Gentoo 2008.0 Released 164
An anonymous reader notes that the Gentoo 2008.0 final release is available. From the announcement:
"Code-named 'It's got what plants crave,' this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD. LiveDVDs are not available for x86 or amd64, although they may become available in the future. The 2008.0 release also includes updated versions of many packages already available in your ebuild tree."
None of your business (Score:4, Insightful)
It is none of your business how I decide to spend my day or what I decide to do with my computer. If I feel like compiling my Linux distro from scratch, I'll do it. Take your environmentalist rants elsewhere.
One word: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Global Warming - why?? (Score:4, Insightful)
what is the benefit of having thousands of geeks compiling the same code over and over, when you can download 1 binary distribution and be done? If you sum up the manhours of all this compilation, the power consumed by countless hard drives and processors churning away, whats the point?
Speed. Now a binary distro can install things quickly but not run them very quickly. If you have a nice dual-core CPU setup and 1 GB of RAM the binary distros will serve you well, but if you have an aging desktop such a a low-end Pentium 4, or a high-end Pentium III, with RAM maxed out at 512 MB, Gentoo will run faster then even Xubuntu. Now, it might take a week to get everything installed, but once it is installed you have the fastest system you can get on that hardware.
It's not about speed, at least from my point of view. - It is all about configurability. - Almost no users ends up with the same system as the other one.
Since one is in full control and there are hundreds of decisions to make it is very unlikely that any user ends up with the same system as another one.
Re:Major problems with Firefox 3 on Gentoo 2008.0. (Score:1, Insightful)
Gentoo's target audience are the people who would understand a comment like that (if it were real, of course) and are expected to know what it means.
Please don't whine and talk down about Gentoo just because you don't fall into the target audience. Some of us actually enjoy knowing what we're doing and appreciate the fact that Gentoo doesn't treat us like morons. Like you said, there's always Ubuntu for the rest of you.
Re:Global Warming - why?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do not want! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been waiting for this release, but after one of the higher-access Gentoo devs was caught using dev servers to attack a competing distro [wordpress.com] (and resorting to name-calling afterwards) I'm not sure if I can trust them any more.
Re:Global Warming - why?? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Speed.
No, not speed, reliability and (startlingly) ease. Yes, you have to wait for the silly thing to compile, but almost without exception, once you've done that, stuff just runs.
Back in my old rpm days, it seemed like I would find an interesting package and find that it has an rpm available. The I'd find that I was missing a library, or had the wrong version, and I'd have to go searching for another rpm. Then another search to find the rpm that would satisfy the requirements for that lib, etc. Every now and then, I'd get to the bottom of my search and find an incompatibility, and it was time to give up, at least for the moment.
Gentoo has a wide range of ebuilds, a wide range of overlays that increase the options, and finally since a complete build environment is part of every system, building a non-ebuild tarball almost always works, too. ( ./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make , etc )
By far, most of my problems have been with stuff only available in binary form.