Gentoo Archive

Gentoo, the venerable Linux distribution which in my headcanon I describe as ‘classy’, has banned any use of “AI”. A proposal by Gentoo Council member Michal Górny from February of this year banning its use has been unanimously accepted by the Gentoo Council. The new policy reads: It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns. Michal Górny We’ll have to see how this policy will be implemented, but I like that Gentoo is willing to take a stand.

You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed? To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates – not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! Gentoo’s official news This is not as big of a deal as I feel like it should be. Gentoo is special, unique, and exists outside of the usual realm of distribution competition. Gentoo offering a binary method of installation makes perfect sense, I doubt anyone will complain, and nothing much will change. Yet, it feels like it should be a bigger deal?

This blog post details how the Gentoo Developers have added a "deblob" USE flag to remove any non-free code within the Linux Kernel. Its goal is to "remove binary blobs from kernel sources to provide libre license compliance". While we're at it, Kernel News has an in-depth look at Gentoo Linux.

The 2008.0 final release is out! 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.

Daniel Robbins, original creator of the Gentoo project, offers a solution to fix the recent leadership crisis at Gentoo: "I have received permission from my employer to return and serve as President of the Gentoo Foundation, renew its charter, and then work in some capacity to help to get Gentoo going in the right direction from a legal, community and technical perspective."

A relatively lengthy Q&A with Ciaran McCreesh about Paludis, the Portage alternative for Gentoo.

Techgage has taken a hard look at the latest release from Gentoo, particularly its installation process. Although there is a revamped installer, using it proved to be a less than perfect experience: "This installer does not function like the previous ones. Before, the installer would wait until you made changes to the last option before it began installing. Now, everything is installed along the way."

The Gentoo Release Engineering project is pleased to announce the much-delayed release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named 'Secret Sauce'. This release met with several delays due to an abnormally high number of security vulnerabilities in large packages which had to be rebuilt using the newer, secure versions of the packages. Update: Screenshots!

"Triggered by recent examples of bad behavior and dissatisfaction among developers and users alike, the Gentoo Council has drafted a new Code of Conduct that will be enforced for both developers and users. The draft of the Code of Conduct is currently being discussed on the Gentoo-dev mailing list."

"Last week, the Gentoo project entered the lowest point of its 7-year old existence. The single most telling statement attesting to this fact is this brief excerpt from the current issue of Gentoo Weekly News. 'The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project: Daniel Robbins; the following developers recently left the Gentoo project: Daniel Robbins' Yes, this is the same Daniel Robbins who founded Gentoo Linux back in the year 2000 and who left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project."

"I love Gentoo, I also hate it with a vengeance. I’m not talking small time peeves here, like the way Krispy Kremes icing gets all over your fingers (and by extension, clothes). I’m talking the type of frustration that is expressed in multitudes of expletives, some of which would make the profinsaurus cry. Why? Because, by definition and by nature, a source-based distribution is its own worst enemy."

Another review of Gentoo 2006.1. In one respect, Gentoo Linux 2006.1 is the same as it's always been, except with newer software on the installation media. Beginning with version 2006.0, though, a graphical environment was added to the live CD along with an installation program that rarely worked properly. The good news is, the installer works reasonably well in Gentoo 2006.1; the bad news is, it's still quicker and easier to install by hand via the command line.

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.

Techgage reviews Sabayon Linux, and conclcudes: "After taking an initial look at Sabayon, I have mixed feelings. Though, I feel more joy when using it than anything negative. One reason this distro may stand out above others is because it takes a difficult base distro, and opens its arms for new users who want to experiment. When it's all said and done, you will have a full functional Gentoo machine after the installation, topped off with a Sabayon coat of paint. What a great looking coat of paint it is."