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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."
Anybody know the location or a mirror with the non-sse version of hardened Gentoo? I can't seem to find a mirror anywhere.
Because compiling from source is what makes Gentoo, and most Linux distros so powerful. That is what those make and use flags are for.
Gentoo is a distro that is designed to be fully customizable. With binaries compiled on your own computer, you'll get better performance.
...don't question it!!!
Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration? I've got a 3.2GHz system with a Radeon 9700 and I'm running XP Pro on it. I was thinking of installing FreeBSD on it which I run with two other systems, but ultimately this system is my primary desktop and I'd like to have a Linux dist installed so I could take advantage of, well, Linux desktop ease-of-use (never thought I'd say that!). Still, I like BSD's ports system, which is why I'm interested in Gentoo (the portage system is supposed to be similar).
... Any info would be appreciated ...
I've never installed Gentoo, though, so I'd be curious about what Gentoo users would have to say about this and how it compares to, say, Mandrake or Suse
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I run gentoo 1.4 with 2.4.20 soething kernel, Now I want to try 2.6.3. I don't think "emerge -uD world" would do the trick in this case.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
After having this distro reccomended to me, I tried it out on a new laptop, and to be honest, I'd say it was not a great experience. Being a linux nub, I guess it was a bad distro to choose as my first install, what with no automated installer, and freaking 4603453 years to compile anything. emerge kde took a few years, as did anything else. While I acknowledge the benefits of compiling everything with optizations for the exact platform it's on, and also realize that installing is a one time thing and using is a many time thing, I still would say there's not a good enough mix between precompiled and source distributed in stage1 and stage2 releases, and stage3 jumps right to all compiled for you. Where's the median?
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Can KDE compile without help on a clean system? That would be nifty. I'm talking about the 8 days where kde-base wouldn't compile due to a bug in the build script that affected fam where the build script used a tool that was masked in the stable branch. This bug could not have happened if someone had tried it on a stable system before it was released to the stable branch. Mod me a troll if you like, but I'm not making this up.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Check out catalyst. It allows you to build your own stage taballs for Gentoo. You can even build the binary GRP packages to your specs and it will automatically arrange for the packges to be burnable to more than one CD. Talk about flexibility. You can cook your Gentoo up how ya like.
What I really want to know is what they have planned for April Fools this year. I do not see how they will ever be able to top last year.
I'm very fond of it on my desktops, I have one running 2.6 and one running 2.4 (both gentoo sources) and both are very responsive. I have yet to see another vanilla system that can handle running at 100% load without missing a beat handling the desktop.
:)
It's not as easy as Redhat Mandrake et al, but then doing more complex stuff (custom kernels, odd hardware support etc) is much easier, which is really part of the Linux spirit
On the other hand I think the people running Gentoo on Zauruses are nuts. Gentoo might be good, but man if there was ever a place for Debian that was it!
Beep beep.
I'm one of the not-very-skilled, but I found gentoo relatively easy to install from their pre-compiled CD. It's good enough that I don't absolutely need the biggies compiled from scratch. So I don't see that the argument about long compile-times need be so determinative.
Above all, I found documentation items from gentoo specially helpful, because they were written by someone with the skill of remembering and including _all_ of the needed steps -- and this isn't true of all documentation in linux-land. (OT -- another very very good documentation IMO is the GRUB manual.)
So let's hear it for user-helpful gentoo folk and their well-documented distro.
-wb-
To a degree you're correct.. But lots of software is *very* configurable if you build from source. You'd either have to have a shitload of prebuilt binaries or just assume that one size fits all.
Not that I use Gentoo; my desktop is a Slackware system, for which I build everything by hand (and install using a script I wrote to create a package, and incidentally I wrote myself a package manager that I use. Yes I know it seems silly!)
I use FreeBSD for servers and its ports system is veeeery cool (once you start using portupgrade anyway), because things can be tailored to suit your needs. I can build Postfix with a myriad of options and get rid of the cruft I don't need, for example.
