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Linux Business Announcements

Gentoo Linux 2004.0 Released 489

Posted by Hemos from the rolling-it-out dept.
Quique writes "Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for the x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. Additionally, the Gentoo Hardened team is announcing the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture. Installation stages, LiveCDs, and GRP sets can be found on the mirrors. More information about the Gentoo Hardened project can be found on its project page. For more information, please consult the documentation, mailing lists, user forums and official IRC channels. The new Gentoo Store has also been announced." I've put more of the release notes below - might also be worth checking out the tutorial for LPI certification done by the President/CEO of Gentoo; there's also a note about Gentoo's newest meta-release tool, Catalyst below as well. Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information.
" In addition to many bugfixes and security updates since the 1.4 release, Gentoo Linux 2004.0 contains a cutting-edge development toolchain and user environment including, but not limited to, Linux kernel 2.6.3, GCC 3.3.2, GLIBC 2.3.2, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4.2, and xfce4.

Gentoo Linux 2004.0 marks the debut of Catalyst, the new Gentoo release meta-tool. Using Catalyst, developers and users can create and customize every aspect of their Gentoo Linux system; from installation stages, to bootable LiveCDs, to customized binary packages for the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP). For more information on Catalyst, please see the Catalyst project page and online documentation."
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Gentoo Linux 2004.0 Released More

Gentoo Linux 2004.0 Released

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  • Almost there... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:46AM (#8430051)
    Cool! So if I start the stage1 compile on my P90 it should be ready by Easter.

    • "Looks like it's not out yet " (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bonch ( 38532 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @02:29PM (#8432470)
      Does it disturb anyone else that:

      * The headline is completely wrong--the 2004.0 file everyone is downloading is the EXPERIMENTAL pre-release that's been sitting on FTPs for a while.

      * As a result, everyone and their mothers are reporting now that it is out. #gentoo has been fielding people left and right over it. Thanks, Slashdot.

      * Hemos mentions it in passing with a "Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information" at the very bottom of the blurb. Uh, mind changing the headline then that says it's released? A bunch of people are downloading the experimental now.

      Thanks for the journalistic integrity, Slashdot--again.

  • Great! (Score:4, Funny)

    by cies ( 318343 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:47AM (#8430061)
    luckily i download this 4 hours ago...

    now all you guys can enjoy the fleed :)

  • How to upgrade (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:47AM (#8430070)
    # emerge sync
    # emerge -uD world

  • Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

    by NeoGeo64 ( 672698 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:47AM (#8430071) Homepage Journal
    That has to be the *biggest* version jump in history! From 1.4 to 2004.0!

    • Re:Wow... (Score:5, Informative)

      by LittleKing ( 688048 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:53AM (#8430148) Homepage
      I know it was probably meant to be funny, but just to clarify, they changed the naming format.

      It goes something like this (I believe):
      There will be about 4 official releases per year and the releases will be named by the year followed by which release it is.

      So since this is the first release of 2004 the name is '2004.0'. The next release should be '2004.1'. The first release next year will be '2005.0' and so forth.

      I hope I got this right.

    • Re:Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

      by somethinghollow ( 530478 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:53AM (#8430150) Homepage Journal
      I think 2000 to XP is a pretty big one. It indicates they ran out of numbers (versioning in long integer) and had to move to letters... Or maybe that they just used a two number versioning system and realized that Windows [19]00 was less than [19]98. Damn 2K Bug.

    • Re:Wow... (Score:3, Funny)

      by ndogg ( 158021 )
      Yeah, I was like, "Alright! Linux has finally caught up with Windows! W00t!"

  • It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:48AM (#8430076)
    Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
    By M, version 1.0

    Gentoo 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."
    "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 .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."

    "...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..."
    "I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .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)."

    "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!"

    -

    • Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:25PM (#8430618)
      What version of GCC are you using? Mine doesn't understand the -fomit-instructions flag and I would like to try it. Is it some kind of an experimental fork? I say it's high time someone took positive action to cut down on the bloat of modern-day software. I'm sure my computer is running millions of useless instructions right now and it's really bugging me that there has been nothing that I can do about it so PLEASE tell me where you got that -fomit-instruction support, okay?

    • Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:5, Funny)

      by supun ( 613105 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:26PM (#8430623)
      emerge -C "Anonymous Coward"

    • Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 ) * on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:46PM (#8430899) Homepage Journal
      Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something...
      I guess one of the reasons that Gentoo has appealed to me, as a former Amiga user, is that a long time ago, I became accustomed to the idea that my personal computer can do more than one thing at a time. In my case, I installed X, so I'm able to have multiple aterm windows open at once!

      I realize that some Linux users came from the MS-DOS background, so they do not run X or screen, and they have modified their kernel to disable virtual consoles. They're from the camp that thinks that whenever you type a command, you should wait for it to finish before you use your computer for anything else. I can understand why they would find Gentoo to be frustrating, and I would not recommend Gentoo to them. I think they would be happier with FreeDOS.

    • Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sloptaco ( 709054 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:48PM (#8430940)

      You can take any group of software users and poke fun for your own satisfaction, calling them wannabe's, whatever ... But mind me asking: "What's the freaking point?" This is like a flash back to my days on the playground. Grow up, please, and quit wasting bandwith with your meaningless bantering. Next time just summarize your thoughts as:

      "I think some people are posers!"

      The end!

    • Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fsterman ( 519061 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @01:15PM (#8431339) Homepage
      Translate this: Gentoo is not JUST a from source distro (which, yes, any distro can be from source, they just make it easier by adding optimization settings) They are trying to do a lot of cool things, and their special optimizing technics are not the only thing. The from source distro is largely to remove having to keep 10 versions of the same package.

      Catalyst is largely an extension of that. How many ^&*%@#$ "Live" CD's are out there? Why does everyone make such a big deal of it? Live CD's are NOT a new thing, Linus made the boot and root floppies very early on. Live CD's are not an innovation, Gentoo has finally put some fresh innovation into an old field.

      No distro is the future, every distro can make it's contributions. Which is why some people say "Gentoo is the future." It has a lot to offer, which I hope other distro's can/will use.

      I have an iBook, and Gentoo runs my file server. Sometime this decade I hope that I can use portage instead of Fink and Darwin ports. Now that isn't Apple switching to some sort of Gentoo fork, but it is some good things about Gentoo spreading.

      I do think that they are duplicating a lot of work with the package manager. Like the UNIX forks it is hurting everyone.

    • Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator! (Score:4, Informative)

      by joeykiller ( 119489 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @01:34PM (#8431649) Journal
      I know you're trying to be funny (and your post are), but is this correct?
      Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster.

      Don't ask me why, but one of my servers (running Debian) creates a lot of animated gif files automatically. Using the version of ImageMagick provided by Debian, this job typically takes 2 seconds per gif file.

      Just for fun I recompiled a static version of ImageMagick using gcc 3.3, with Pentium IV optimizing, on a RedHat Linux box, and tried running these binaries on my Debian box. And you know what? The same job now takes just under one second.

      So for me recompiling was a significant factor for speeding up my program.

    • Dependency hell... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrCode ( 95839 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @01:41PM (#8431798)
      Funny, but...

      The problem I've had with RPM-based distributions isn't having to specify two RPM's in a circular dependency. It's that when I want to update one program about 3 months after installation, I have to update the 'glibc' RPM, which then means I have to updated practically every RPM.

  • Easy upgrade (Score:5, Informative)

    by koh ( 124962 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:48AM (#8430080) Journal
    Also note that existing gentoo users only need to "emerge -[D]u world" to upgrade to the 2004 release.

  • Experience with dual-boot? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chromodromic ( 668389 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:50AM (#8430120)
    Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration? I've got a 3.2GHz system with a Radeon 9700 and I'm running XP Pro on it. I was thinking of installing FreeBSD on it which I run with two other systems, but ultimately this system is my primary desktop and I'd like to have a Linux dist installed so I could take advantage of, well, Linux desktop ease-of-use (never thought I'd say that!). Still, I like BSD's ports system, which is why I'm interested in Gentoo (the portage system is supposed to be similar).

