Gentoo 2005.0 Released

mintshows writes "According to Gentoo Planet, the first gentoo release of the year, 2005.0, is out. You can download the 2005.0 ISOs from the torrents at http://torrents.gentoo.org/ . Of course, current Gentoo users can just emerge to the latest and greatest as always."

Re:Gentoo liveCD?

[lachlan76]

Uhhh...what?

Gentoo is already on a livecd, which you boot from. Then you chroot into your hard drive for the install. Is that sort of what you meant?

Re:compile on!

[atrader42]

I'd shift those around a bit. The only real liability I've found is the compile time (which can be pretty drastically reduced with the use of some tools. Gentoo has tutorials). I would absolutely move learning and tweaking into the power/cusomizability category (though I haven't found much of a speed improvement over pre-compiled software in most cases, so that probably isn't the best reason to try gentoo). I started out with redhat 9, and although it did what I wanted for the most part, when I had a problem, it was usually pretty hard to fix since I didn't really know what was going on. Now that I've done a couple gentoo installs, though only stage 3, I must admit, I know much better what causes certain problems. In addition, I love being always up-to-date and not having to worry about cruft.

I'm a computer science student, and love learning all I can about computers, so maybe some of those are not advantages for you. However, if you're into experimentation and the latest and greatest, gentoo is a great way to play with it all.

Re:compile on!

[John Hurliman]

I don't know, I use binary packages for just about everything unless I want the latest bleeding edge stuff or it's just a small trivial package. Gentoo doesn't MAKE you compile everything, it's just the default option.

But to answer your question, I've had a fully compiled system started from stage one, and didn't have any hard drive problems. Also didn't notice any visible performance difference, but the customizability has kept me with Gentoo for a long time now.

For those of you who want ease of install

[vectorian798]

Try this out:
Vidalinux [vidalinux.com]

Apparently it's Gentoo, with a nice graphical installer that is no longer cruel and unusual punishment...although the install of Gentoo teaches you quite a bit.

Yes, you get the benefits of portage.

Just wait a little for a new version based on 2005

Oh, and I just

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really, I didn't just finish compiling whatever. Anyway, as a lot of people still don't seem to understand, release don't mean anything if you've got gentoo allready installed, as you can keep it up to date with emerge sync and emerge -u world, that's all there is to it.

Releases only mean something for people wanting to install gentoo, although it is no proplem to install from an older medium, you'll still get an uptodate system in the end.

However, what is great about new releases is that they mean new and uptodate binary packages, so if you just want to install gentoo quickly and still have an uptodate system, here is your chance.

Btw., wasn't this release supposed to feature at least a preview of the upcoming installer? Any word on that?

Re:Gentoo liveCD = Catalyst

[yamcha666]

The Gentoo people are already ahead of you.

The software is called Catalyst. More info here [gentoo.org].

Re:KDE 3.4

[Jafar00]

3.4 is there but masked. The current stable version according to portage is 3.3.2. I'm sure in a few weeks, I will wake up to a new KDE and a smoking CPU after all that compiling. Funny thing is, I use Xfce these days. ;)

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Stalyn]

please check here [gentoo.org].

just sub 2004.3 for 2005.0.

Re:compile on!

[Jafar00]

If you compile Gentoo on a slower system (PII, PIII etc) you will notice a huge increase in performance over a pre-packaged system. I have a PII-366 laptop that could not play movies until I installed Gentoo on it. Sure, it took 4 days to get everything installed, but in the end the old laptop is now quite usable with a cutting edge, new OS rather than just opting for the recommended win98 ;)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Trejkaz]

Actually, it's far from a nightmare on the desktop. I got sick of a few other distros mostly because of their philosophy of reinstalling every new minor release.

On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally. Since I did my last world upgrade a day after KDE 3.4 came out, I'm probably pretty up to date by chance.

Well, I guess there is a slight difference between the releases, though. The later profiles will specify more modern default packages than the earlier ones. That doesn't have too much effect once your system is already installed, however.

Re:KDE 3.4

[aconbere]

honestly XFCE 4.2 is one the nicest, cleanest and most stable Window Manager/ Desktop Environments I've found and I've tried them all. It's crisp clean and simple, doesn't come with a whole slew of deps (ie no ancient mozilla dependancies that I'm never going to use).

then to top it off, it has taken a clue from the *box's and the like and made using workspaces more than just an eye-candy toy, making it easy to scroll through workspaces, or to set keys to do so. It doesn't steal key configs as gnome does (F1?). and last but not least it's FAST.