For the average desktop user, source builds probably aren't too useful (though for the average desktop user, MacOS X {without that hideous default look} is probably the best).
Catalyst sounds nice, but what about a tool for making our own initrds so I can, for example, load the module-only driver for my raid card? I think a lot of people have a need for loading third-party drivers in order to boot.
RAID card vendors have a funny definition for "linux support". My Promise SX4 card's SATA interfaces, and not the raid interface, are the only thing 2.6 supports, so you get to stare at 4 separate drives instead of your RAID-5 array; one helpful page suggests that "that's ok because software raid is better anyway"- um, okay. Promise's half-closed-source driver(which is available from 'some guy in germany') won't compile under 2.6, but does under 2.4; however, only as a module, so bringing up the system off the card is impossible without an initrd, even though LILO will work since it uses the BIOS to get the kernel and initrd.
I tried using genkernel, which does build initrds, but I haven't been able to make an initrd that'll boot a -normal- system without tons of module errors, and adding the FasTrak driver module into an already built initrd is a huge pain as well, something else I haven't gotten working. Anyone have a good link to a guide to making initrds and specifically dealing with module headache and describing how the initrd then boots the system off the real_root partition?
'course, i'd also settle for a howto on tricking the kernel into linking the module directly into the kernel, that'd do the same thing...
Please help metamoderate.
Gentoo has the Live-CD market cornered, with Knoppix remaining as the only serious competitor. :)
In fact, the Hardened-Gentoo CD rocks. Get it, burn it, take it with you wherever you go, you won't be sorry.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That should be about enough time to get KDE built. (seriously -- I emerged kde a c ouple of weeks ago, qt and all, on a P-450. Took about 5 days -- a bit more if you count fixing some hickups in the qt ebuild).
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
For those with more machines who wish to run gentoo, you can use distcc (distributed c compiler) to speed things up. You can use it from the early stages ;) :)
Gentoo has great documentation on distcc!
Have fun!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
"On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo?"
Did you ever hear Debian users bitch in the early days about how difficult it was to install Mplayer?
emerge kplayer
Done
That's why.
You forgot:
Gentoo has come a ways from when I first tried it, and I use it on 3 systems- but the Gentoo team needs to make a serious effort to recruit people for maintaining the portage tree and especially fast, thorough certification of updated packages.
Please help metamoderate.
As the OP states, GCC optimizations don't make a great deal of difference to performance. In fact, with -O3 (and function-inlining as a result), the code is BIGGER and consequently causes more CPU cache misses. Then end result is slower performance.
Gentoo's speed comes about through the trim system set up and lack of pointless gadgets - this is great, but it's not hard to tweak a Debian or Slackware system to make it just as fast (or even faster).
You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
Maybe because Gentoo accomplishes both of your first two points? And why not go ahead and throw in optimizations for the arch of the machine... sure it doesn't always help, but if you're compiling from source you might as well.
So maybe if you just want a desktop and don't feel like compiling everything for over a week you can use a different distribution. But I've found Gentoo works well for servers.
In particular for busy servers that are co-located behind > 100MBps of bandwidth for database-backed sites: Every clock cycle helps!
Some mirrors have a "universal/" dir under releases/x86/2004.0/livecd/. It's populated with two different 2004.0 liveCDs.
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.
... unpleasant to work with, it expected weird things of my CD-ROM drive and I pulled my hair out when the live-installtion (net-inst) cd didn't have Bash avaible - no tab completion sucks. After having installed it, the X-Server wouldn't work and I gave up, tired and exhausted. Way too much stuff preconfigured in my opinion - not necessarily a bad thing - hey, apt-get seemed quite nice (I mean it).
