Gentoo Linux 2008.0

In recent times the Gentoo Linux and its foundation has been plagued with a multitude of problems and times have certainly been challenging for this once popular distribution. It's already July and we are now finally seeing Gentoo's first official release of the year. In this article we are taking a brief look at Gentoo Linux 2008.0 and its changes.

Some of the packages that are updated with Gentoo Linux 2008.0 are the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, X Server 1.3.0, GCC 4.1.2, glibc 2.6.1, Xfce 4.4.2, and Portage 2.1.4.4. Gentoo Linux 2007.0 had shipped with the Linux 2.6.19 kernel, and of course, in that year and a half since its release there are many new drivers and an arsenal of other improvements to the kernel since that time. Gentoo profiles have been completely reworked in Gentoo 2008.0 to allow for significant cleanups of redundancies, reducing developer maintenance, and avoiding unnecessary confusion.

When it comes to the GNOME LiveCD, they have switched from using GNOME to Xfce. Switching to this lightweight desktop environment was done to conserve space on the LiveCD image. Once using the LiveCD installer to install to a disk, you will be left with Xfce 4.4.2, but KDE or GNOME can be built from the Portage source. With Gentoo 2008.0 there is no x86 or AMD64 LiveDVD this time around (at least not for now) due to a decision by the release engineering team to avoid delaying the 2008.0 release any further.

The Gentoo Linux installer now supports network-less installations using the packages and ebuild tree on the LiveCD. In addition, the Gentoo 2008.0 installer has numerous fixes for extended and logical partitions.

If you are interested in downloading Gentoo 2008.0, you can do so from the Gentoo Mirrors.