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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."
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Gentoo 2008.0 Released

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  • So now that Gentoo has a nice graphical installer, can we expect all kinds of n00bs flooding the forums? I thought the idea was to have a distro you can really tinker with, given the majority of other distros taking care of the sleek user-friendly market.
    • Re:emerge first (Score:4, Informative)

      by armanox ( 826486 ) <asherewindknight@yahoo.com> on Sunday July 06, 2008 @12:39PM (#24075359) Homepage Journal
      Gentoo 2007.0 had a graphical installer too. I tried using it (almost 20 times), and never did get Gentoo installed with it. Then I went to the command line minimal install (stage 3), and got it up and running in the first shot.
      • My experience was the same as yours. Never had a problem with minimal install, or at least if there was a problem it was hands on enough that you could work through it.

        The graphical installer in 2007 didn't do gentoo any favors.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... can we expect all kinds of n00bs flooding the forums?

      Typical douchebaggery from a typical Gentoo user:
      "I use Gentoo. Look at my penis."

    • One word: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Noodlenose ( 537591 )
      Slackware [slackware.com]
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ash Vince ( 602485 )

        Why on earth has this been modded insightful? You people obviously have no idea.

        The main feature of Gentoo is that it is a bleeding edge release. Because everything is build from source you generally have the most recent version of all the software you chose to install.

        Slackware have only just recently adopted the 2.6 Kernel. It has a tradition of old stable software. They are both "geeky" releases but they approach it from a very different mindset.

        I am not attempting to say which is better (although I pref

    • by kashani ( 2011 )

      Gentoo has always about giving you more control and making hard things easy. If it weren't, we'd be using the giant pain in the ass called Linux From Scratch.

      kashani

    • Yes, but reinstalling Gentoo was just too much of a pain. I did the old tried and true no-installer method - several times. It took a LONG time to get the system up and going and into a usable form. First few times were exciting, but on my 3rd or 4th time doing it, it just felt like a chore. I don't want to spend a weekend getting a box up and going. When the installer finally came out I started using that. It was buggy to be sure, but it got me a working Gentoo system pretty quick, and from there I w

  • by gambolt ( 1146363 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @12:31PM (#24075315)

    How do sourcemage and lunar compare, anyone know?

    I've had the impression that Gentoo has been stagnating recently.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 06, 2008 @01:35PM (#24075757)

      I used sourcemage a few years back. (Left because i got tired of waiting for shit to compile, hurr hurr.) I found it really nice, and absolutely LOVED the bash-script based package management. Compared to Gentoo, it's also really good at fixing itself when things get borked.
        If I had more disk space, I'd probably give it a go again. It was a really nice distro.

        - mantar

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        >I found it really nice, and absolutely LOVED the bash-script based package management.

        Hey, that sounds kinda cool. Maybe Gentoo should consider this idea instead of .ebuild files.
        • With the caveat that I'm writing this from Xandros (gak!), I've always found the Gentoo ebuilds to be pretty sane. Is there anything in particular that needs changing about them?
  • The great thing about Gentoo is that upgrading is as easy as 'emerge --sync && emerge -auvND world'.

    I'm not quite sure about this installer. As mentioned above it may bring in new users... but at what cost? I suppose maybe the forum members will whip 'em into shape by telling them to RTFM.

    Gentoo is about choice. Give it a try if that's what you're into. The new LiveCD should support most new hardware out of the box (important stuff, anyway -- like network and disk/chipset drivers).

    I love and use it

    • Re:Finally. (Score:4, Informative)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @01:13PM (#24075573) Homepage Journal

      The great thing about Gentoo is that upgrading is as easy as 'emerge --sync && emerge -auvND world'.

      That's updating, not upgrading. At the very least, you should select a new profile, to get the new default system packages and masks.

      To go to 2008.0, this should bring you mostly there:

      [make a backup]
      emerge --sync
      eselect profile default/linux/x86/2008.0 # Adjust to your preferred profile
      emerge --emptytree system
      emerge --emptytree system
      emerge --emptytree world
      emerge --update --deep --newuse world
      [merge any new ._cfgNNNN files using your favourite tool or manually]

      Ayup, you need to rebuild system twice to cover interdependencies, and then world, to get everything to link with the new system libraries.