You must be lucky, because I am the guy you have been looking for to answer all your questions - I run Gentoo on my desktop, Slackware on my Server and recently installed debian-testing. And here is the reason why I like Gentoo the most:
Slackware is a great distro, I could have been the one I liked most. It is barely "extended", everything seems to be where it should be and there are no strange custom configurations/extra control panels/pre-installed programs like on Mandrake or RedHat. But after a while Slackware got pretty tedious, because I had no decent package management (swaret sucks and no central point for mirrors) and the init script system, though I learned a lot through using it, was more than I wanted to handle on a regular basis.
debian-testing. After I found that #debian does have some more helpful users than the ones I encountered last time (Actual quote: "You tried to install unstable? HAHAHAHA"), I found debian hard to install - not because of the lack of an installer but because there is one. It was to some exten
Now Gentoo. I love it - but it is not because I want that so-called CFLAGS Performace Increase(tm). Yes, it's mostly a myth. There are a few apps where it matters, but most of the time it doesn't. But I love portage - I did almost everything on that system myself, except the area I don't like to touch - it has a nice init-script system (think rc-update add apache default). Portage rocks, because compiling from source, while it may be timeconsuming, circumvents a lot of dependency problems, because programs that compile with libX 0.1 will most of the time work with libX 0.2 too, and vice-versa. Also, if I want a new version of a program, no need to wait for a maintainer to make a new release of the package. Most of the time it's just down to renaming a single ebuild-file (i.e., renaming cdrdao-1.1.6.ebuild to cdrdao-1.1.7 ebuild) and portage will try to fetch the appriopriate file from the same server and compile with the same options.
And last but not least: USE flags. I like my emacs without X, thank you, so that's USE="-X" emerge emacs for me (please, no flames from the vi/nano/edit.com crowd)..
I could go on about other things I like, but that mainly sums it up. I hope that obliterates some counter arguments such as "performance myth" and "compile times" because I think those things suck too - and I still like Gentoo.
Hi,
/usr/(lib|bin|include)/) and take my own kernel .config file or would I have to rebuild a .config file? I assume of course it won't force me to trash my preexisting partitions and data (such as /home, /vol, etc..)
I've been running Mandrake with numerous patches (mainly nForce-related) as well as the 2.6.2-rc2-mm1 kernel from src.
Will gentoo builds upgrade in-place (into
I'd prefer a source-based system that optimizes for SSE, 3DNow, etc..
(and I have 1.4 CDs for Athlon XP and SPARC, just waiting to get the dual-150MHz SPARC in to blow away and drop Linux on.. wh33!!)
Translate this: Gentoo is not JUST a from source distro (which, yes, any distro can be from source, they just make it easier by adding optimization settings) They are trying to do a lot of cool things, and their special optimizing technics are not the only thing. The from source distro is largely to remove having to keep 10 versions of the same package.
Catalyst is largely an extension of that. How many ^&*%@#$ "Live" CD's are out there? Why does everyone make such a big deal of it? Live CD's are NOT a new thing, Linus made the boot and root floppies very early on. Live CD's are not an innovation, Gentoo has finally put some fresh innovation into an old field.
No distro is the future, every distro can make it's contributions. Which is why some people say "Gentoo is the future." It has a lot to offer, which I hope other distro's can/will use.
I have an iBook, and Gentoo runs my file server. Sometime this decade I hope that I can use portage instead of Fink and Darwin ports. Now that isn't Apple switching to some sort of Gentoo fork, but it is some good things about Gentoo spreading.
I do think that they are duplicating a lot of work with the package manager. Like the UNIX forks it is hurting everyone.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Righ. One is a minimal, one is the full version of 1 disc (so no optimized compiles for individual platforms yet). Many mirrors only have the minimal CD (from which you can make a full CD). Or get the full from ftp.ussg.iu.edu (but I beat you to the queue!)
Gentoo isn't really release-specific in that you'll need to reinstall the entire system to upgrade to a new release. the releases are just milestones for the LiveCDs and included packages. If you already have an installed system, you can upgrade only the parts you need off the net or CD as source or binaries.
What I'm saying is that you can safely install all of Gentoo 1.4 as binaries and then go hardcore with tweaking CFLAGS, upgrade and re-compile gcc, KDE and OpenOffice to your heart's content. But it's not mandatory. If you're willing to wait a while or stay behind the bleeding edge a bit (less supported systems wait longer/further back), you can get binaries for everything.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Can Debian or any other distro do a chroot install like Gentoo? I don't really like compiling everything, but it was really nice to be able to drop the tarball in a chroot folder on a running system and do the complete install from there.