    I've never installed Gentoo, though, so I'd be curious about what Gentoo users would have to say about this and how it compares to, say, Mandrake or Suse ... Any info would be appreciated ...

    • Re:Experience with dual-boot? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8430181)
      Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration?

      I think these days pretty much all distros are equally good dual-booters. If you have grub, and /boot is big enough to hold the kernel, you can boot pretty much anything.

      As long as you order all the distros *not* to touch your boot config, that is. Install the boot configuration once with a distro you trust, and take advantage of the config with subsequent distros.

    • Re:Experience with dual-boot? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mr Smidge ( 668120 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:57AM (#8430224) Homepage
      Gentoo's installation guide will tell you how to set up a dual-boot configuration *properly*, with no wizards or anything, just plain old text file editing.

      If that sounds daunting, don't worry because it's as easy as pie. Personally, I use grub, with a config file a bit like this:

      # Gentoo
      title=Gentoo Linux (linux-2.6.1-mm4 kernel)
      root (hd0,1)
      kernel (hd0,1)/boot/bzImage-2.6.1-mm4 root=/dev/hde5

      # Windows XP
      title=Windows XP Professional
      root (hd0,0)
      chainloader (hd0,0)+1

      Dual boot couldn't be easier.
      • You make it sound like Gentoo and/or Grub somehow make this easier than normal when, in fact, it hasn't been all that difficult for something like 10 years. Even back then, the hardest thing you had to worry about was making sure that Lilo could find its files below the 1024th cylinder (or was it sector...).

        • While Gentoo hasn't necessarily made this "easier", it is certainly more clear what is going on. I'm always nervous about some GUI installer just doing stuff to the MBR without telling me what it is, whether it is the Windows installer or the Redhat one.

          And, at least for x86, GRUB IS an improvement in usability over LILO. I haven't used any version of LILO in the last two or three years since I switched to GRUB, but the main advantage of GRUB is that you don't have to remember to reinstall it into the boo

    • wow, you've had your comment up for almost 4 minutes and it hasn't been flooded with fanboys yet. Amazing. But seriously, if ease of use is what you're looking for then you should probably stay away from Gentoo. I will admit that it's a dream once you finally get it running but getting to that point takes quite a while. It's quite simply the most masochistic installation I've ever seen. The live cd will dump you to a prompt and then it's up to you to partition your drive, mount it's filesystem, untar a

  • Yea! (Score:3, Funny)

    by stateofmind ( 756903 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:51AM (#8430123)
    My P-III 450 and I will let you know what we think of it in about a week.

    Josh

    • Re:Yea! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Hayzeus ( 596826 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:08PM (#8430382) Homepage
      That should be about enough time to get KDE built. (seriously -- I emerged kde a c ouple of weeks ago, qt and all, on a P-450. Took about 5 days -- a bit more if you count fixing some hickups in the qt ebuild).

      • Re:Yea! (Score:3, Informative)

        by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) *
        The trick is not NOT 'emerge kde' but to 'emerge kdebase'

        kdebase has the window manager, a slew of the basics (kedit, kate, konsole, konqueror, etc.) in it and I've found that it satisfies most of my KDE needs.

        Also, QT and kdelibs are what really take a long time to compile.

        Try compiling with '-mcpu=|yourcpu| -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer' and see how much faster it compiles, -O3 is a misnomer, it's actually slower to execute a lot of -O3 code than -O2, and -O3 takes a hell of a lot longer to compile.

        • Re:Yea! (Score:4, Informative)

          by cobar ( 57479 ) <maxwell@101freeway.com> on Monday March 01, 2004 @05:47PM (#8434485) Homepage
          That should actually be -march=cputype
          -mcpu dictates that the code should be scheduled for your cpu type, but will still be backwards compatible with 386's. Using march will let you use instructions that are only available on newer cpus. For personal use, there's seldom need for compatibility with other machines.