      On a desktop system, you might also want to update the boot splash theme to reflect the new "version", but there isn't any 2008.0 theme out yet, so that might have to wait.

      • Why on earth would you emerge -e world/system? It's abolutely redundent in this case.

        "revdep-rebuild" takes care of sytem link consistency, which doesn't get touched anyhow when updating your profile.

        • by arth1 ( 260657 )

          Why on earth would you emerge -e world/system? It's abolutely redundent in this case.

          A new profile might bring in new packages which has headers that affect the system toolchain.
          Since you don't know whether this is the case, the only way to ensure that new changes are incorporated into the system is to rebuild system. If you don't, you may have world packages that use a different include file than the system, which can cause problems, like when a newly introduced package uses different values for #defines,

      • I just prefer backing everything up and then reinstalling everything. Much less painstaking, and I get to start out on a clean slate of a system.

        Very nice, I think. Maybe for people who need their computer and can't forget some of the components, though, this isn't much of a viable option.

        *runs off to make a checklist*
      • Re:Finally. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 06, 2008 @06:56PM (#24078157)

        The correct procedure is:
        # Update local package repository image
        emerge --sync
        # Select new profile (Adjust to your architecture / preferred sub-profile)
        eselect profile default/linux/x86/2008.0
        # Update to latest default USE flags (which is generally all that changes with profile updates)
        emerge --update --deep --newuse world
        # Update config files with tool of your choice

        The rest is completely useless. Even if you did want to completely re-emerge the entire system, there's little point in the 2 "emerge -e system" (if you're a ricer, you may choose to do one of them - since system is included in world, the second is completely pointless)

        • That's basically what I said... I just left out the profile.

          -a = ask (overlook packages before install)
          -u = update
          -v = verbose
          -N = newuse
          -D = deep

          Thus: 'emerge -auvND world' is the same as 'emerge --update --deep --newuse world'

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by smallfries ( 601545 )

      From your comment I can assume that either:

      1) Your install is headless
      2) You have been using Gentoo for less than 12 months
      3) You are still running XFree86 instead of Xorg
      4) Your memory is very selective

      The very idea that every update goes smoothly without a single dependency block is something that most Gentoo users would laugh at. Given all of the problems with the Xorg update, or the changes in libraries that borked the tree for months last year this is laughable.

      Portage is a great piece of software, and

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        1) Your install is headless

        I've found it very difficult to install Gentoo on a truly headless system.
        There are nothing provided install-wise to let you do a network boot -- you have to create your own setup for that, even initially. And trying to use cu on a terminal line against an install CD is an exercise in futility -- it assumes that you have a head.
        Other distros might be just as bad, some are better, but none are worse.

        • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          There are netboot images, but primarily for Sparc and Mips... I have done a complete remote install on a sparc using serial console, when the physical server was several thousand miles away.

      • 1) it's my main system. I've got the test dev server that us headless and the same command works fine.
        2) I've been using Gentoo since (late) 2004
        3) Been using X.org for quite some time (running it unmasked at the moment)
        4) Yes. Perhaps.

        I never said that I never came across any dependency blocks. I had 2 the last I upgraded (the morning this article came out, actually) and it was a simple unmerge of two packages... then press up twice and press enter to re-build the package list and install.

        I own a Mac as we

        • I own a Mac as well. It was a terrible experience for me. I installed Gentoo on it. Works fine now.

          Now I know that you're twisted :)

      • Portage is a great piece of software, and I stuck with Gentoo for many years because because of its strengths. But portage is not what lets Gentoo down. The complete lack of QA on the official tree that leads to dependency blocks, updated libraries in the stable tree that break ABI compatability with previous software and the general cavalier attitude to pushing any old crap into the stable release are what kills Gentoo.

        The lack of consistent QA is what killed off Gentoo for us on servers. It was a much
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by danomac ( 1032160 )

      The great thing about Gentoo is that upgrading is as easy as 'emerge --sync && emerge -auvND world'.

