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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."
Cool! So if I start the stage1 compile on my P90 it should be ready by Easter.
luckily i download this 4 hours ago...
:)
now all you guys can enjoy the fleed
# emerge sync
# emerge -uD world
That has to be the *biggest* version jump in history! From 1.4 to 2004.0!
By M, version 1.0
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards 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." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), 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."
"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
"...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..." .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)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"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 -O9 -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!"
-
Also note that existing gentoo users only need to "emerge -[D]u world" to upgrade to the 2004 release.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
That's why Gentoo Linux LiveCDs provide GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform): a complete set of precompiled per-architecture-optimized binary packages a-la-slackware (including X, KDE, OpenOffice and more) to speed up the installation process for those who don't want or can't wait for compile process to complete.
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
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
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.
Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration?
/boot is big enough to hold the kernel, you can boot pretty much anything.
I think these days pretty much all distros are equally good dual-booters. If you have grub, and
As long as you order all the distros *not* to touch your boot config, that is. Install the boot configuration once with a distro you trust, and take advantage of the config with subsequent distros.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
A clarification - I just checked out the gentoo page, and they talk about support for Sun Ultra, not SunSparc.
A Sparc5 is different than an Ultra5... I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.
It will be nice to upgrade it from the RedHat 5.2 that it currently is running, all things considered.
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.
Don't give out wrong info, all you have to do is emerge gentoo-dev-sources for a 2.6.X kernel
Setec Astronomy
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-
Gentoo's installation guide will tell you how to set up a dual-boot configuration *properly*, with no wizards or anything, just plain old text file editing.
If that sounds daunting, don't worry because it's as easy as pie. Personally, I use grub, with a config file a bit like this:
# Gentoo
title=Gentoo Linux (linux-2.6.1-mm4 kernel)
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/bzImage-2.6.1-mm4 root=/dev/hde5
# Windows XP
title=Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1
Dual boot couldn't be easier.
USE flags. They let you compile in (or out!) support for whatever you want in your system, which is great for custom-tailoring your own sets of packages for whatever tasks.
:)
Otherwise, you could just use the binary packages, and it'd be quite a bit like any other distro.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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.
Not accurate. You can emerge development-sources to get 2.6.3 (actually, 2.6.4-rc1 now). You don't need to use ~x86. Know it 'cause I've done it.
Advice: on VPS providers
I've got about 50 Compaq Deskpro 4000's that are begging for something to do.
Why not? Support your local electric company I say!
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.
Uh, that's not cool to do that. I did that once, and forgot to take it out, and then I wondered why I suddenly had to upgrade 4 dozen packages (to unstable releases, I soon realized) It's better to specify the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS on the command-line for the single command.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Whoops, silly middle mouse button...
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
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!
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.
Probably due to the fact that it's not actually officially been released yet.
Since all the servers are getting hammered pretty hard, this should be mentioned. If you have run
sudo emerge sync
sudo emerge -uD world
in the past few weeks, there's nothing new out there for you. All you'll get is the new packages (like always) and bragging rights to run a "new version." There's not even a new minor 2.4 kernel version - I've been running 2.4.25 since it was released.
So, you do NOT need to sync up now. Especially not while half the slashdot userbase is doing so. You're pounding the living **** out of the servers, and for no good reason. If you must get new everything, whether to brag about running "version 2004" or what have you, su to root and set an at job to do so late tonight. Thank you for making Gentoo usable for people who actually NEED to update.
Someone finally gets it. It isn't the CFLAGS so much as the USE flags. Don't want evolution to build with PDA support? -pda. Want to make sure that nothing on your system gets built with X support (because this machine doesn't run X): -X. Gnome fanatic that wants to be free of all traces of kde? -kde. vice-versa for the kde fans. That's the level of control you can't get on a "binaries only" distro.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Oh boy, a Gentoo Live-CD... So you just have to boot it, wait for glibc+KDE to compile and THEN you can use it?
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
So let's go over Gentoo's "support" for anything...
Gentoo runs the Linux kernel, so your support is going to be the same as any other distro that runs the Linux kernel.
In Gentoo you have to either a.) configure your own kernel; b.) use genkernel and accept the gentoo config; or c.) use genkernel and tweak the default config (genkernel all --menuconfig)
I've run Gentoo on my laptop for I don't know how long.. well I'm sure I could figure it out, but it's been well over a year. I have a howto for my laptop brant (HP ZT1150) and it's actually the link in my sig.
Here's another HP ZT1000 site, and he also runs Gentoo..
So, without trying to flame you, the "distro" support is, at least, misleading. As the support for things is generally based on the kernel you build, or someone builds for you.
The real advantages of Gentoo are it's all to easy upgrade path. I used to reinstall Linux every 4-6 months just to get the latest base system. With Gentoo I just emerge system every month or so. It's almost a drawback if you're someone who likes to wipe the slate clean and start over, as there's little reason to...
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
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.
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.
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
Good post, I modded you +1, Informative. Oh, wait...
OK, here's a quick calculation.
/var/log/emerge.log
$ genlop -t -s ".*" | grep total
merged totally 2191 ebuilds in 9 days, 14 hours, 52 minutes, and 40 seconds.
$ head -n 1
1059351074: Started emerge on: Jul 28, 2003 00:11:14
10 days in 7 months - that's 5% of available machine time spent compiling.
Assume the power used is 250W when compiling, 50W idling: 5% of (250W-50W) is 10W: that's a maximum of 20% extra power for a Gentoo machine over a Slackware box.
Some power will be saved by optimisations, but I doubt it'll be much.
counter.li.org estimates 18m Linux users. Say 1m Gentoo users have run Gentoo an average of 2 years. As is well known, one year is \pi*10^7seconds.
1 machine/user * 1*10^6 users * 2 years * 3.14*10^7 seconds/year * 10W/machine / 3.6*10^6kWh/W/s
equals 2*10^7 kWh, or 20,000MWh
In comparison, Sizewell (a medium-sized nuclear power station near London) produces 1188 MW, or 30,000 MWh/day.
"Gentoo Linux || ignore slashdot and various other news-sites, 2004.0 is not released."
Unfortunately, the file is in the releases directory and is dated today.
Yeah, that's the experimental 2004.0 file that's been there for at least a MONTH. It gets routinely updated.
Next time before you call someone a "troll," look into it first.