The Gentoo Release Engineering team announced the release of Gentoo Linux 2006.0. Gentoo Linux 2006.0, the first release in the 2006 series, represents improvements across many architecture. Major highlights in the release include KDE 3.4.3, GNOME 2.12.2, XFCE 4.2.2, GCC 3.4.4 and a 2.6.15 kernel. This is also the first release with the Gentoo Linux Installer officially debuting on the x86 LiveCD, which will fully replace the Universal and PackageCD set.
Gentoo 2006.0 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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I was thinking of doing an upgrade – but I am just too tempted to try the installer. I’d like to see what form another original installer takes. Nice work Gentoo!
guys, be warned that this release uses GCC 3.4.4 which is not compatible with GCC 3.3.x. So, if you’re sharing binaries between your systems; you’ll get headache once you install a system with an incompatible version of GCC.
I’ve been waiting for too long for a new release to install on my laptop. I’ve tried ubuntu, but it’s too slow compared with gentoo.
once you install gentoo, try kuroo version 8 as a front end for emerge. It’s awesome.
check it out here http://tux.myftp.org/kuroo
and get ebuild from here
http://tux.myftp.org/kuroo/browser/ebuilds
search gentoo-wiki.com to find out how to install from ebuilds.
guys, be warned that this release uses GCC 3.4.4 which is not compatible with GCC 3.3.x. So, if you’re sharing binaries between your systems; you’ll get headache once you install a system with an incompatible version of GCC.
Explains this to me. What exactly is not compatible between these GCC versions ?
I ask because I never had one compatibility problem when upgrading from GCC 3.3 to GCC 3.4, or even to GCC 4.0 for that matter.
The only problem I got with newer GCC .0 releases were regressions or more enforcements of the latest C standards.
So, can you explain the compatibility problem ?
C++ built with GCC3.4.* needs libstdc++.so.6 but C++ built with GCC3.3.* needs libstdc++.so.5
Solution install sys-libs/libstdc++-v3
Solution : don’t uninstall GCC 3.3 (or at least keep the old library) when installing GCC 3.4 then.
The toolchain does not use C++ anyway, so you will have problems tipically with KDE, gnomemm or mono apps.
I remember now that the GCC team warned people of how to upgrade for C++ apps, when they released GCC 3.4.
That must be why I did not have any problem : I kept the old library when upgrading my GCC.
I love Gentoo but I know the text based installer inside and out.
I just did an install yesterday damn it – would of been nice to have this yesterday
Wtih the new Gentoo installer, even newbies can install Gentoo (without going through the huge installation guide).
As much as I like going from stage 1 and go from there – there are just others that can’t stomach it. So this is a good move. Newbies get the usability of portage and a nice installer. Good job!
Hopefully, next time we’ll see a good GUI frontend for portage being available as a standard.
Hopefully, next time we’ll see a good GUI frontend for portage being available as a standard.
Porthole, Kuroo – it’s just a question of time. Think so…
And as to Gentoo Linux – the best distro I’ve ever used. It’s fast, it’s stable and it is as you like it. Other rpm based systems didn’t make their way on my servers and desktop boxes for good. Oh! Maybe one exception – PLD linux for some time…
>the huge guide
It’s really not huge as long as you don’t take the stage 1. Sure it’s not like some distro set everything up, put everything in even stuff you don’t need, but does absolute minimum then lets you build up in your flavour. And I mean, if you want Gnome over just plain console based system after the initial install, type ’emerge gnome’, wait a night =) and you’re done.
If you want to see a fancy greeting screen after pressing mouse 5 times after putting your CD in, go with fedora/ubuntu…
Now that there is a more “newbie friendly” installer, maybe more people hesitant before will take a look at gentoo. It is my *personal* opinion that anyone who wants a career as any sort of linux systems admin should build a full gentoo based system from a stage1 at some point in their career. I love gentoo because it forces you to learn linux, I hate gentoo because it forces you to learn Linux
As much time as it takes to compile everything, gentoo is pretty nice. Aside from Suse/NLD/Ubuntu, it is one of the few distros supporting the latest greatest Xgl/compiz also. Try it out
It is my *personal* opinion that anyone who wants a career as any sort of linux systems admin should build a full gentoo based system from a stage1 at some point in their career. I love gentoo because it forces you to learn linux, I hate gentoo because it forces you to learn Linux
And unfortunately, too many other people share your opinion. Installing Gentoo might teach you a couple things about chroot and all that business, but it’s not going to turn you into a sys admin. The instructions are very detailed and a trained monkey could install gentoo.
You learn Linux by using Linux, exploring the system, exploring the tools and reading lots. Just installing Gentoo is not going to do anything for you.
I guess it’s one of those “OMG, look at me, I’m running Gentoo you Mandrake n00b”.
Is it just me, or does “installing Gentoo” count as “exploring the system” and “using Linux?” Sure, it is a short glance at the underlying framework of Gentoo and an even shorter glance at the Linux kernel itself, but it _is_ after all those exact things you seem to rhetorically avoid about the Gentoo install.
