http://www.osnews.com/story/13803/Gentoo_2006_0_Released Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 19 May 2013 01:10:44 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?99544 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99544 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! Mon, 27 Feb 2006 04:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (hhcv) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99547 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99547 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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 05:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (nighty5) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99549 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99549 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 05:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flav2000) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99553 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99553 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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (SEJeff) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99555 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99555 congrats! Hope to give it a try soon. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ArKay) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99558 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99558 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abhaysahai) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99567 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99567 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". Mon, 27 Feb 2006 07:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Lumbergh) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99571 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99571 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 07:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flav2000) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99573 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99573 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... Mon, 27 Feb 2006 07:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (martin.k) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99574 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99574 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 07:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bedo) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99579 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99579 "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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tejaskokje) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99587 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99587 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (saxiyn) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99590 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99590 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 ~ # Mon, 27 Feb 2006 09:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (SteveB) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99616 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99616 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 ? Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ookaze) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99617 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99617 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). Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ookaze) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99622 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99622 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? Mon, 27 Feb 2006 11:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (valnar) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99625 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99625 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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 11:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (m_abs) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99636 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99636 >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... Mon, 27 Feb 2006 12:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sithgunner) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99638 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99638 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 12:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ookaze) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99650 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99650 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Scott) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99652 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99652 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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abhaysahai) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99658 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99658 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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rener) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99659 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99659 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rjpa) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99684 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99684 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (byrc) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99692 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99692 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99693 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99693 The problem is that unstable branch is too unstable. When I used Gentoo (2004-2005) with ~x86 from stage 1 it just worked. Recently I tought I'd try how this changed. I've installed Gentoo from stage 3 and then upgraded to unstable branch. It refused to even boot after that. Running mixed x86 and ~x86 is too much of a hassle so I don't know if the benefits of Gentoo outweight the problems of maintaining the system : Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (miscz) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99695 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99695 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). Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (SEJeff) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99720 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99720 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Get a Life) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99727 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99727 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Get a Life) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99738 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99738 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dark child) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99756 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99756 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... Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (irbis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99792 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99792 Not many people have time to tinker with the setup, so having some sort of installer for binary packages caters well for those people.

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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99797 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99797 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99801 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99801 The problem is that unstable branch is too unstable. When I used Gentoo (2004-2005) with ~x86 from stage 1 it just worked. Recently I tought I'd try how this changed. I've installed Gentoo from stage 3 and then upgraded to unstable branch. It refused to even boot after that. Running mixed x86 and ~x86 is too much of a hassle so I don't know if the benefits of Gentoo outweight the problems of maintaining the system :

It's called unstable for reason. You don't need an entirely unstable system to run unstable software on Gentoo. Personally I don't think there is much point in running an entirely unstable Gentoo. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99803 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99803 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. Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99822 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99822 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 Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (morglum666) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99825 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99825 From my favorite bash.org quote,

it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
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
that's the first one Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jamesd) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?99969 http://www.osnews.com/thread?99969 Nifty installer on the live-cd.One of a kind other distros should take notice of. Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (netpython) Comments