Gentoo Linux Announces Gentoo Linux 2004.1 377
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."
News or Commercial? (Score:3, Insightful)
Things of note... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [gentoo.org]. Thanks!
The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:5, Insightful)
-m
Upgrade (Score:2, Insightful)
about that departure (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
How to upgrade... (Score:1, Insightful)
1. "emerge sync"
2. "emerge -pv world"
3. Look at the list of packages and see if you need to upgrade them, or if the upgrade will break something.
4. "emerge [packagename]"
Some people say to just "emerge world", which will upgrade everything on the system. Problem is that you don't really want to be doing blind upgrades like that. A new version that just came out could have some security hole in it that you don't know about. Also, you should only upgrade if the newer version is a security fix or has a feature you need. UPgrading for shits and giggles is not a good idea. Also, don't forget to run "etc-update". (but READ THE MANPAGE FIRST, it can severely bork your system if you don't do it right. Consult the Gentoo forums for more infol.)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it still have the same installer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Drobbins' store (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Drobbins' store (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Does it still have the same installer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:3, Insightful)
For a more topical example, note how many posts have already suggested Gentoo as "great for newbies". Now I tried Gentoo a few months ago (before the LiveCDs), got it running with a little work, and it was okay. But I went back to Mandrake pretty quickly. Some advanced desktop features were missing, such as an equivalent to Mandrake's combination supermount/hotplug support. I had to specifically emerge almost all of the programs I wanted to use because the base install was so stripped down. And I sure hope the install is now easier than the old "partition by hand using fdisk" install that I had to do (it wasn't so hard for me, but for a newbie...)
Who would recommend a distro like that to a newbie? I think it's mostly people who want to say "my distro is bigger/badder/geekier than yours". If you're willing to put some work into setting up Gentoo it would probably be a fine desktop, and I'm sure that a stripped down, highly optimized Linux would be a great server OS, but that's not what newbies need.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Insightful)
Enterprise Systems require a modicum of competence (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but if one is a competent admin, one can quickly put together a python (or [insert your favorite scripting language here]) script to automate these tedius steps in response to a few quick questions posed at the start of the script.
That is what I did when we deployed Gentoo enterprise-wide for my employer. (Maintaining your own sync server, frozen to your enterprise's tested and vetted state, is also a wise thing to do. Still vastly more managable, flexible, and easy to keep up to date than any other distro I've come across, and over the years since my first pre-distro use of Linux back in '93 that is more than I care to count).
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Insightful)
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
Obviously, it's bad RPM Juju to mix and match RPMs from different distributions. As long as you stick with RPMs built for your specific release of RedHat, everything fits together fine. But sometimes you don't have that option.
The difference is that sooner or later, RedHat releases become obsolete, and much harder to find good RPMs for. I imagine it's pretty hard to find the latest KDE RPMs for an old Redhat 4.2 box
And it's not just old versions of RedHat. Newer versions can have the same problems. We recently installed RH ES on a 24/7 database cluster, but needed to use Postgres 7.3.x. The Redhat-supplied Postgresql was an older release, where the periodic VACUUM process would basically lock an entire table for up to an hour--in our application, that's unacceptable. We strayed from RedHat's official packages because we basically had to. We went with the PGDG RPMs compiled for our version of Enterprise Server, and they work great, but I'm dreading the day that we need the official RedHat Postgresql RPM to satisfy a dependency. RPM --nodeps --force usually works, but it's also bad RPM Juju.
With Gentoo (and Debian), you also have the best results if you stay with the packaging system. However, this much easier to do so, especially over time, because your base install never becomes obsolete. You never need to search for a package that's built for your specific release of Gentoo / Debian--if it's in the packaging system, you'll be able to install it on your machine, regardless of how long ago you did the base install.
My machine at home was originally running Gentoo 1.2, and it's been painless to keep it up to date as new packages become available.
If RedHat and the other RPM distributions were to standardize on their RPM package naming and layout, and provide an easy and reliable upgrade path between releases, that would go a long way towards getting rid of the RPM Dependency Hell problem.
Gentoo is pretty damned good (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that, or deciding to install OpenBox as the Window Manager, and then having pure simplicity itself on my desktop as opposed to KDE or Gnome.
It has brought new life to my old HP Omnibook laptop, now 6 years old at least. Of course it was hell installing it, even with a Stage 3 install. The laptop was previously running Mandrake with Blackbox, and would run out of memory all the time (160MB installed) even without running much. Gentoo, by being custom all the way, means that I have memory spare, enough to run Apache and Postgresql and have a little portable web development machine.
The only thing that is scaring me is that I have just emerge -DUu world, and something has downloaded the kernel 2.4.21 headers when I have kernel 2.6.5 on my machine. I did emerge -pv world first as well, and this was not indicated, grrr.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:2, Insightful)
Our optimizationism (tm) also has some constructive consequences: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=108718 (gets more interesting towards the end) is a nice example.
Since we all want to have the latest and "greatest" these fine developers (I am sure other distros have em too...) are squishing every bug they see on their way to get a full GCC 3.4 - compiled system.
I'm sure some of these fixes will find their way to all distros.
Gentoo is good for you (Score:2, Insightful)
The bottom line is that it is still Linux. You are closer to the core/spritit of Unix (distributed with source code). Does compiling it for YOUR machine make a big performance difference? Maybe it was a little snappier...hard to tell. Does the "if you do not need it, it will not install" make a big difference? Nope, it is just disk space in many cases that you are wasting? You are no longer dependent on .rpm files to get new stuff but you are now dependent on the portage tree. Is there anything that I couldn't get working on Gentoo? Nah, not really. Am I going to go forward with my migration with Gentoo? Not sure, I have a HW problem to resolve on my T30 and after that, I may go to Fedora Core 1 because there are more resources out there and the company I work for software is being ported to support RedHat AS line so I will have better luck getting my Demo's working on a RH O/S. Picking a dist these days is really just a bunch of littler minor subjective decisions and feelings. I'll probably keep Gentoo around on a harddrive and punch it in every now and then. It has been fun and good for me.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Insightful)
Certain things don't allow you to do that (ut2004-demo being the worst) because they are writing to the disk a whole lot, or something else. However, the things like that are rather few and far between.