Anders

Calm down

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, I agree with some of the things you say, while I personally don't find etc-update to be that hard (It just gives you a list of the config files that can be updated and you can then simply choose the ones you don't want to be updated, that is most of the times the ones you edited yourself and then update the rest automatically), it sure isn't the ideal way of doing things.

Also the important messages scrolling by has been a problem for ages and still hasn't been addressed, which is a shame.

And I also agree that gentoo's handling of web things like apache, php, wordpress, etc. is far from ideal. (webapp-config, how I hate you).

But there is one thing that really makes a lot of your critizism mute, you are running an unstable system and complain about breakage and constant updates. Come on, that's just silly.

And contrary to what you seem to think, there is no situation that requires you to run an unstable system, especially if this system is a server. If you think you need some unstable apps, fine, gentoo gives you the tools to just install those unstable apps and leave everything else stable, if you refuse to use these tools, don't complain, it is entirely your fault.

add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[rkcallaghan]

paste this block in to your /etc/portage/package.keywords to get KDE 3.4.0

# unmasking kde 3.4.0
=kde-base/kde-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeartwork-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdebase-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/arts-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdebase-pam-4 ~x86
=kde-base/kdelibs-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdegames-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdepim-3.4.0-r1 ~x86
=kde-base/kdewebdev-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdegraphics-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdenetwork-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdetoys-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeadmin-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdemultimedia-3.4.0 ~x86
>=media-libs/xine-lib-1.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeaddons-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeedu-3.4.0 ~x86
>=dev-libs/boost-1.32 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeutils-3.4.0 ~x86

Re:Gnome 2.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, Gnome 2.10 has been available for quite some time now. It's just masked, that is all.

So if you want it, unmask it (should be 2 minutes or work) and install it, but let the people that want to have a stable system have their stable system.

Broken system?

[Billly Gates]

I did an emerge --sync and an emerge -u world just a few hours ago.

I wonder if this new release is why autoconf became broken and why I can't compile anything,

Re:compile on!

[bonch]

Unfortunately, benchmarks show that there is no marked performance boost compiling everything. Mostly, the things that affect performance most from compilation are the kernel and libc.

Re:New but better?

[grishnav]

Ubuntu is really great like that. It's what I use when I don't have the time/motivation to do a Gentoo install (and then normally just wish I'd done the gentoo install when I can't have Gaim+OTR, mplayer+codecs, etc. without grabbing the tgz's, hunting down the deps, and putting it all together myself instead of just 'emerge gaim-otr', 'emerge mplayer'... oh well).

Anyway, Ubuntu has up to date packages, uses a nice interface to apt, and has really excellent hardware detection. It's as brainless to install as Windows and just about as easy to use. I like it much.

Re:compile on!

[dmayle]

has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end

I'm an avid Gentoo user, and I've got to say, if you're only considering Gentoo for the speed/power, you might as well put some stickers on your case, because you'll probably notice a bigger speed improvement like that. Gentoo is really useful for the following reason:

• Relatively bare-bones linux (like Linux from Scratch) but with excellent documentation. - Fantastic for learing about linux
• Customizability - if your distro maintainers chose one route with a package that doesn't meet your needs, your stuck installing from source, and maintaining version upgrades yourself. (Being sure to keep track of config options every time) - with Gentoo, you set the appropiate config option (called USE-flags) and you're good from then on.
• Support community - no matter who you are, sometimes you will have problems. Pretty much every problem I've ever had on Linux took a simple search on the Gentoo forums to find the solution in less than five minutes. (Even when my problems aren't on Gentoo Linux, I always search the Gentoo forums first, as they're usually more likely to contain a useful answer)
• Available packages - Everything under the sun (and I mean, just about everything you could want) is already packaged for Gentoo. Meaning, unlike with some other distros, you won't have to go searching for someone else's packages to install what you want. It's already there, with just one line to search and install.
• Support community - oh wait, did I mention this already? It deserves a second mention because it really is fantastic. I've never been more impressed with the amount of community help available.

Re:fragmented fs

[bonch]

I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts.

And people wonder why Gentoo users are stereotyped? All three of those statements aren't always true.

1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

I'm not bashing people who use Gentoo. I'm just saying, it's not some perfect distro that does everything great. And compilation is so overrated and provides no benefits. I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu, so that's just me.

Split ebuilds

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't do that, use the new split ebuilds.

Re:fragmented fs

[szap]

The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation

You might want to look into XFS, particularly xfs_fsr ("filesystem reorganizer for XFS" from the xfsdump package in most distros). Works on mounted filesystems.

Higher CPU and mem usage than other fs, though. YMMV.

Thanks to the astute posters above...

