Gentoo Will Celebrate 10th Birthday With LiveDVD

Last year Gentoo canceled their 2008 release plans to focus on putting out just one release per year, while in years past they had put out as many as four releases per calendar year. There has not been a new official release of Gentoo since July of 2008, albeit they are one of the distributions to use a rolling release approach, but in honor of their tenth birthday they have begun work on a new LiveDVD. Gentoo has been producing timed snapshots of their installation media, but this will be the first Gentoo release in 2009.

It was announced today at Gentoo.org that they would be producing a new LiveDVD to honor Gentoo's 10th birthday. Gentoo 1.0 was not released until March of 2002, but before that, there was the Enoch Linux distribution where Daniel Robbins had ultimately began his work on this distribution. The release of Enoch came in December of 1999, which in just over two months will be ten years ago.

The Gentoo Ten LiveDVD will be available in x86 and x86_64 flavors, with an early snapshot of this birthday distribution already being available (it can be downloaded from the earlier link) to help in the testing process. Of course, we downloaded and tested out this new Gentoo Linux snapshot right away. Among the software packages available on Gentoo Ten are OpenOffice.org 3.0.0, KDE 4.3.1, X Server 1.6.4 RC1, the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, and Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3.

At this point, there are no special customizations or anything to mark Gentoo's 10th birthday within this Gentoo LiveDVD, but it is simply a snapshot of the current state of Gentoo. Expect Gentoo Ten to be officially released later this year.