  • My Experience with Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LordoftheFrings ( 570171 ) <null@ f r a g fest.ca> on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:53AM (#8430157) Homepage
    After having this distro reccomended to me, I tried it out on a new laptop, and to be honest, I'd say it was not a great experience. Being a linux nub, I guess it was a bad distro to choose as my first install, what with no automated installer, and freaking 4603453 years to compile anything. emerge kde took a few years, as did anything else. While I acknowledge the benefits of compiling everything with optizations for the exact platform it's on, and also realize that installing is a one time thing and using is a many time thing, I still would say there's not a good enough mix between precompiled and source distributed in stage1 and stage2 releases, and stage3 jumps right to all compiled for you. Where's the median?

    • Re:My Experience with Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)

      by miracle69 ( 34841 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:02PM (#8430301)
      You can emerge binary only packages in Gentoo. emerge --usepkg gets you the binary only.

      If you still want to compile everything, get distcc and let your beefier hardware do the trick.
    • I hear you, but i disagree. I always reccomend Gentoo to linux newbies. It forces you to get past the GUI to really understand what's going on. I didn't ever "get it" until I installed Gentoo the first time. Now I stay with it out of loyalty. No other distro taught me more.

      • Re:My Experience with Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Etyenne ( 4915 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:29PM (#8430656)
        Exactly the worst thing you could do. Recommending Gentoo to just any newbie is counter-productive advocacy.

        When you make a recommendation, you have to take your target audience into account. You should not recommend Gentoo for someone who don't care about the innard of his OS and just want to use a word processor, read his email, surf the Web and play a game or three. They don't want to get past the GUI, they just want to get things done.

        Power user, system administrator and programmer are a totally different story and *may* be good candidate to recommend Gentoo to.

        That's so obvious, I can't believe it have to be said.

  • wow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by anthonyrcalgary ( 622205 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:54AM (#8430172)
    Can KDE compile without help on a clean system? That would be nifty. I'm talking about the 8 days where kde-base wouldn't compile due to a bug in the build script that affected fam where the build script used a tool that was masked in the stable branch. This bug could not have happened if someone had tried it on a stable system before it was released to the stable branch. Mod me a troll if you like, but I'm not making this up.

  • Um? (Score:4, Informative)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis AT gmail DOT com> on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8430175) Homepage
    I went to three diff mirrors. No ISO for 2004.0/livecd/x86

    ???

    What gives???

    Tom

    • Re:Um? (Score:4, Informative)

      by dryan ( 709968 ) * on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:36PM (#8430750)
      Probably due to the fact that it's not actually officially been released yet.

    • Re:Um? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gspr ( 602968 )
      Some mirrors have a "universal/" dir under releases/x86/2004.0/livecd/. It's populated with two different 2004.0 liveCDs.

      • Re:Um? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Noksagt ( 69097 )
        Righ. One is a minimal, one is the full version of 1 disc (so no optimized compiles for individual platforms yet). Many mirrors only have the minimal CD (from which you can make a full CD). Or get the full from ftp.ussg.iu.edu (but I beat you to the queue!)

  • Gentoo never ceases to amaze.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mehaiku ( 754091 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8430177) Homepage

    Check out catalyst. It allows you to build your own stage taballs for Gentoo. You can even build the binary GRP packages to your specs and it will automatically arrange for the packges to be burnable to more than one CD. Talk about flexibility. You can cook your Gentoo up how ya like.

    What I really want to know is what they have planned for April Fools this year. I do not see how they will ever be able to top last year.

  • But.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by stateofmind ( 756903 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8430187)
    But I'm still compiling the last version!

  • Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc. (Score:5, Informative)

    by djh101010 ( 656795 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8430192) Homepage Journal
    A clarification - I just checked out the gentoo page, and they talk about support for Sun Ultra, not SunSparc.

    A Sparc5 is different than an Ultra5... I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.

    It will be nice to upgrade it from the RedHat 5.2 that it currently is running, all things considered.

    • Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc. (Score:5, Funny)

      by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:00PM (#8430258)
      I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.

      Considering the blazing performance of SPARC chips, it might have completed the compilation process by the time Sarge is released. So you might as well wait for sarge.
    • I have Gentoo running on my SunBlade 100, it runs rather fast, compiled mozilla in a couple hours. KDE failed last night, going to see what happended today.