Gentoo has been available for the PPC for a while. Not sure if you knew this or were just advocating using Yellowdog (a fine distro in its own right).
The only reason I don't run Gentoo on my PPC is that the default install CD didn't recognize my Adaptec 2940 (? I think that's the card...?) that runs the only hard drive in my Power Tower (no snickering!). The PPC maintainer lamented having kernel panics related to SCSI drivers, so he decided to leave that out of the previous 1.4 release (though it's present in the 1.2 release...).
Go figure.
Does it disturb anyone else that:
* The headline is completely wrong--the 2004.0 file everyone is downloading is the EXPERIMENTAL pre-release that's been sitting on FTPs for a while.
* As a result, everyone and their mothers are reporting now that it is out. #gentoo has been fielding people left and right over it. Thanks, Slashdot.
* Hemos mentions it in passing with a "Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information" at the very bottom of the blurb. Uh, mind changing the headline then that says it's released? A bunch of people are downloading the experimental now.
Thanks for the journalistic integrity, Slashdot--again.
Fair enough, though a simple workaround is to do an "emerge -up world" after an unmerge and see if Gentoo wants you to install that package again.
Sadly, that won't upgrade everything... just the packages recorded in the "world" file, which means if you let emerge figure out your dependancies somewhere along the line, rather than explicitly mentioning them on the command line, they might be skipped here, depending on how good the -D detection works.
I use a series of awk and sed scripts to make sure my world file contains a list of all my installed packages to make it easier to keep track of what's been changed recently.
Frankly, the performance gains I've gotten from compiling locally aren't particularly noticable; and the compile times are a pain in the ass. I use Gentoo for two reasons, first and foremost I wanted to learn more about Linux. So I got a distro that forces you to learn without being quite as death-defyingly l33t as Linux From Scratch. And it has excelled in that purpose, I've learned more in the 4 months I've used Gentoo than I did in the 8 months I used other distros. Bloody well had to, which is why I got it.
The second reason I got Gentoo was as a way out of dependancy hell. I find the gentoo ebuilds to be a bit more up to date than the Debian packages usually are. I don't like the compile times, but the days of conflicting RPM's are gone. As are the days of being told to get RPM foo, then being told by foo that I also need bar, then being told by bar that I need quux. I'm quite willing to sacrifice the time needed to compile to get the convenience of not messing with the whole RPM dependancy scene.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
...can been seen here: http://forums.gentoo.org/statistics.php A new record for "Most Users Ever Online" has been set for forums.gentoo.org! :-D
I've been using Linux for six years now, I know people who used SLS and the ilk will still call me a newbie, but I've got some comments about the whole situation.
.deb, .rpm, or .tgz's, this is especially true if you want to install something the day (or in Debian's case, the year ^_^) something comes out. One thing I found frustrating was that I often had two copies of many software packages -- the binary (because I'm lazy) and the source (because I often refer to source files for algorithms and other things while programming).
* My first distro was Slackware. This was good because I actually got to know how to do things the hard way.
* Over the years I have flipped back and forth between Debian and Slack when a new release happens or just because I am bored.
* I switched to Gentoo a few months ago and I really like it. I think the best thing is because it really is seamless, there are a few unique tools but they aren't big and complicated. Gentoo is simple.
Everybody seems to poke fun of how long it takes to compile things with Gentoo. I figured that most people compiled things from source (except maybe Mozilla, GCC and X) instead of just using the provided
I don't see why Gentoo should be any faster than any other distribution. Honestly, ARCH and -O3 don't make that much of a difference. To me it's just another distribution but one that does what I like it to -- stay out of the way. My Debian and Slack installations have been highly modified, using my own config tools and other things, with Gentoo it's a lot easier to do those kind of things.
Gentoo is a hacker's system!
---
KISS -- Keep It Simple, Stupid!