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."

Comments

My Experience with Gentoo

[LordoftheFrings]

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?

Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[mehaiku]

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.

Gentoo has it's place

[Realistic_Dragon]

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!

gentoo helpful to a new user

[waterbear]

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-

Re:gentoo helpful to a new user

[cayenne8]

And the forums are fantastic too!!! Anytime I run into a problem...if I can't find it quickly with a search (which usually solves it)....I can post and generally have an answer in a surprisingly short period of time.

And...I find the people there are VERY patient...you rarely if ever see RTFM as an answer...

Initrd tools?

[SuperBanana]

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...

A little info

[Daath]

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!

Re:Oh no,

[myg]

Reasons I run Gentoo:

• Full support of the XFS filesystem.
• My Gentoo machines are servers; so compiling everything to the exact specs of the machine gives a performance boost (especially on non-x86 platforms).
• I can turn off any trace of Xwindows. I'm sure some people like it, but I don't. I hate X. I don't want so much as the client libraries on my box.
• The live CD makes recovery and certain other operations easier since it pretty much matches the environment of the running server.
• The Gentoo community provides a good amount of peer review into package selection.

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!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[fsterman]

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.

"Looks like it's not out yet "

[bonch]

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.

Re:Very well.

[gaijin99]

Gentoo is a distro that is designed to be fully customizable. With binaries compiled on your own computer, you'll get better performance.

I use Gentoo on my computer, but for none of the reasons you listed :)

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.