FreeSoftNews

Linux distributions often live and die on the strength of their respective communities. Such is the case with the Gentoo Linux distribution, which canceled its last release in 2007 but has now emerged in 2008 with a new release.

Tanned, rested and ready?

Developers are hopeful that the 2008.0 release will put Gentoo back on track as the project aims to regain momentum and mindshare with open source developers. The latest release of Gentoo comes on the heals of a hot release season for Linux. Red Hat, Ubuntu and openSUSE are all planning to release updates.

Read more at InternetNews

For those unfortunate souls who couldn’t boot or burn the LiveCD, we’ve provided the 2008.0-r1 revision bump. It fixes these specific problems:

* Bug #230998: 2008.0 LiveCD for x86/amd64 messes up when copying kernel/initramfs into tmpfs
* Bug #231024: LiveCD AMD64 image does not fit on ordinary 700MB CD

We apologize if you encountered one of these problems. We fixed them as quickly as we could after hearing about them. Get the new 2008.0-r1 revision from our “Get Gentoo!” page.

Read more at Gentoo

Elections just ended for the Gentoo council for the next year. Turnout was 57% with 145 developers voting, which is quite excellent. The council, created by GLEP 39 to replace Gentoo’s previous hierarchy, decides on global issues and policies that affect multiple projects. To select council members, Gentoo uses the Condorcet voting method, which involves ranking them in order rather than just picking a single candidate. Here are your new council members, listed by ranking in the election results:

* Donnie Berkholz
* Mark Loeser
* Diego Pettenò
* Petteri Räty
* Luca Barbato
* Markus Ullmann
* Tobias Scherbaum

All of the previous council members who ran again were re-elected, and the two new members are Mark Loeser and Tobias Scherbaum. A full list of ranked candidates is also available. These graphs illustrate the results more clearly. They are histograms, where higher columns on the left side indicate high rankings, and higher columns on the right side indicate low rankings.

The new council members will get right to work—the new council’s first meeting, scheduled for July 10, is approaching fast.

Read more at Gentoo

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 [1], 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.

• Read more: Gentoo Linux 2008.0 released

• Music by: Rob Costlow - Meant to Be (from: http://www.jamendo.com/it/album/888)
• Screenshots on our wiki:
  - Visual Tour Part 1
  - Visual Tour Part 2
• Linux Kernel 2.6.25.9 with extended Wireless, Laptop (UMPC, like EeePC), Filesystem (unionfs, aufs, squashfs, ext4, NTFS-3g) support
• Really fast boot time (around 30 seconds, depending on your Computer)
• Out-Of-The-Box hardware detection, Input devices, GPUs, wireless, in no time!
• Outstanding easy-to-setup 3D Desktop, Gaming support, thanks to Compiz Fusion 0.7.6 and a set of free Top-Tier Games included or available (Sauerbraten, Second Life!, Nexuiz, Quake4, Warsow, Savage, Wesnoth)
  - AMD/ATI Catalyst 8.6
  - NVIDIA: 173.14.05, 96.43.05 and 71.86.04 - automatic selection
  - X.Org Server 1.4.2 (7.3), automatic input devices configuration through HAL
• Incredible set of ready-to-use applications and Desktop Environments:
  - KDE 3.5.9 (KDE 4.0.5 available for download)
  - GNOME 2.22.2
  - XFCE 4.4.2
  - Fluxbox 1.0
  - OpenOffice 2.4
  - Firefox 3.0
  - aMule 2.2.0
  - Wine 1.1.0
  - Google Earth 4.2 and Picasa 2.7
  - Flash 9
  - Java 1.6 (IcedTea)
  - Innotek VirtualBox 1.5
• Entropy 0.15.23.7: defining the “software2.0″ concept (read our current/future development plan and status, sponsored by the NLnet Foundation)
  - This is the Cool, Exclusive, Fast, User-oriented, Sabayon Linux Package Manager, Portage compatible, written from scratch
  - Featuring “equo” as Textual front-end
  - Featuring “Spritz” as Graphical front-end (based on YumEx)
  - Featuring a notification applet front-end to keep your system up-to-date (based on RHN-Applet)
  - Featuring an Online Packages Browser at packages.sabayonlinux.org
  - Featuring “Community Repositories” support, every user will be able to create his/her own repository in less than 15 minutes
  - Featuring Gentoo Linux Security Advisories support, enabling you to easily and quickly get informed about security threats and their fixes/package updates
  - Completely internationalized into your language (5 languages currently supported), help us!
  - Around 7500 applications available for buth 32 and 64bit Computers
  - Multiple branches support, wanna stick with 3.5 during the 4.0 development? No problem!
  - Currently at about 40000 lines of code, and growing
  - No more headaches to keep your System updated, We do it for You! Two clicks or a few keystrokes, this is what you just need.
  - Completely based on Open Source technologies (Python, SQLite, MySQL, OpenSSL, Urwid, gzip), source code available at svn.sabayonlinux.org
  - One of the first Gentoo-based Linux distribution actively supporting source and binary packages.
• Sabayon Linux Installer:
  - Now with a refreshed and more polished look
  - Featuring the following installation profiles:
  - KDE 3.5.9
  - GNOME 2.22.2
  - XFCE 4.4.2
  - Fluxbox 1.0
  - UMPC (really tight setup, featuring XFCE)
  - Core (server-oriented setup)
  - Featuring a Custom Packages Selector, to allow tweaking your installation to death
  - Improved Software RAID, Fake RAID and Windows detection
  - Intense bug fixing, most of the code has been rewritten from scratch to reduce system libraries dependency
  - Fully integrated with the Entropy subsystem
• Media Center functionalities:
  - GeeXbox 1.1-devel included
  - Elisa Media Center 0.3.5
• From future:
  - KDE 4.1 ready!
  - Sabayon Linux 4.0 upgrade ready!
  - EeePC 10xxx ready!

