Linuxlookup.com is reporting on the release of Gentoo Linux 2006.1. Building on the strengths of previous releases and featuring all of Gentoo’s well-documented flexibility, performance and portability, this release is now available on all supported architectures. The most popular architectures now use GCC 4.1, glibc 2.4 and baselayout 1.12.1, as well as including a new profile layout, with seperate desktop and server profiles.
Gentoo Linux 2006.1 Released
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Finaly }:>
Isn’t it a rolling release anyway?
Could have just grabbed 2006.0 and emerge vauD world
Unless you have really new hardware that wasn’t detected by 2006.0 CD
Upgrades aren’t necessarily that simple, even in Gentoo. Firstly, one ought to update the /etc/make.profile symlink to point to the appropriate portage profile. Secondly, consider the gcc upgrading guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gcc-upgrading.xml
It specifically states that there have been some incompatible ABI changes between binaries produced by gcc-3.4 and gcc-4.1 – presumably the C++ runtime library again. In any case, this is an important issue if the user decideds to explicitly activate the new instance of gcc with the gcc-config tool after installing gcc-4.1. As the majority of upgraders will most probably want to do exactly that, the most sensible procedure would be to to carry out the instructions mentioned in the guide: upgrade gcc, switch/activate, emerge libtool, emerge -e world then optionally remove the older version of the compiler. If you think about it, running emerge -uDN world would be a complete waste of time unless one intended to stay with gcc-3.x for the forseeable future …
Finally, depending on the exact circumstances and not necessarily relating to the variations between official release snapshots, upgrades of certain packages can sometimes entail particular steps to “clean up” afterwards. This might entail running perl-cleaner, python-updater and/or revdep-rebuild (I’m sure I don’t need to mention dispatch-conf/etc-update).
Anyway, this looks like a good release – well done to the Gentoo release engineering team
Upgrades aren’t necessarily that simple, even in Gentoo. Firstly, one ought to update the /etc/make.profile symlink to point to the appropriate portage profile.
To clarify, it’s only necessary to do that about once or twice a year. Other than that, gentoo upgrades are indeed (mostly) rolling. Anything more complicated than that is often (though not always) due to upstream changes the gentoo people have little control over, e.g. changes in gcc or the switch to modular X.
However, it would be my advice (to anyone installing or reinstalling [why?!] Gentoo on a new box who wants to take it) to always use the very latest official release of the install CD’s for your architecture.
Edited 2006-08-31 14:46
Also, I forgot to add that when switching gcc versions one really ought to rebuild the kernel and kernel modules in their entirety. The kernel does not like having portions of itself built with different compilers. I’ve seen this happen quite often with people who build external modules (such as nvidia-drivers), expecting to be able to use the modules with a kernel that was originally compiled with an older gcc version. It doesn’t work. Although it’s easily dealt with, the point is that there is no “automagic” way of taking care of all of this.
Edited 2006-08-31 11:42
http://gentoo-install.com/
Pretty basic, but it does the job.
Another note worthy document, the official Gentoo Handbook. There’s also plenty of people in IRC and the forums to help you. Fear not, Gentoo now ships with a GTK and Ncurses installer.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml
irc.freenode.net #gentoo #gentoo-amd64 #gentoo-ppc #gentoo-ppc64
http://forums.gentoo.org/
The GTK/ncurses installer didn’t exactly work last time I tried it, but I’m comfortable enough with the commandline to use it anyway. I hope the installer has improved in this release.
IMO, if you have a setup that will allow you to follow the handbook more or less blindly, the commandline install should be easy enough for anyone who can get over the “OMG! it’s a commandline! WTFx3” stage.
Isn’t it “mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc” instead of “mount -t proc proc /mnt/gentoo/proc”
Why have you obsoleted “mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev” if i may ask?
Fixed a few things in the past few days, 2006.1 dumped a fewthings, so im changing as people find errors.
Will have to try it once I get my laptop harddrive working again. In other words, a new harddrive. I really liked the first review of this distro and will just wait to see more reviews about it. I am really starting to get persuaded into trying it.