      So far, no problems. I tried linux on my sparc 5 with SuSE, and it was slower than Solaris 2.6. But that was a few years ago.

      I'm still running Mandrake on my home boxes, I can't have it down for a day while its compiling. Now if Gentoo just offered a full binary build also.

  • Gentoo has it's place (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @11:56AM (#8430199) Homepage
    I'm very fond of it on my desktops, I have one running 2.6 and one running 2.4 (both gentoo sources) and both are very responsive. I have yet to see another vanilla system that can handle running at 100% load without missing a beat handling the desktop.

    It's not as easy as Redhat Mandrake et al, but then doing more complex stuff (custom kernels, odd hardware support etc) is much easier, which is really part of the Linux spirit :)

    On the other hand I think the people running Gentoo on Zauruses [freshmeat.net] are nuts. Gentoo might be good, but man if there was ever a place for Debian that was it!

    • Re:Gentoo has it's place (Score:4, Informative)

      by jdavidb ( 449077 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:29PM (#8430648) Homepage Journal

      I'm presently running Gentoo on my dual boot snow ibook. The fact is that I would prefer Debian; I used to run Debian exclusively on this machine's predecessor, a blueberry that couldn't handle the static electricity of the winter of 2002-2003. :) Unfortunately I spent half a year trying to get Debian X to work on this machine with no luck. I finally discovered that the version of X with the correct drivers is still considered experimental. I never could get any luck figuring out how to rehome my machine to get the right XFree86, and finally decided Gentoo would be easier, which it was.

      I like Gentoo. I admit it seems speedy (though this is the fastest machine I've ever owned). I used to like compiling my own Linux distro through Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] and sort of like the idea that everything on this machine was compiled for source (though since I didn't do it manually myself I don't have quite the same since of satisfaction). That said, Gentoo currently doesn't offer anything that will make me stay with it after Debian catches up. Worst of all, I have some doubts that all of the software I can emerge is under licensing schemes I want; they seem to be a little bit more lax about that than RedHat and Debian.

  • Gentoo Notebook Support (Score:3, Informative)

    by hirschma ( 187820 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:00PM (#8430257)
    I tried Gentoo on my notebook, and it seemed that support for PCMCIA and wireless just wasn't all that great. Documentation for such issues was pretty much non-existant at the time.

    Has this improved? Any Gentoo want to point me towards portable nirvana?

    Jonathan

    • I first built Gentoo on a ThinkPad 570e two years ago. At that time I was using SMC wireless equipment and all went swimmingly well.

      Last March I upgraded to a ThinkPad R31 and installed Gentoo on it. It had internal wireless, and that worked beautifully until the hardware quit. I then plugged in my trusty SMC wireless card and built PCMCIA wireless support and all worked perfectly again.

    • Re:Gentoo Notebook Support (Score:5, Informative)

      by dougnaka ( 631080 ) * on Monday March 01, 2004 @01:08PM (#8431243) Homepage Journal
      "Notebook support" is an arbitrary statement about a specific end use environment.

      So let's go over Gentoo's "support" for anything...
      Gentoo runs the Linux kernel, so your support is going to be the same as any other distro that runs the Linux kernel.
      In Gentoo you have to either a.) configure your own kernel; b.) use genkernel and accept the gentoo config; or c.) use genkernel and tweak the default config (genkernel all --menuconfig)
      I've run Gentoo on my laptop for I don't know how long.. well I'm sure I could figure it out, but it's been well over a year. I have a howto for my laptop brant (HP ZT1150) and it's actually the link in my sig.
      Here's another HP ZT1000 [isomerica.net] site, and he also runs Gentoo..
      So, without trying to flame you, the "distro" support is, at least, misleading. As the support for things is generally based on the kernel you build, or someone builds for you.
      The real advantages of Gentoo are it's all to easy upgrade path. I used to reinstall Linux every 4-6 months just to get the latest base system. With Gentoo I just emerge system every month or so. It's almost a drawback if you're someone who likes to wipe the slate clean and start over, as there's little reason to...

  • Save the mirrors. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by starman97 ( 29863 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:01PM (#8430272)
    Torrents please...

