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paan 11 July 2008 Knicks and knacks 689 views 3 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

As I said before. I was catching up on the Gentoo news development lately. And in the off chance that someone is even more out of touch with the news than me, I’d just want to say that Gentoo 2008.0  has just been release on 6th of july, and in true gentoo fashion, release a fix for some problems 2 days after that.

History

What’s important about this release is that gentoo team has a release cycle of 2 release per yer. So each year it would be , for example if the year is 2006, 2006.0 and 2006.1. The release themselves are a big deal because unlike other distro that need to be updated regularly to update any of their components. Gentoo packages are updated through portage, their package management system. And new package are added regularly by the gennto team. Gentoo releases usually means big changes to the overall file structure and usually accompany by a major chang or enhancement in portage itself.

The missing version 2007.1

Gentoo missed their release in 2007 and only release 2007.0 . Their last release 2007.0 was back in May 2007. Like any oopensource project, the streangth of the project lies in it’s core developer. So if their resolve is wanning then there was fear that gentoo might go the the distro heaven like a lot of other distro. For me personally, I love gentoo and I love portage. I think that this release is like the gentoo team came back from a long holiday. Fresh for new chanllage.

In an interview with internetnews.com

“From a community perspective, the 2008.0 release is a big deal as 2007.1 was canceled and never saw the light of day,” Gentoo founder, Daniel Robbins, told InternetNews.com. “So the fact that the Gentoo release engineering team was able to reset the release process, improve their interaction with the Gentoo community and then successfully release 2008.0 from the ashes of 2007.1 was a big achievement.”

And it was a big achivement. Gentoo 2008.0 spots a new profile system, (finally) moved to the 2.6 kernel from the old 2.4 kernel, and an improved installer from the new,somewhat buggy(for me at least), graphics installer of 2007.0. I think the release thing improved morale as a whole with the developer and community alike.

Summary

There’s no summary. I’m just glad that gentoo is back. I just hope I can spare a weekend from the missus to take gentoo for a test drive as well as try out Palidus.