[EzInKy]

...for pointing out that I yet again have made a typo. Yes, of course I meant '02, not `92. It's an age thing. After you live through enough of them, the decades just seem to start running together.

Re:"Iso's"

[Anonymous Coward]

You are full of shit, mate.

Quick making excuses and learn to fucking spell.

Thank you.

Re:Darn it!

[KidHash]

Using portage, installing app.version.9999 installs the current CVS build

Re:Proposal for etc-update solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using dispatch-conf instead of etc-update. This does exactly what you're suggesting.

Re:question,

[tomstdenis]

A small gentoo desktop install typically takes between 1 and 2GB. That includes the coreutils, linuxutils, X, mozilla, editors, compilers, etc...

As for the ram, ideally you want 256 as a minimum or you're going to be swapping a lot to disk. 512MB is plenty. I know on my laptop at least going from 256 to 768 [two slots, it came with a 256MB board] MB of ram was a nice boost for building stuff.

On my laptop I sit at 3.2GB used and I have tons of other tools installed [Gnome, tetex, debugging tools, gaim, openoffice, etc...].

But even a full desktop build with Gnome or KDE wouldn't top 4GB of space and in that you're getting a lot of free tools.

Tom

Re:question,

[MeerCat]

can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

I'm running gentoo on an old 233 pentium MMX laptop with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gg hard disk (of which 1.5 gb is stil an old windows partition) - it's my home server including my main mail server (built in UPS, only draws about 10 watts, small and quite quiet etc.) and it's running fine.

I rarely run up X on it, I admit, but I've got X installed (so if need be I can run up apps to display on my main machine) and it's happily running qmail (qpsmtpd,spamassassin, clamav,pyzor, razor,dcc etc.), ssh and other "home server" apps, and it doesn't need much room:


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 2.9G 1.8G 1019M 64% /
/dev/hda5 17M 8.7M 7.5M 54% /boot
/dev/hda7 1.1G 560M 529M 52% /usr/portage



I could probably trim this further, but it's fine for me. I have a weekly cron job to "emerge --sync" and "emerge -Dupv world", and I'm thinking of adding "emerge -Du --fetch-only world".
Updates compile a little slowly at times, but then I don't have much installed to update, and I could always add a cron job to do the updates too.

Re:compile on!

[amcguinn]

To my mind, the big advantage is that the dependencies are more fuzzy. I can run a stable distribution, with stable, tested, software, but if I need, say, the latest Abiword, or mplayer, I don't need to upgrade my whole system to get it. That is what I always wanted with Debian, but couldn't have.

The end result is just slightly less stable than debian "stable", but considerably more than "testing" or "unstable". It is only possible because my packages are built against the libraries I've got, not the ones the package maintainer has got. Waiting for compiles is a pain, but it's what makes it all work.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.

I feel somewhat obliged to point out that with Gentoo you don't need to know what those special cases are since you just set the USE flags for your system and then let it take care of everything. An example: When I used Debian I tried to get lirc working with xine and no matter how I tried to configure it I couldn't get it to work until I finally discovered that the Debian package was compiled with lirc support disabled - despite the fact that if you download lirc and compile it yourself it's enabled by default (I looked at that and couldn't believe that any package maintainer would compile a package with such default settings off). Now I have lirc set as a USE flag and never need to know whether it's set as default or not since everything just works.

Re:fragmented fs

[tweakt]

"The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update."

Then you'll be pleased to discover 'dispatch-conf' It keeps all your CONFIG_PROTECT files in RCS revision control and automatically merges in changes which do not result in conflicts (not by default, auto-merge must be enabled, but it works flawlessly). You'll only be prompted when there are changes to config files in updates that directly conflict with changes that you've made yourself.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha-WHA?! By "average Gentoo package", do you mean KDE or OpenOffice (the two biggest offenders for compile time)? My hardware hasn't been called "current" since 2000, and most emerges just take a few minutes.

Furthermore, OOo has a binary distribution, and KDE is in the process of changing to split ebuilds (so you only have to compile those programs that have actually changed).

Warning to AMD64 Users - Don't download yet!

[isolationism]

Users wishing to take the plunge and install Gentoo on an AMD64 should wait a day or three before attempting to download an image from the mirror. As described in the thread on the Gentoo Forums [gentoo.org], the wrong image has been propagated by accident.

Gentoo's master mirror was staged with the wrong amd64 livecds which don't boot due to a missing bootsector!

We're currently shipping the correct images to all the mirrors.

Not that this will probably impact any /. readers, but I read the AMD64 forums religiously as I have two AMD64 Gentoo installations at my house. I don't go reading the forums before installing though, so hopefully this saves at least one person some time/frustration before installing.