  • Initrd tools? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:01PM (#8430286)

    Catalyst sounds nice, but what about a tool for making our own initrds so I can, for example, load the module-only driver for my raid card? I think a lot of people have a need for loading third-party drivers in order to boot.

    RAID card vendors have a funny definition for "linux support". My Promise SX4 card's SATA interfaces, and not the raid interface, are the only thing 2.6 supports, so you get to stare at 4 separate drives instead of your RAID-5 array; one helpful page suggests that "that's ok because software raid is better anyway"- um, okay. Promise's half-closed-source driver(which is available from 'some guy in germany') won't compile under 2.6, but does under 2.4; however, only as a module, so bringing up the system off the card is impossible without an initrd, even though LILO will work since it uses the BIOS to get the kernel and initrd.

    I tried using genkernel, which does build initrds, but I haven't been able to make an initrd that'll boot a -normal- system without tons of module errors, and adding the FasTrak driver module into an already built initrd is a huge pain as well, something else I haven't gotten working. Anyone have a good link to a guide to making initrds and specifically dealing with module headache and describing how the initrd then boots the system off the real_root partition?

    'course, i'd also settle for a howto on tricking the kernel into linking the module directly into the kernel, that'd do the same thing...

  • Live CDs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:04PM (#8430326) Homepage Journal
    Gentoo has the Live-CD market cornered, with Knoppix remaining as the only serious competitor. :)

    In fact, the Hardened-Gentoo CD rocks. Get it, burn it, take it with you wherever you go, you won't be sorry.

    • Re:Live CDs (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:15PM (#8430463) Journal
      I would say Knoppix livecd has better support for hardware, and more applications. But Gentoo has those live Game CD's that totally rock (if you have supporting hardware with linux drivers).

    • Re:Live CDs (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fsmunoz ( 267297 )
      Uh? I never heard of Gentoo LiveCDs. Nobody I know ever mentioned Gentoo LiveCDs. I Know Knoppix, Gnoppix, DynaBolic and Linux BBS and some others, but not Gentoo.

      I might be the only person in the world to be oblivious of the Gentoo LiveCD's market cornering. On the other hand you might be confusing what you like with World Domination. I love Debian, but for most people that I talk to Linux is RedHat or SuSE, so there would be little to be gained from saying that "Debian has the Linux desktop market corn

    • Re:Live CDs (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chainsaw ( 2302 ) <jens.backmanNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:59PM (#8431100) Homepage
      Oh boy, a Gentoo Live-CD... So you just have to boot it, wait for glibc+KDE to compile and THEN you can use it?

  • time to have fun! (Score:5, Funny)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:07PM (#8430369)
    I've got about 50 Compaq Deskpro 4000's that are begging for something to do.

    Why not? Support your local electric company I say!

  • A little info (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Daath ( 225404 ) <(lp) (at) (coder.dk)> on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:11PM (#8430413) Homepage Journal
    For those with more machines who wish to run gentoo, you can use distcc (distributed c compiler) to speed things up. You can use it from the early stages ;)
    Gentoo has great documentation on distcc [gentoo.org]! :)

    Have fun!

  • Just a clarification... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pakaran2 ( 138209 ) <windrunnerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 01, 2004 @12:37PM (#8430768)
    Since all the servers are getting hammered pretty hard, this should be mentioned. If you have run

    sudo emerge sync
    sudo emerge -uD world

    in the past few weeks, there's nothing new out there for you. All you'll get is the new packages (like always) and bragging rights to run a "new version." There's not even a new minor 2.4 kernel version - I've been running 2.4.25 since it was released.

    So, you do NOT need to sync up now. Especially not while half the slashdot userbase is doing so. You're pounding the living **** out of the servers, and for no good reason. If you must get new everything, whether to brag about running "version 2004" or what have you, su to root and set an at job to do so late tonight. Thank you for making Gentoo usable for people who actually NEED to update.

  • chroot installs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Monday March 01, 2004 @01:40PM (#8431771)
    Can Debian or any other distro do a chroot install like Gentoo? I don't really like compiling everything, but it was really nice to be able to drop the tarball in a chroot folder on a running system and do the complete install from there.

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