Read more at Sabayon

The June issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month’s issue: LinuxTag
and FliSoL, GSOC interview, Gentoo in space, and more!

SystemRescueCd, a small Gentoo-based live CD designed for hard disk partitioning and data rescue tasks, has been updated to version 1.0.4. What’s new? “Updated the default kernel to Linux 2.6.25.7 with Reiser4fs; fixed problem with Samba due to bad case in the UTF8 character set; fixed the LVM….

Read more at DistroWatch

Sabayon Linux today announced that it will partner with NetCraft Communications, a global provider of computer infrastructure management services and makers of Versiera, Remote System Management and Monitoring Software. As part of this strategic alliance, both companies will leverage their technologies, including Sabayon Entropy to provide broader software distribution methods.

Versiera will now be available on Sabayon Linux, an open source desktop operating system based on Gentoo Linux. The first web-based system for infrastructure monitoring and management to support a broad spectrum of operating systems, Versiera simplifies the common system administration tasks. It can quickly identify and notify of technology issues, Versiera can help preempt functionality problems at various layers of the infrastructure. The purpose Versiera software is to reduce the cost of technology ownership and enable companies to focus on their core business.

Read more at PRWeb

The May issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month’s issue: Gentoo Foundation status, Summer of Code interview, network monitoring, and more!

If you’re interested in the legal standing of Gentoo, you can relax because in the past week, the State of New Mexico declared that the Gentoo Foundation Inc has returned to good standing and is free to do business. This accomplishment allows other aspects of the foundation’s work to proceed again. The foundation takes care of Gentoo’s intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks) and money. It ensures that nobody violates our copyrights and trademarks, serves as a place to hold money, and decides where to devote that money.

Thanks to everyone involved with returning Gentoo to good legal standing, and thanks to our community for your patience!

Read more at Gentoo

Some important things for Gentoo happened over the last few days. First of all we have a bit of good news as all the paperwork for the Gentoo Foundation was filed and approved a few days ago, see Gentoo Foundation, INC. From my understanding the Gentoo Foundation was administratively dissolved due to required paperwork not being filed over quite some time but it’s good to see that this problem is now resolved.

Read more at LiveJournal

2008.0_beta2 is here. Thanks to you, our community, for testing beta1 and filing many bugs. You can help make 2008.0 amazing! Test out this beta and report any functionality issues you encounter. Since this is still a beta, we’re looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork.

This should be the last beta and will be followed by the final 2008.0 release after further bug fixing.

Get 2008.0_beta2 from the usual places.

Roy Bamford, the newly elected President of the Gentoo Foundation’s trustees, spoke with David Abbott from LinuxCrazy. You can download the podcast.

He talked about recent challenges the Gentoo Foundation faces, among other topics. You can learn about the reinstatement of the foundation, short- and long-term plans, a possible move to the Software Freedom Conservancy and answers to some common questions, like how you can contribute to Gentoo. On a more personal note, you can hear about Roy’s long Linux and Gentoo experience, his hardware and the origin of his nickname, NeddySeagoon.

Read more at Gentoo

When we said “soon,” even we didn’t realize how soon it would be. 2008.0_beta1 is here. Your support and enthusiasm are greatly appreciated—thank you.

You can help make 2008.0 amazing! Test out this beta and report any functionality issues you encounter. Since this is the first beta, we’re looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork. We expect to release a second beta once your testing has helped us fix problems with this first beta.

A migration to RPM was carefully considered again for this release, but in the end we decided to wait for the few remaining RPM-using distributions to migrate to the superior packaging format of ebuilds.

Read more at Gentoo

The 2008.0 beta is roughly a month behind the original tentative schedule. A number of factors contributed to this, including the migration to new release processes, the usual delays that affect most open-source projects, and the death of a close relative of our developers Chris Gianelloni and Chrissy Fullam.

Work on the first beta is still underway, and we expect to release it soon.

Read more at Gentoo

There have been some questions on the Gentoo lists about the unexplained delay in the 2008.0 beta release. What’s going on is that two of the key developers involved have suffered a severe personal loss and are not currently able to work on that release.

Read more at LWN

The March issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month’s issue: Gentoo trustee election results, conference summaries and more!

If you need to repair PCs, even if you don’t use Linux as a rule, you should have a Linux repair CD. These self-booting Linux distributions give you all the software tools you need to bring all but the deadest computers back to life. The best of these distributions is, hands-down, SystemRescueCd.

I’ve been using SystemRescueCd for years, and it has saved my rump many times. With every new version, SystemRescueCd has continued to get better.

Now, after years of development, project leader Francois Dupoux has released Version 1.0 of this great Gentoo-Linux-based distribution. A wonderful tool before, with this update, SystemRescueCd has become a necessity for anyone doing either individual or corporate PC repair work.

Read more at Linux-Watch

New trustees for the Gentoo Foundation were just elected. The foundation takes care of Gentoo’s intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks) and money. It ensures that nobody violates our copyrights and trademarks, serves as a place to hold money, and decides where to devote that money in the best interests of Gentoo.

Developers have been voting to elect 5 new trustees for the last couple of weeks, and the developers they elected are:

• Roy Bamford (neddyseagoon)
• Ferris McCormick (fmccor)
• Joshua Jackson (tsunam)
• Tom Gall (tgall)
• William Thomson (wltjr)

The agenda for the first meeting includes discussion of incorporation, the bylaws and future plans. The meeting will be 1900 UTC Sunday, March 16 in #gentoo-trustees on irc.freenode.net, and it is open for all to attend.

Gentoo Website

The february issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month’s issue: Gentoo trustee elections, how a team works, graphical statistics and more!