Now with that in mind, perhaps the Install Guide could be supplemented by even further exploration and usage guides? Oh right, Gentoo already has a growing and surprisingly vast collection of exploration and usage guides.
I am not sure I see how a trained monkey could intelligently and systematically use the guides available to troubleshoot and fix problems. That is what we humans do — test the waters, troubleshoot the waters, fix the waters, and become widely familiar with the waters. We are not born with knowledge of said waters. It takes install guides and further supplementation for anyone to learn about these topics.
Alright sure the install offers some help in learning how to use a linux system..but does it really teach you what you need to know about runtime-levels and editing obscure config files? Would someone who just installed gentoo from scratch know how to set-up a cron job and remotely configure a lAMP server? How about even compiling software without using portage? Gentoo does teach linux somewhat, but it is not some magical guide to life and linux.
And to the “gentoo is the only one along with suse/NDL/Ubuntu supporting quartz/compiz” guy…you can make slackware or debian or pretty much any linux distro support all those, by like, installing it and configuring it.
You TOTALLY took my comment out of context. I also totally agree with your comment but don’t agree with the way your presented it. Read the part that says, “anyone who wants a career as any sort of linux systems admin”.
That means that anyone with future aspirations of being a Linux SysAdmin should use gentoo to jumpstart
The “OMG, look at me, I’m running Gentoo…” are the ricers I talk about and don’t much care for. http://funroll-loops.org/
If you want to learn linux, Gentoo or Slackware are both great starting points. If you want things to “Just Work TM” without much hassle, Ubuntu, or OpenSuse are better choices. These are my personal experiences (from the viewpoint of a Professional Linux Systems Admin).
Gentoo being fairly automated doesn’t really teach the user considerably much. It doesn’t teach distribution-specific knowledge that will be useful in an employment scenario. It doesn’t instruct in the configuration of packages used in a commercial setting. It doesn’t even really teach the monotonous process of bootstrapping a system from scratch. It’s just another distribution. In a way it’s like suggesting if Windows came with a slightly shittier installer it would be a good starting point for learning to administer Windows networks.
It’s just another distribution. In a way it’s like suggesting if Windows came with a slightly shittier installer it would be a good starting point for learning to administer Windows networks.
Have you used Gentoo? It’s not just another distribution. It’s a meta-distribution. Gentoo gives you a lot more control over what packages you install and which options you enable. Gentoo allows you to build your own distribution with their tools. It is very different from other distributions.
Using Gentoo permits you to determine what dependencies and functionality to compile your system with, with the convenience of a package management system. It’s not a matter of being a “ricer,” though there’s nothing ostensibly wrong with compiling software to your hardware platform.
Installing Gentoo has been pretty easy already, so I’m not sure that it really affords much to a potential administrator. Those should become familiar with whatever distributions they’ll be paid to deal with.
congrats! Hope to give it a try soon.
Gentoo for me was a bleeding edge distribution, where though I have to compile from source, but got the latest software. No doubt it was a great learning experience. However, I shifted to Arch when I got a ThinkPad. Though I still used to visit gentoo forums for any help that I wanted and always found some discussion addressing it. Gentoo forums are the greatest wealth of information for me.
Seeing that a new installer is ther for gentoo I could not stop myself from checking it out, I can see that gentoo is not as updated as Arch or even FreeBSD. For eg we still do not have xorg 7.0 in gentoo stable, I am very well aware that xorg must be there in unstable and working well too, but why is it not in stable when many others have it. Even the Next release of Ubuntu (due in April ) will have xorg 7.0, why not gentoo? same goes for KDE ( gentoo has 3.4.3 whereas the current version is 3.5.1).
Is there a change in gentoo to update the software stack after too much testing ? or was it always like that.
The Gentoo stability criteria is usually determined by the amount of time elapsing after a package is released without major bugs I think. At least most packages get marked stable after a month or so.
The “unstable/testing” packages of Gentoo is different from the “masked” packages.
The “masked” packages are the true bleeding-edge stuff on other distributions and for most cases “unstable/stable” packages work just fine when you override it with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~arch”.
“Stable” packages are just that. A little manual work would get “unstable” packages installed. I think this way general users gets a stable systems if they just do regular updates. It’s fine to have bleeding edge if you want to but most users would frown upon a complete mess after they ran “emerge -u world”.
I for one mix both stable and unstable packages. I am using the latest KDE 3.5.1 and ati-drivers for example. And that works just fine.
Even the Next release of Ubuntu (due in April ) will have xorg 7.0, why not gentoo? same goes for KDE ( gentoo has 3.4.3 whereas the current version is 3.5.1).
Is there a change in gentoo to update the software stack after too much testing ? or was it always like that.
First of all the seperation of xorg into modules is a much bigger deal for Gentoo than other distributions because now you have to build many many packages that all have to be tested with different use flags, cflags, and compilers. Also you have to take into account the fact that a release in Gentoo doesn’t matter. It’s only an LiveCD. You download the newest sources during installation.
