Gentoo 2004.2 Released

brghntr writes "The gentoo guys (and girls) have released 2004.2 for the x86, AMD64, HPPA, and SPARC. You can read the information page here or go straight to the mirrors."

Comments

Re:Nooooo

[gl4ss]

just take a look at the mirrors.. if the mirrors are already updated theirs no slashdotting is going to do anything to them.

for two reasons, first there's quite a big list of them and the second reason is that there's couple of sites on the list that could probably take the beating all by themselfs.

Re:Platform curiosity

[vrai]

I run Solaris on the desktop at home (Solaris 9 with Blackbox and the KDE apps) and it was a breeze to get running. Mainly thanks to these guys, who have created an apt-get style system for Solaris.

So to install SSH I just typed "sudo pkg-get install openssh" and off it went. It handles dependencies so installing KDE would automatically download and install Qt. Much nicer than the default Sun packages.

Hopefully this fixed the bugs in 2004.1

[Stevyn]

I've had better luck with 2004.0 than 2004.1. In fact, I couldn't get 2004.1 to even boot the 2.6 kernel on the live CD. But of course the beauty of gentoo is that it doesn't matter since you can always update your system at any time.

I recommend people do a stage 3 and install the binary packages if you're not sure of what optimizations. Then play around with cfflags and use flags and then recompile everything later on. Doing a stage 1 as a beginner is a waste of time because later on you'll find some important use flag you missed that could give you some performance. Of course, if you know what you're doing, then go for a stage 1 if you have the time. It took me about 24 hours to go from stage 3 to a kde environment.

The reason I recommend gentoo to people, however, is portage. Anyone on mandrake, fedora, or suse have at one time or another had to deal with RPM hell. Portage solves all that. And while people complain how it takes so long, it's not time spent hunting for packages and tarballs like if you want to install a package that one of those above mentioned distros does not have yet. So for example, before you go to sleep, you type "emerge mozilla-firefox" and when you wake up, you have firefox and it took all of two seconds on your part. It won't take all night of course, I'm just using that example to show how while it takes longer to compile packages, it takes just two seconds of your time.

Re:Hopefully this fixed the bugs in 2004.1

[polyp2000]

This is actually an interesting point ..
One of the benefits of gentoo is the optimisation for ones hardware. If you have a fast machine the install-compile process is not so bad providing you dont cock anything up along the way. Once you have a gentoo up and running updates and installing packages with such unprecidented ease makes the initial effort well worth the while. Quite often there are the snyde remarks about waiting for stuff to compile. In all honesty once you have a gentoo box up and running compiling the odd thing from time to time is rarely an inconvenience.

I slightly drifted from the parent there but what i was going to suggest is this. There must be many many people with systems compiled for a specific architecture. eg My box is compiled and optimised for a Dual Athlon MP ; It would be quite nice if there way a way i could "dump" my system somewhere where others with similar architecture could take advantage of the optimised, but pre-compiled system. Over time, i'd envisage a library of "Gentoo's" specifically built for different systems. Do people think that this is a viable idea, and how might it be done ?

Nick ...

Re:Nooooo

[BlindSpy]

How much compiling could you be doing? I run gentoo as well and after the initial install-all-of-my-programs, I complile maybe once a week for about 5 minutes to update my world. And the time you spend compiling gets made up in Gentoo's speed. Also what do you mean by "Wouldn't most computers be too busy compiling to actually be able to slashdot anything?" The new gentoo version only applies to people that dont have gentoo yet. People that already have gentoo are constantly up-to-date.

Gentoo topic icon?

[Chuck Bucket]

When do we get a Gentoo topic icon on Slashdot? Look at all of the out of date icons that are out there, but after 2 years we still don't have a Gentoo one?

Sorry, but this has irked me for some time, especially since I think the Gentoo icon is one of the classiest, along with the Debian icon. /C/B -help