      This is changing, pretty soon world will not contain system packages. So you'll have to update them separately.

      • Thanks for the tip! So far you are the first to mention anything that wasn't bitching and complaining about my post.

        Thank you for that.

        • There's more information about the changes in a draft upgrade guide [gentoo.org]. There's a few key changes (as someone above mentioned as well), one being that portage will preserve existing libraries until the dependencies are rebuilt against the new ones. Another is that you can create logical sets (i.e. create a media_player set with vlc & mplayer and dependencies, and update it using `emerge -av @media_player` -- this will update everything in the set. Pretty nifty.

          I don't think there's any
          • What are the odds of accidentally clicking the Submit button instead of the Continue Editing button. Doh!

            To finish it off: I don't think there's any official documentation on the gentoo website just yet, but there was a guide installed in /usr/share/doc/portage-2.2_rc1/html/index.html on my amd64 box.
  • by repruhsent ( 672799 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @12:48PM (#24075429) Homepage Journal

    ...but I'm still compiling 2004.3.

  • are there still all the blockers when installing anything of any use? the sort of blocker that doesnt tell you when you run an emerge -pv and when you run the actual emerge to build and install a large package and all its depends and leave the room for a while (assuming that the full process may take a hour or so) and when you come back, the emerge broke on the second package.

  • by Xfacter ( 1075973 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @01:20PM (#24075629)
    I've looked all over, but I can't find the electrolytes!
  • by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @01:43PM (#24075833)

    A bit tongue-in-cheek, but I'm also serious here - 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? Just so you can have a 64bit Firefox that Flash won't run on? A 686-optimized kernel, connected to the Internet via 768 kbit DSL?

    • by Chemisor ( 97276 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @01:46PM (#24075849)

      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.

      • by pdusen ( 1146399 )
        I suspect he was tagged 'Troll' for calling it an "environmentalist rant". Even though he is completely right.
    • by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @02:00PM (#24075945)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Xubuntu is slow because it has like 30 daemons loaded at startup. Provided you get rid of daemons you don't use, you'll find minimal speedups when something is optimized for a generic i686 compared to something optimized for core2, except maybe some video player/editor that isn't mplayer/mencoder based. Archlinux/Crux/Frugalware basically runs on this philosophy, and provides i686 generic binaries, which run on Pentium II and up.

        • You'll only get minimal speedups compared to a binary *optimized* for core2, yes - but you'll likely get fairly good speedups if you're willing to let gcc use processor-specific instructions and whatnot (meaning you can't move the binary to another x86 unless it's the same as yours).

          In other words, generic binaries are compiled with -mtune=generic (or -mtune=core2 or whatever) so they'll work on basically any x86. If you want every possible speedup, you'll need to use -march=cputype where cputype is your c

        • Provided you get rid of daemons you don't use, you'll find minimal speedups when something is optimized for a generic i686 compared to something optimized for core2

          What about the "daemons" that you can't get rid of as they are required by the app because that app's maintainer, or "higher-ups" in the distro's management decided that the app must include this or that feature (for whatever reason)? For many Gentoo users, its not about recompiling the exact same code over and over again, because in that case, you'd be right, there would be minimal improvement in the resulting apps, and a lot of work for almost nothing.

          Others have mentioned all the other reasons why some

          • "PPS: Somebody please mod up that AC below me who made the 'if it compiles, it runs' comment. He's dead-on: that is the single most important reason I left binary distros. After an install, there is NO guarantee that your system will work. In a source-based distro, if the build/link/install completes successfully its almost certain that at least you'll be able to get back into your system the next time you reboot, because in the act of compiling and successfully linking an app, your system has effectively v

            • There are an infinite number of bad things that can lock your box that compiling from source doesn't fix.

              I never said compiling from source fixes *everything*.

              This is what drove me off of Gentoo. In the unstable branch, wget broke, with the emerge world finishing. Leaving emerge unable to fetch new code to fix the conflict that broke wget (hint what does portage use to fetch source?).

              So you use your browser/ftp client and go fetch the source manually, then downgrade to the previous version. Compared to being unable boot your system, or something like glibc being completely hosed, this is trivial. And this kind of problem can happen on any distro.

