSD distro or any similar OS is going to get the same things done for you. They may do things in different ways, but ultimately they have fairly similar results. I'm not trying to devalue any viewpoints or systems here, but honestly there is no point in bitter, angry fighting over superior open source OS's because they are pretty much all way better than Windows.
I happen to like Gentoo, and I run it on some of my machines. But I also run RedHat and Mandrake and Mac OS X and I even have one Windows XP box. I don't particularly care about the alleged optimization in Gentoo, because there is no noticeable difference in speed between any recent distro I have run. What I do care about is the fact that it is highly customizable, fairly easy to use, and frankly pretty cool. The Portage system is a unique adaptation of BSD Ports and the similar Linux counterparts.
I fail to see how Debian is better than Gentoo. They are somewhat similar, and I wouldn't say that either is necessarily better. Of course, with Linux, it ultimately comes down to what is best for you. Either way, there is no way anyone can definitively say one is better. One could go on all day about the goodness of Debian, and I could throw that all out in my mind because I happen to not like how Debian feels and acts. Or I could just go by the simple fact that although initial installation of Gentoo can be more complex than that of Debian, Gentoo worked infinitely better with my hardware from the start. But all that demonstrates is that I like Gentoo better than Debian. It might be the case that I'm the only person that feels that way, and you know what, I would be fine with that.
What I am trying to say here is that we just need to try to be more tolerant here on Slashdot, and ultimately in all areas. Sure, we shouldn't tolerate an OS that is blatantly or hopelessly flawed, but I just don't see that describing Gentoo or any other OS that I have used recently. Go ahead and debate, go ahead and criticize, but realize that you can't really fault someone for their opinions.
I answer your question of why I run Gentoo: because I like it. I respect that you don't like it, if that is the case. I can see how many, if not most people would not like it at all. But I do like it and I am no "zealot." I wouldn't take a bullet for Gentoo, but I'll stick up for it if it is unfairly slammed. I am willing to see the flaws in my chosen distro. Are you?
I am feeling fat and sassy
You can customize any distribution to your heart's content -- that's why it's called Open Source. I remember changing around everything on a Mandrake 8 box some years ago, so that when it booted up the splash screen said something like "Dan's Linux", and the prompts replaced Mandrake Foobar Linux with Dans Foobar Linux (Mandrake names their releases -- forget which foobar it was). Not only is it really easy to make cosmetic changes, if you know what you're doing, it's relatively easy to make other changes to the distro as well.
Exactly the worst thing you could do. Recommending Gentoo to just any newbie is counter-productive advocacy.
When you make a recommendation, you have to take your target audience into account. You should not recommend Gentoo for someone who don't care about the innard of his OS and just want to use a word processor, read his email, surf the Web and play a game or three. They don't want to get past the GUI, they just want to get things done.
Power user, system administrator and programmer are a totally different story and *may* be good candidate to recommend Gentoo to.
That's so obvious, I can't believe it have to be said.
:wq
You missed the point.
How do you merge your fixes into apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ?
The reason we're called "zealots" (yep, I use Gentoo as well) is because everytime a Linux article comes out on /. there are 30 comments that say "What's the big deal, Gentoo already does this" or "All I have to do is emerge -lskfa file", and it's completely irrelevant.
I love the way Gentoo works, and I understand that there are many people who feel the same way I do. But keep it to yourself unless someone is specifically asking for advice on a distro to try. People are sick of hearing us push Gentoo at every freaking opportunity.
OK how do I upgrade from 1.4 to 2004?
I suspect the answer is emerge sync ; emerge -u world but I'm not sure.
Hey is 2004 still using devfs with 2.6? Get with the times guys!
You can take any group of software users and poke fun for your own satisfaction, calling them wannabe's, whatever ... But mind me asking: "What's the freaking point?" This is like a flash back to my days on the playground. Grow up, please, and quit wasting bandwith with your meaningless bantering. Next time just summarize your thoughts as:
"I think some people are posers!"
The end!
Someone please inform the Pentagon that m1a1's sense of humour is MIA.
Dude, it's a joke. Lighten up before you get an ulcer.
Sheesh. And I thought I was tense...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Gentoo may be a nice system but for me this was a major showstopper.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
While Gentoo hasn't necessarily made this "easier", it is certainly more clear what is going on. I'm always nervous about some GUI installer just doing stuff to the MBR without telling me what it is, whether it is the Windows installer or the Redhat one.
And, at least for x86, GRUB IS an improvement in usability over LILO. I haven't used any version of LILO in the last two or three years since I switched to GRUB, but the main advantage of GRUB is that you don't have to remember to reinstall it into the boot sectors every time you change the config. You just edit the config file, save, and it'll work fine on the next reboot. And, it's nice because you can manually edit the config file right in the GRUB GUI...
"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."
Isn't finding bugs and reporting them part of the spirit?
You're right - gentoo really helped me learn some more advanced parts of a linux system. And I could learn it one bit at a time, because you install it step by step.
But it can still be a bit overwelming and I have been using computers every day for most of my life.
I think that redhat and mandrake are two of the reasons why many people that try linux don't like it - it is too difficult to upgrade (try upgrading from gnome 2.0 to 2.2 or 2.4, for example) and it is generally too difficult to install things that come out afterwords that have many dependencies.
gentoo does it all for you. I would use debian, but gentoo's desktop apps are newer and more stable than debian unstable. They usually have things before other distros.
It is also a lot easier if you are developing, because there aren't separate *-devel packages. If you have the library you want to use, then you have anything you need. If you are writing a new app, then you obviously have to have the latest stuff, otherwise it is going to be outdated before you are done.
and the userbase is friendly and helpful. Yes - there are many 'noobs', but remember that we need new users and we need to help them learn linux so that linux can become successfull. All of them might not code, but they help a lot with testing and they provide valuable feedback to make things easier and better. They are the users, coders and sys-admins of tomorrow.
Better let them use Gentoo where they will receive friendly help than leave them to ask "stupid" questions on elitist (you know the name of the distro) mailing lists.
He gets the insightful, you get the troll :). What a (/.) wonderful world.
-Tom
Funny, but...
The problem I've had with RPM-based distributions isn't having to specify two RPM's in a circular dependency. It's that when I want to update one program about 3 months after installation, I have to update the 'glibc' RPM, which then means I have to updated practically every RPM.
On another note, I love people who insist on compiling with -O9 or -O6 or something. The documentation doesn't mention anything above -O3, but that doesn't faze our brave hyper-optimizing friends, who "can tell the difference" between a program compiled at -O3 and one compiled at -O9. These are also the people that love to list a dozen specific -f flags that are in fact implied by their optimization level, because they don't trust the -O9 flag to turn all those flags on for them. They'll also specify -march, -mcpu, and maybe -mmmx for good measure, in case the compiler wasn't smart enough to figure out that athlon-xp has MMX extensions, and in case the compiler can find some use for those MMX extensions in chfn, which is invariably the sort of "performance-critical" application they're compiling.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Exactly.
I could care less if my computer consumes a lot of time performing a task. It's when I have to consume a lot of time performing a task that annoys me.
And screwing around with RPM's consumes a lot of my time.
With Gentoo, I can issue one or two commands and be done with it.
(don't tell anybody, but Linux is a multitasking operating system, so when I do compiles I can actually be accomplishing other work on that very same computer at the very same time.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?