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Gentoo Linux Announces Gentoo Linux 2004.1
Keppy writes "The departure of Daniel Robbins hasn't dented the progress of Gentoo Linux with version 2004.1 being released. ... please support Gentoo by purchasing something from the online store. The Gentoo homepage also has a short message about the future of Gentoo Linux now that Daniel has left. ' Robbat2 writes with an excerpt from the linked announcement:
"Please consult our
mirror index for download
locations and the
Gentoo Linux Installation Handbook
for detailed installation
instructions. Support for Gentoo Linux 2004.1 can be found through our
user community by way of the Gentoo Forums,
IRC, and various
community mailing-lists.
Release notes for each architecture
can be found linked from the
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering project page."
Gentoo really is a great operating system, and maybe even for beginners. One of Gentoo's many strengths is the portage system. The portage system is a easy to use system that allows you to build just about any application from source automatically (and often with Gentoo optimizations). It can automatically build all the dependencies for the program too, saving you much time and effort. The portage system also supports binaries (must mention to avoid stoning) however that is often only used in replication systems. Since you can easily setup your own portage mirrors you can create your own custom packages (either that compile from source or are binaries) and easily deploy across your own servers. This would allow you to configure packages on one machine and then just distribute the binaries across duplicate machines if you wished (as I have heard of being done). I also have found Gentoo emerges rarely fail when compared to some of the problems you can run into with RPM. Another large benefit of gentoo is it doesn't install anything that isn't needed to clutter your system up. It will install the bare bones, (ssh, etc) and then you can emerge anything you want. This is much nicer than most OS's which will load it with crap from the start. It is one of the most configurable distributions I have seen, and every Gentoo install is truly unique. Again, while it may give you the barebones to start it takes little work (minus the cpu time to compile) to get it to where you want it. As I said earlier, I think Gentoo may even be a bit beginner friendly. While setup is a bit long and not nearly as easy as something like Redhat, they have a very easy to follow tutorial which walks you through it step by step that I think most beginners could follow. In addition, they have 3 different ways to install Gentoo. A live cd version that is basically bootable and then you have 3 different stages you can choose from. Stage One is a bit insane, for those who really need total control over what is installed. For most people Stage Two is fine as it still compiles virtually everything from scratch, giving you a ton of control, just saves some time over Stage One. Stage Three is for those who just need something fast or are a bit new, and can install binaries of various things to save you compile time and easy of install. This makes Gentoo truly amazing.
1) For posts like this, it's good to be a subscriber. ;)
;) )
2) It's good to see that the DR announcement has not changed anything in terms of release schedule, and the job they did setting up the hierarchy seems to be working very well.
3) At least one mirror has a file claiming to be 2005.1. While Gentoo is great, I don't think that it's being delivered from the future. (At least not yet.
4) The minimal CD is still only 82MB!
5) Slashdot, could Gentoo get its own icon? It's here. Thanks!
libertarianswag.com
Debian has announced their expected release of Sarge to coincide with the next ice age.
That, folks, is karma whoring at it's best!
I've used Gentoo since last October. Before that, I had essentially never seen a Linux machine. It is my first distro and I haven't really looked back. I've tried others just to see what they were like, mainly Fedora and Debian, but they just don't shape up to the standards I've put and Gentoo has given me. It took a while in the beginning to learn all the ins and outs, but now I can navigate through it with so much ease. Hoorah to Gentoo and its bleeding-edge innovation.
And the day came when the risk to remain closed in a bud, became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
If you have never tried Gentoo, you should give it a try. Contrary to popular belief, you can have the base installed and running in 15 minutes, and from then you just emerge the packages you want. gentoo-dev-sources, openssh, sysklogd, vixie-cron, at, ntp, whatever.
The documentation is brilliant, and all the defaults for the packages are sensible, and well thought out.
When I install a box, I do it at about 4pm. Give it 30 mins to configure, and install a new kernel, reboot, and leave it to emerge -u world ; emerge kde mozilla overnight.
Couple of things though - emerge ufed, and gentoolkit - ufed is a gui for editting USE flags, and gentoolkit contains qpkg.
A very brief doc I knocked up is here. It's probably slightly out of date by now, but you get the idea.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I am relatively new to the Linux game, so perhaps I am just ignorant -- so please forgive me if that is the case. However, it seemed to me as an outsider that true geeks used Linux, while mortals used Windows and Mac. However, having joined the fray it seems that within the Linux community is highly fragmented. Now it seems that the true geeks use Debian and Gentoo, while the mortals use Mandrake and Redhat. Weird.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
I just switched about three weeks ago from Debian to Gentoo, and so far I love it!