              In Ubuntu, the package maintainers actually care about the installed packages from repos running once they're installed.

              Great, keep using Ubuntu if you like it. If I ever decided to use a binary distro again, I'd probably try them first.

              In Gentoo world, not so much.

              Life on the bleeding edge is not for the faint of heart. For many, its

              • Compared to being unable boot your system, or something like glibc being completely hosed, this is trivial. And this kind of problem can happen on any distro.

                No, it won't. Because binary distributions have something that Gentoo hasn't mastered - "quality assurance" and a limited set of configurations to support. If there was a broken glibc package, for example, someone would've already seen that it was broken before they published the binary package to the download server.

                For background - I used Gentoo f

                • I used Gentoo for a few years (from 2003 to late 2006-ish)

                  but as it turns out, I just had control over which of the prescribed USE flags I enabled

                  You used Gentoo for 2 years and in all that time you never heard of an 'overlay'? Sounds to me like Gentoo wasn't the kind of distro for you anyway. No problem, stay with Ubuntu and be happy, just remember, what works for you doesn't work for everyone else.

                  • And again you completely ignore the fact that QA is important for a distro to be useful. When I emerge world, with a stock unstable system on i686 and no overlays, I shouldn't HAVE to use my browser to fix the fact that the package manager managed to break the tool it uses to get source code. This is first grade basic shit here. After those kind of fuck ups, how can I trust the maintainers to get anything basic right? Why would I want to use their kernel sources?

                    Ubuntu is by no means perfect. Every now and

                  • Ok, overlays would give me more control over the packages, by letting me redefine the ebuilds for everything. But I can recreate all of the packages I don't like on any system. For example, I can easily get a source rpm, edit the spec file, and recompile. Except that, if I did that with Redhat, Suse, or Debian, I'd be starting with stable, tested sources. With Gentoo, I'm not really starting with a known quantity - so it's not obvious if my changes caused subsequent problems or if the package was broken

      • by **loki969** ( 880141 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @02:50PM (#24076295)

        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.

        • by Syde ( 1047152 )
          I agree, speed is important, but the flexibility of Gentoo is amazing. I tend to refer to Gentoo as a tweaker's dream. I came from the days before we had useful package management systems in Linux... back when you had to compile all of your packages and dependencies yourself. (X and a window manager sure was a lot of fun to install back then!) So I remember the time of compiling everything and getting everything properly optimized for your hardware (and other software)... so for me Gentoo is kind of the
        • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          Every system being slightly different has security advantages too...
          There will be subtle differences in the addresses at which various pieces of code are loaded which can make exploit writing more difficult.
          With a binary distro, you can just download the binaries yourself and discover the necessary addresses.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Gothmolly ( 148874 )

        "...it might take a week to get everything installed..."

        Do you save that week in performance later?

        • Unlike ubuntu, you can actually keep using the system while it is installing packages :-)

          The blocking in apt seems a bit excessive.

          My cronjobs (in gentoo) used to run when I was sleeping, so it didn't matter much.

      • I had been using gentoo for about 4 years, and migrated over to ubuntu about a year ago. I miss a lot of things, but I never really noticed any changes in speed.

        What I miss is USE flags. Things like "smartcard" and "cjk" etc, and especially all the use flags you can tweak in apache and php etc. They let you compile in experimental patches and extra features, while letting you cut out all the bulk you don't need.

        The main reason I left was lack of signed packages, and complete lack of any automatic update

      • by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @09:03PM (#24078973) Homepage Journal

        > 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.

        • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          I too have had similar problems... Binary distributions become a huge pain if you don't have the most up to date bleeding edge version, which can often be highly unstable...

          If you try installing the beta packages on your otherwise stable version, you will often find that they depend on new versions of core system packages (glibc, gcc etc), gentoo lets you install the latest apps if and when you want, without having to drag the rest of your system up unnecessarily.