“Gentoo Linux Installer officially debuting on the x86 LiveCD”
Does this mean that I can install Gentoo from Live CD ? I have never tried Gentoo, but can give it a shot if live cd works well on my system.
Tejas Kokje
Haven’t Gentoo moved to GCC 4 yet? Even Debian completed that by now… I guess upgrading toolchains is more difficult for source based distributions though.
Official is still the 3.x toolchain. But you can run 4.x if you want. I have here 4.1 RC2 runing, without any problems:
nautilus ~ # cat /etc/gentoo-release
Gentoo Base System version 1.12.0_pre16
nautilus ~ # gcc –version
gcc (GCC) 4.1.0-pre20060223 (prerelease)
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
nautilus ~ #
It’s not.
Just a matter of compiling the new version.
If you want pure toolchain (that recompiles itself with exactly same binaries), it requires a little more work (see LFS for that).
I haven’t downloaded the latest Gentoo yet, but how would this compare to Vidalinux? Wasn’t it their goal to build a Gentoo (Portage) based system that was easy to install?
Vidalinux has two USP
1) An easy GUI installer — The new Gentoo GUI installer is good too.
2) It supplies a large repository of pre-built packages for gentoo. This unique feature takes away the compile time and is very handy for mormal users. However, that is only for paid customers, for “free” customers, the choice is limited.
Compare this to gentoo pre-built packages, for eg::
http://test.gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Using_PORTAGE_BINHOST
and we have a huge repository, free of cost.
Not sure with these feature in gentoo, how relevant is paying for VLOS.
That apart VLOS was the first GUI install for gentoo and has helped many users venture into beautiful world of gentoo. kudos for this.
Edited 2006-02-27 14:02
Vidalinux just sucks, nothing but a stage 3 installation and nothing works, if you buy the “boxed edition” you get kernel-sources, open office and some other boring stuff. The developers of this package need to take a lesson or two in general business.
Well, the
http://www.t2-project.org/
appears to be a leap ahead. The gcc-3.4 based series was released stable months ago (2005-11-04) and the gcc-4.x based series including X11R7 is already in the beta phase – to be released stable next month:
http://www.t2-project.org/roadmap.html
The text installer is not so bad on Gentoo, even Stage 1. You really only have to setup your network, which is automatically setup if you use dhcp, partition your disks, install filesystems, chroot, bootstrap, emerge system, compile your kernel, and emerge/install grub. Other than the compiling and any extra configuration it only takes a few minutes. There is no harm in having an installer but it isn’t like text based installation was really that hard. With an installer you are still going to have to setup use flags and choose loggers, etc.
Not many people have time to tinker with the setup, so having some sort of installer for binary packages caters well for those people. Personally I like how things are done in FreeBSD. You can install a base system in less than 5 minutes and then use sysinstall or the ports system to add packages later.
Not many people have time to tinker with the setup, so having some sort of installer for binary packages caters well for those people.<p>
There are already binaries for Gentoo and you still have to tinker because the whole point of Gentoo is to be able to choose your own applications and your own setup BEFORE you build the system, unlike other distributions. The GUI installer doesn’t change any of this. It only gives you a pretty interface to do it all from. I don’t have a problem with the GUI installer but it doesn’t change much from a techinical point of view. In fact a stage3 + GRP is what you are talking about and it has been around for a long time now.
I wonder why Gentoo still doesn’t have its long planned “secure Portage”, i.e. official GPG verification support integrated into Portage? First time when I read about the plans related to it must have been in 2003 already, three years ago. Here is a link from 2004 explaining those plans: http://www.gentoo.org/news/20041021-portage51.xml
Debian has had its secure Apt (with GPG support) for some time now. Many RPM-based distros have integrated GPG checks to their package managers too. Why not Gentoo?
Another source-based distribution, and maybe one of Gentoo’s main competitors (although much smaller and less known for granted), Source Mage GNU/Linux (SMGL) has advanced GPG verification support for ages already and it works very well there as far as I know:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Spell_GPG_Checking
I don’t want to flame here, and Gentoo is fine and ok as far as I’m concerned, but personally, if I would want to run a source-based distro, I would probbaly choose SMGL over Gentoo. The installation seems simpler too. Here’s another interesting link where you can compare Gentoo and SMGL features:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/FaqDiff_Gentoo
Only thing that I don’t perhaps like so much in SMGL is its megic/sorcery metafora used in all SMGL-related commands…
Very impressive livecd. Wouldn’t work for my network card, so I was not able to connect to the internet, but this booted up beautifully on my xeon workstation.
I really hate gnome but the experience was fairly impressive overall.
Then again, this was only a couple of days after having to use CDE on solaris 9, so maybe it wasn’t a fair comparison of beauty
– Microsoft Fanboy
From my favorite bash.org quote,
<@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
<@insomnia> cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
<@insomnia> that’s the first one
Nifty installer on the live-cd.One of a kind other distros should take notice of.