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[MarcQuadra]

m I going to have to rebuild my entire base system manually because I waited too long between syncs?

No. The message that your configuration isn't valid anymore isn't a death-knell. Change the symlink of /etc/make.profile to a newer target and emerge -u world.

With a system that old, I'd do an emerge -e world too, to recompile the whole system with your new compiler.

Re:fragmented fs

[Oopsz]

dispatch-conf has one feature i've yet to see in any other conf manager or editor. Saved, revisioned histories. That alone is worth it's use..

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[flithm]

Yes it compiles for amd64. Also your video card has absolutely nothing to do with compilation! The only thing that your video card affects is the X server (and to some degree frame buffer console mode)... which is your fault for buying ATI (known for notoriously bad Linux support).

Support a company that cares about Linux: NVidia.

Having said that... many people with ATI cards have Linux running properly (with 3D support). I've heard they've been improving their driver steadily.

The "Installer" Isn't Just For Installing Gentoo

[grubber33]

As you all know, Gentoo releases are just pre-compiled packages with on a live CD with an environment for you to work your way around in. This also comes in handy for rescuing any Linux installation, as I've done many times before. If you mess up your kernel config or your FS crashes and you can't acces *.fsck, you can always do it from the live CD. Just a note for those that have had horrid experiences with getting back into their desktops after upgrades.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[drinkypoo]

It is really annoying that you have to be compiling constantly when you use gentoo, but it's not annoying that it actually works and I can just make my own installer CD with a miniroot that has busybox and some filesystem utilities in it, and unpack a tarball into place. Bingo, I'm installed. I chroot into it, build whatever I need to get the system going, install grub to the boot partition, and bingo. I'm in like Flynn. On the other hand, I continually have problems getting other Linux distributions to install, even on completely ordinary hardware. I've had problems on very boring systems (that the gentoo LiveCD figured out completely) with Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Slackware. Gentoo generally just works, and it's very easy to figure out how to make my own installer CD if theirs doesn't support my particular hardware. (mkisofs is your friend. you will need a current version of grub if you want to use it, because it supports el torito boot.) I just build whatever kernel I need on another system and I'm done. You could get there with colinux if you had to.

If I were a noob I'd probably be trying to run fedora, but I'm not even going to get involved there. If I can't get white box linux to work on a mailserver box at work, then I'm going to put gentoo there, too. It had SuSE enterprise 8 which actually required an update to 8.1 or 8.01 or something in order to support a megaraid card in a gateway server. I tried doing it with debian, but debian didn't want to read its driver floppies.

I'm pretty well disgusted with every distribution other than gentoo. It features the best part of BSD, namely ports, in a linux-friendly form. Some of the package maintainers are definitely crack smokers, but in general the system works very well. In particular portage itself needs help, especially so that it can recover from problems. If even the cached information is somehow corrupted, even though portage can tell it's corrupted, it won't rebuild it properly. In general some of the most important parts of gentoo, like portage in fact, are poorly documented. Don't even look at the documentation for the installer LiveCD creation tool, it's maybe five percent of what it should be, and even most gentoo developers reportedly don't understand it. Otherwise I've been as pleased with gentoo as possible.

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

Setting things up is a breeze. You won't find any config files outside of /etc (usually in /etc/packagename) except for the ones in /etc/conf.d that specify startup flags and the like. Gentoo is very consistent, much moreso than most other distributions, even if you don't like the way it does everything. On a fairly fast machine with plenty of memory it only takes a couple days to build gentoo with KDE and Gnome, honestly. Even on a slow machine it shouldn't take more than a week and most of that time you can be doing something else :)

Honestly, the gentoo base installation goes very quick. I suggest starting from a stage3 install, as you can actually be using the system while you upgrade it. Install the portage tree from the CD and don't upgrade it until after you install binary packages from the packages CD. Then emerge --sync to update portage, emerge -u portage to update portage, then emerge -uD world to update the entire system. I think the single thing that takes the longest is probably either building gcc, or X.org. Everything else is relatively short.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[hpxchan]

Everything is up-to-date, and re-installs are rarely - if ever - necessary. Fedora Core users must wait for FC4 for KDE 3.4 and Gnome 2.10; Gentoo users just have to wait for the rsync update.

If (like me) you're runnning a personal computer (i.e. not a production server) and want the latest and greatest as soon as they come out, Gentoo is worth it.

Chandler

Um, not insightful: Wrong.

[oldosadmin]

This is a new *profile* version. Profile versions change things. Like default packages (one of the 2004 releases changed "x-window-system" to be xorg-x11 by default, for example).

New profiles mean more than just installers.