          As an example, try installing Nagios 3.x on

          • Start here:
            http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/apt-build [ubuntu.com]

            Then build nagios3 from the Intrepid sources on your Hardy system. Then, if you still miss Gentoo, remove some random files from the system and spend a few hours trying to figure out what broke. Maybe have your neighbor come over and call you an idiot even though he also doesn't know what's wrong, so you can feel like you're in the Gentoo forums.

            • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

              That's exactly what i did in the end, but it's hardly an ideal situation...

              I will have to support the nagios3 package myself, the distro won't update it for me.

              Plus the compile process didn't seem to offer me any easy way to configure how i would like the package built, unlike gentoo which gives me the following options:
              [ebuild U ] net-analyzer/nagios-core-3.0.3 [3.0.2] USE="apache2 perl web -debug -lighttpd -vim-syntax" 2,695 kB

              So i can choose whether i want my nagios3 build to be configured to use apa

              • Ok, it's been a week, but I'll reply anyway in case you check replies. :)

                As for the cflags, gcc just checks the environment for those. It's not Gentoo-specific. So, you just do an "export CFLAGS=-march i686 -Os; export CXXFLAGS=$FLAGS" or whatever, and you're set. Do it your .profile, /etc/profile, or just type it before running the build command. With apt-build, you can also just set those in /etc/apt/apt-build.conf. The environment vars, though, also help when just running "configure; make; make ins

      • by shish ( 588640 )

        Speed. Now a binary distro can install things quickly but not run them very quickly.

        In the last benchmark I saw, gentoo occasionally managed to be something like 0.5% faster on some tasks, and was occasionally 20% slower when the user compiled with an optimisation which backfired; the package maintainer's choice of optimisations for the specific package were generally better than the user's choice for their specific CPU... That was a few years back though (when gentoo fanboyism was at its peak), not sure what's changed since~

        Googling for said article, I find lots of references to it, but

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While people tend to say speed (which is generally true as far as older hardware and optimizations are concerned), I just like the simplicity and the ease of configuring ALL of my system in one folder: /etc/conf.d, pretty much.

      Another thing I like about gentoo is the simple fact: if it compiles, it runs. I've had debacles in the past where when you try to use some obscure program's binary it just won't run because you've got newer lib versions installed, etc, etc. Compiling stuff to work on your system mea

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Hangeron ( 314487 )

      Not much benefit, but show me a distro with packages as up to date as Gentoo, and I'll switch over. I think most choose Gentoo because it's bleeding edge and for customization. Compilation and speed are just by-products as far as I'm concerned.

      • It's only bleeding edge if you unmask everything and if you're willing to deal with all of the Gentoo team's patches which may be unstable. I'm considering switching to an unmasked vanilla-sources instead of gentoo-sources just so I'll always have the newest version of the Linux kernel and have it be exactly what Linus and friends intended to distribute.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      what is the benefit of having thousands of geeks compiling the same code over and over

      That's the point, it isn't always the same code. The real power of Gentoo (Portage really) is the power for the user to say "I don't want features x, y, and z in this piece of software so don't bother compiling them in".

      With a binary distro you are usually stuck with the decisions that the maintainer has made about what features of the software to include/exclude.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      There are many reasons - flexibility, speed of resulting binaries, less dependency problems and lase but not least - the new version is out, but I am already running all the latest software versions included in this version. You upgrade regularly and end up with new version when it is out. No need to go through massive upgrading where so much can go wrong.
    • by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      If you sum up the manhours of all this compilation .. whats the point?

      When portage works (i.e. back in the old days when the QA didn't suck and updating a system that has no unstable packages installed, didn't always result in mutally-blocking packages) there aren't any manhours. The computer does that work, and the human spends no more than a few seconds on the issue.

      The point (again, when things are actually working, a situation that seems a distant memory to me) is that you get it the way you want it

    • 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?

      Well, you get some nifty "VTEC" stickers... [funroll-loops.info]

  • Do not want! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ant P. ( 974313 ) on Sunday July 06, 2008 @06:45PM (#24078085)

    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by theraptor05 ( 908452 )
      And said dev subsequently had his Gentoo infrastructure access removed [wordpress.com]
      I'd say I trust the overall distro that much more for dealing with the situation appropriately.
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