:^), but I find Gentoo as easy as Debian. BOTH are MUCH better than RedHat, IMHO.
emerge is as easy for me as apt-get was, and the only difference is I have to be patient with long builds. For me, thats a "so what" ?
I'd personally rather wait during the install, than wait while the machine is supposed to be running.
And while I am not a linux newbie, I certainly am no guru (yet
Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming. *sigh*
Linux on THE desktop? Linux is on MY desktop.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
"The departure of Daniel Robbins hasn't dented the progress of Gentoo Linux with version 2004.1 being released. ... "
Robbins anounced his departure.. what.. last monday ?? Ofcourse his departure didn't affect the release... it was already finished !
And Robbins hopes to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo...
By far is esearch. "emerge esearch" will get you a suite of utilities that will index the portage tree and make it easier and faster to search the package descriptions. It will also sync and show you any new or updated packages since the last time you synced. A great addition to any Gentoo machine.
On topic when replying to this guy and still funny after all this time ... I've got the Karma to burn on the troll mods :)
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-maticGentoo 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!"
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Stages are more flexible than that. If you use a tool like stager or catalyst you can compile fully-optimized stage3 tarballs for your next install from the system you're working on already, so you can still use 'today's' machine while building 'tomorrow's'.
.ebuilds for desired result (gcc-3.3.3 and linux-headers-2.6.5 come to mind). Also modify stager for optimizations and stager/files/make.conf.$ARCH for USE flags. /var/stager for good luck
I have a stager script that I've hacked the bejeezus out of and configured to generate 2.6-headered NPTL systems that are fully optimized, even though the installs start at stage3. I've got flowcharts and stuff to keep track of the 'stage evolution'
here's my process, IIRC:
1. have working gentoo system with stager and a stage1 snapshot.
2. emerge sync
3. unmask or modify certain
3. stager snap $DATE-custom
4. stager athlon-xp 2 stage1 $DATE-custom
5. stager athlon-xp 1 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
6. clean out temp files in
7. stager athlon-xp 2 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
8. stager athlon-xp 3 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
so now you've got a fully-native NPTL stage1 to build other stages from and a fully-native stage3 ready to install.
My actual system is a lot more complex, as I build a 'generic i686' stage1 and then fork off to Pentium3 ad Athlon-XP builds for my different machines. I've also got a totally seperate stage geneology for the PPC build, but they all share the portage snapshots and configs for consistency.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
It seems that Drobbins could maintain ownership of the trademark and thus profit from the store indefinitely. That said, you obviously have not followed the effort and money that Drobbins has put into Gentoo. From a Gentoo Newsletter:
In addition, Daniel will retain royalty-free rights to use of the "Gentoo" trademark and the "G" logo, allowing him to continue him to run the Gentoo Store if he wants, in order to support his family and attempt to pay some of the $20,000 in debt he accumulated during his tenure as Chief Architect.
I think Drobbins deserves every penny that can be squeezed from the Gentoo store and then some. Thanks Daniel.
Good day,
I literally just moved my home computer from Slackware 9.1 to Gentoo 2004.0 last week (ok, over the course of the last week!) and I have to say that it is indeed the slickest Linux distribution I have ever used!
I still run Slackware 9.1 on my laptop, which has 5/3 the memory and a CPU twice as fast as my home computer - but my new Gentoo box actually runs about TWICE as fast!! It's amazing how compiling everything w/ -O3 and -march=XXX really makes a huge difference. Last night I was simultaneously compiling OpenOffice, Evolution and Gimp, with no slowdown at all in my web browzing, development, etc!
Also, nvidia, sound, FB, kernel 2.6.5 worked the first time, plus it has thousands of packages to download (everything I need), and boots faster than Windows did on my faster machine (by ~8-15 seconds, depending on my readings).
One more thing - Portage is even more user-friendly than downloading *.tgz from linuxpackages.net and running installpkg. It searches for the right version from various mirrors, then downloads, does MD5 checking, and compiles automatically, and maintains a nifty little log, and checks for all dependencies. Also - it provides the most freedom I've seen in a distribution - nothing I don't need or want is installed. Getting evolution to be optimized to my machine is just a matter of typing "# emerge evolution"
Gentoo is indeed fan-freaking-tastic (if you have the patience to compile everything from scratch).
A. Coward
Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming
And hardware support... The only reason my laptop is still running XP is that my wireless card refuses to run.