List of good distros to me:
Gentoo, Slackware, Slax, Zenwalk, Vector
Distros I have not liked:
Fedora, Redhat, Mandrake, Knoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu
Yes, it’s a good review. I might also try Gentoo now too. The installer looks really good and you can have a full desktop with Gnome quite easily. It seems that Gentoo shouldn’t scare anyone now.
By the way, you should try Arch Linux if you liked those distros you mention.
List of good distros to me:
Gentoo, Slackware, Slax, Zenwalk, Vector
Distros I have not liked:
Fedora, Redhat, Mandrake, Knoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu
Just curious what you liked/didn’t like about these distros. I tried Ubuntu but it ran noticably slower on my machine so I returned to Gentoo. I’m about to give Vector a try since it’s billed as working well on older harware.
…I just finished compiling KDE. 🙁
In all seriousness, I wonder what a quad-core CPU would do to compile times. Maybe it’ll make installing apps almost as fast as a binary install, thereby making Gentoo more attractive to a larger user base.
Well, I run gentoo and use both a dual-core Opteron 165 @2.5GHz and an Athlon64 3200 to compile (using distcc to distribute the compiling over the machines). It’s very fast at compiling, but still much slower than a binary install. Also, many packages have to be compiled with make -j1 (i.e. only one file is compiled at a time) because otherwise the build process breaks, so adding more cores doesn’t help with them.
Having said that, the advantages of gentoo make up for the compile times for me.
…I wonder what a quad-core CPU would do to compile times. Maybe it’ll make installing apps almost as fast as a binary install, thereby making Gentoo more attractive to a larger user base…
We’re running a quad core Xeon workstation with 4 gigs of RAM at work. (We do fMRI brain imaging analysis with the machine.) Gentoo is our primary OS for the workstation, and the stage1 install was not quick *at all.* =)
Compiling from source still takes a while no matter what powerhouse you’ve got… especially when you compile things like glibc and gcc more than once. And comparing binary install times with compile-install times on the same workstation will most likely always favor the binary (by leaps and bounds).
I still love Gentoo. Beyond the hype, it has a great community, excellent documentation, and it’s empowering to users. I personally came for the optimizations, but I stayed for its package management system. Not only are dependencies not an issue, but I love that for each package you can selectively compile-in or opt-out of compiling-in support for other applications/frameworks. I don’t know many other distros that make that so simple.
I love other distros, but gentoo definitely fills an important niche. And that niche, in many ways, is under appreciated. We’re not all “ricers.” To me, Gentoo makes freedom more accessible.
I love other distros, but gentoo definitely fills an important niche. And that niche, in many ways, is under appreciated. We’re not all “ricers.” To me, Gentoo makes freedom more accessible.
I couldn’t agree more. I recently tried bringing an old laptop to life. Fedora – hated it, ubuntu – hated it, whoppix – i like but i’ll stick with gentoo.
HA! this coming from me, a former MS addict. I finally understand what they’ve been saying about command line interfaces! sheesh, i am a geek.
I must say it’s been nice to read some of the compliments and constructive criticism in the Gentoo and NetBSD articles that have been posted recently, rather than enduring another bitchfest like the one we’ve had the past week. And no, I wasn’t blameless in that, either.
I keep my main system updated almost to the day. I have had GCC 4.1.1 as my main compiler for some time now so that wasn’t a big issue for me. I just relinked my profile to 2006.1 and “emerge -auDv world”. Not too bad at all. It makes me cringe when I think of the last time I upgraded a binary system, which was from Redhat 8 to Redhat 9. That was a nightmare. It never quite worked right and I had to backup and reinstall anyway. I have had the same Gentoo system running for three years now.
What do you run as desktop manager if any?
What do you run as desktop manager if any?
I am using windowmaker but I have gnome installed because I use a lot of gnome applications.
It’s a shame OSNews has nothing to say about Linux From Scratch 6.2.
Gentoo sweetest distro yet.