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Gentoo 2005.1, Experimental Live CD Released
safeness writes "Gentoo 2005.1 was released yesterday. Included in its release is an additional experimental LiveCD with the long awaited graphical installer. Now there's one less reason for your friends to switch to Gentoo! Get it here!" And darthcamaro writes "Hard to tell from the change log what's new ... but this story on internetnews.com notes new installation hardware support and WiFi."
Hmm...so I might actually be able to run stage 1 now? *crosses fingers that his card's on the list*
Looks spiffy. I'm seriously a geek in heaven lately...it seems that now my biggest problem is choosing between all the pretty, easy, functional linux installs I could be running and resisting the urge to "catch 'em all."
I do find myself occasionally wishing, though, that some of the effort being put into endlessly fragmenting and repackaging linux could be put into taking some of the great apps available and turning them from "good, functional, usable, and fast" into "droolingly beautiful and slick as Elvis' hair."
adam b.
The short answer:
Yes
The long answer (ripped from gentoo-users mailing list)
<blatent rip>
Profiles mean "nothing"-- insofar as portage doesn't "divide" packages
based on profile. In other words, it's not as if baselayout 1.11.13 is
only available to the 2005.1 profile, while the 2005.0 profile can only
have 1.9.4-r6 or something. Portage does sometimes disable or enable
certain USE flags based on profile, but this is unlikely to be a big
issue unless you're changing to a completely different profile (i.e.,
from default x86 to selinux or something). And in any case, the profile
is regularly incrementally updated, most likely to reflect critical
updates (ever notice that "Performing Global Updates" that Portage
sometimes delays your emerge with?).
The profile is really only an issue on initial install. After that, it's
fairly irrelevant to daily life (until Portage flatly says to upgrade it
as the old profiles are unsupported-- most likely meaning that they will
not be updated to reflect "things we know now that we didn't know when
we designed the old profile"). But otherwise, I'm sure there's still a
couple of people around here with the 1.4 profile, and definitely some
with a 2004 profile-- because the profile "name" is not particularly
important once Gentoo is actually up and running.
</blatent rip>
So you can update the profile, but it's not needed. And if it was, portage would yell at you to do it.
The sentence you quoted is an example of something that should never have made it on to the front page, even on Slashdot. I really wish the editors would keep such biased remarks in a blog or some place more appropriate.
I really do want to try this new distro out. If the graphical installer is compulsory, then yes, it will be very annoying. That's not how Gentoo has done things in the past, and I can't see a reason why they would do away with manual installs now. It's probably a simple option you can disable at the command prompt when you boot the same way you disable things like APM or DHCP discovery (noapm, nodhcp, etc).
I did my first gentoo install only 2 months ago(by the book), and in that time learned more about linux than from running it an entire year before with other (more user-friendly distros). You do learn alot, even by the book, because it lets you see the inards more than some distros, and forces you to see how what does what and why it's there. This is actually one of the main reasons I DID use gentoo, rather than something like fedora 4.
I'm a Gentoo user, used the 2004.1 Minimal LiveCD and a stage-1 package to start me off. I spent 2 days getting it working. Actually, I spent 2 days getting it running. I wouldn't really call it working. I was experimenting with make.conf, and basically I fucked it up big style. No problem, I've got plenty of time.
So I fixed up, did it again, and actually got GNOME running. It still sucked though, I was useless at kernel configuration. And I thought that using the 2.4 kernel would be best, you know, more stable. Well yeah, but I don't have hardware from the 90s.
3rd time around, it was cool, and still is. You don't need to reinstall when a new release comes out, just use emerge.
I love my system. It's tweaked specifically for my hardware and the use. It's fast, startup and use. It's lean. And I _did_ learn a lot from it. Thank-you Gentoo.
Sig Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
At home, I use Ubuntu and Gentoo -- the former for fun, the latter for development. I've found that if I'm needing to find stuff and compile it, Gentoo is the most friendly distro. On Ubuntu, you have to first find out all the various dev packages you need to compile something, and it can be a real pain. Not so with Gentoo!
Gentoo is really only good in this respect, though. I also like it as a hobby system, and avoid software with really long compiles on it. So I say, if you're going to go Gentoo, avoid Gnome and KDE and go with something more in the Gentoo spirit, something like FVWM2 or OpenBox. You can pair it down and tweak it to be a real workbench OS, no frills.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.