Gentoo Linux Rolls Its Secret Sauce, May 10, 2007

The first Gentoo Linux release of the year is now available, featuring an improved installer and updated packages.

Gentoo Linux has released its first update of 2006, continuing the evolution of the meta-distribution, adding new software versions and improving support for PowerPC architectures.

The founder and former chief architect of Gentoo Linux, a so-called meta-distribution of Linux known for its adaptability, has joined the ranks at Redmond.

Gentoo Linux is proud to bring you the long awaited Gentoo Linux 2005.0 release!

The Gentoo Foundation Inc.'s Gentoo Linux has quickly grown into one of the world's most popular Linux distributions. However, Gentoo's non-commercial status, as well as its reputation as a bleeding-edge distribution for Linux system tweakers, has so far dimmed its prospects for enterprise adoption.

A project to create embedded versions of Gentoo Linux has achieved preliminary releases on x86, MIPS, PPC, and ARM.

You can find out more about 2004.3 by checking out the release page or reading the ChangeLog.

As I said in the #102 Mailbag, I've been wanting to try Gentoo. I hesitated to install it because I knew it would take three days since you have to compile your own software, and I assumed I would have lots of compilation errors to troubleshoot. But four of my friends have been running it at their workplaces and say they rarely get compilation errors -- mirable dictu. Three of them are solidly convinced for Gentoo; the other is a little tired of having to wait for a package to compile. But everyone says you just run "emerge PACKAGE" in a shell window and leave it alone, and 90% of the time you end up with a flawlessly installed package. No mess, no fuss, just pure impact. The way Unix was meant to be. This article describes my experience installing Gentoo, some things I learned along the way, and describes the Gentoo features I found the most interesting.

Gentoo has fixed a vulnerability in the 2.6 Linux kernel that could be exploited for a remote denial-of-service attack. The company calls this a "high-impact" flaw and recommends users update to newer versions of the kernel.

The departure of Daniel Robbins as the Chief Architect of Gentoo Linux will undoubtedly be felt by the project. Daniel was a key contributor to the Gentoo Linux project and his contributions will be missed by many.

As mentioned previously, Gentoo Technologies is in the process of becoming an official 501(c)(6) Not For Profit organization. This will place the stewardship of Gentoo Linux into the hands of a Board of Trustees, who will act as gentle caretakers of Gentoo.

Gentoo Linux has announced the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. The 'Gentoo Hardened team' has also unveiled the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture.

In addition to bugfixes and increased security, Gentoo Linux 2004.0 contains tools for developers including toolchain and user environment based on Linux kernel 2.6.3, GCC 3.3.2, GLIBC 2.3.2, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4.2, and xfce4.

Hackers have forced the Gentoo Linux project to take a server offline

The attack and subsequent compromise comes after several machines belonging to the Debian Linux project were breached by attackers last month. A forensic analysis of the Debian machines revealed that no software packages or source code offered for download were affected--a claim now being made by Gentoo.

The maintainers of the Gentoo Linux distribution released a statement that describes the incident: "One of the servers that makes up the rsync.gentoo.org rotation was compromised via a remote exploit," it reads. "The compromised system had both an IDS and a file integrity checker installed and...we are reasonably confident that the portage tree stored on that box was unaffected."

I note first off that this distribution is not for the faint of heart, but does have some advantages (which in some cases are disadvantages) right from the get-go. The install image is small. The release I downloaded (1.0) was a scant 16MB. Now that is a small image. Those of you tired of grabbing RedHats 2 CDs or SuSes 7 might be glad to hear that, but wait. The install CD is just that, like an install floppy, it has enough to "get you going". Then the installer will download the packages it needs for your system to build itself, then after that (and a reboot) if you want any other packages you can download them also. Of course, I am leaving some things out for now, but that is the basic concept. Now onto the things I left out..

Gentoo Linux 1.0 has finally been released! You'll find install instructions here and ISOs and build tarballs here (and on our mirrors soon). We've finally made it! I'll be working on making it possible to buy freshly-burnt up-to-date Gentoo Linux CDs through the site in the coming weeks -- stay tuned!

It took me a few minutes, but I settled comfortably into the realization that this installation was not a flashy, polished GUI installer a la Mandrake, but a user-driven command-line interface more akin to "Linux from scratch." It didn't take any graphics or fancy UI to convince me, though, that this was a very powerful package.

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