After a bit of hunting it seems that the problem is an IRQ conflict between the inbuilt LAN card (which cant be disabled in the BIOS) and the IRQ that the PCMCIA tries to grab when initializing the card.
The card works in windows without a hitch.
I dare say that someone with skills beyond mine in Linux could probably get it working, but for now im stuck in windows, as are most of the computer using population.
irc.freenode.net /join #gentoo
Very helpfull people there. Base install of Gentoo comes with "irssi" IRC client that you can hook up to right from the install CD. Ask your question (no need to ask "can I ask a question") and try to be as specific as you can.
Now, this IS an IRC channel so you might run into a few knuckleheads there, but be patient and you WILL be helped. The people there are very well versed and many of the OPs are themselves Gentoo developers and they know the system. They will help.
I go there to help also. It's my small way of giving something back to the community as I'm not a developer, but I can try to help others.
Most people are very patient there, but if you're asking a question that's plainly right in the install guide, they'll direct you to that usually.
Don't be a jerk there and you'll do fine. Others I've seen log into the channel and go "this sucks, I can't get this and this working...Gentoo sucks...I can't do anything". Then when no one responds in about 20 seconds they shout "how come no one wants to help me...this sucks". And on and on. Some people are beyond help it seems...and not for just and OS install either, hehe.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Gentoo emerge -UD world FUCKS UP configuration files.
/etc/._cfg0000_gentoo-release while keeping the original /etc/gentoo-release untouched.
/etc -iname '._cfg????_*'
um..if you knew anything about Gentoo then you would know that it doesn't touch configuration files, if there is a new config file it will rename the NEW file as something like
After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:
find
will give you a list of the config files that need updating. Yes. Gentoo even informs you how to find these files. and nice big fat: "use 'emerge --help config' message is staring you right in the face if any new config files need updating.
This isn't something you can just bypass. Nice try. But please, give us a little credit if you're going to make something up!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
uncomplicated upgrades.
This is the only reason I switched all servers where I work over to gentoo. We need some special builds and such. I don't have time to download/compile by hand. Of all distros I have used Gentoo is the easiest to maintain and keep up to date.
It would be nice with a more enterprise geared gentoo though. It is very fast with upgrades to new packages, might break something. Doesn't happen often but if it does it's often easy to fix.
For the desktop there is no competition. Gentoo is the easiest "bleeding edge distro" to maintain. Alot of unstable packages to test out. And no need to go fully unstable if you only need a few packages.
Now I have about 10 different gentoo boxes at work to take care of. Every friday it takes about an hour of work to upgrade them. Could probably handle 20-30 with not much more time spent.
The only thing I miss about Debian now that I'm on Gentoo is the easy ability to clean out the install. With Debian I could always go into dselect and walk through all the crap I had installed and remove it selectively, with full dependancy checking. It was tedious, but I was glad to be able to do it every now and then. As far as I can tell, Gentoo has no comparable functionality.
In short, here are some negative things to keep in mind:
In turn, here are some more (and some repeated from the parent post) good points from my view:
Gentoo is for the computer user who likes to customize his environment and have control and know what is what. If you just want to 'use' your computer, go get Mandrake or Fedora or Windows. If you like
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
And while I am not a linux newbie, I certainly am no guru (yet :^)
And this is one thing I really love about gentoo. Especially if you're a newbie to linux (I wasn't, but I like you, was certainly no master). Following the installation guide that gentoo provides was a very educational experience for me. Not only does it tell you step by step what to do to get your system up and running, it tells you WHY you're doing it. I was very impressed with the instructions. Oh, and when I ran into any problems at all, their forums had the answer, and when they didn't have the answer, someone responded to my post within a matter of a couple hours, and had the solution to my question.
-matt
After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:
/etc -iname '._cfg????_*'
find
Actually, you can also do:
'etc-update'
This will walk you through the config files that need to be updated, and let you decide whether you want to accept the changes wholesale, discard the changes, or manually merge them in (it will even show you the differences between old and new).
qpkg -q libfoo sounds like what you are looking for.
yes! i started in gentoo linux because a friend recommended it
... although a moment ago #gentoo had 1013 people, channels like #gentoo-laptop (since I have a laptop) are excellent resources
the more or less manual install, coupled with the very good documentation and guides, helped me grow acustomed to linux more than I had by just using it through shell accounts or on friend's boxes
the full immersion that comes with its install is a learning experience that can't be beat, and when help is needed there are docs, forums, and irc -- and let me say the irc (imo) is one of the best ways to learn