In 2008 the Gentoo Foundation ceased to exist, sending rumors of Gentoo's demise and ultimate death circulating around the Internet. Almost two years on, the distro is still here and celebrating its 10th anniversary. How close did the distro come to disaster, and where does it stand now?
MS: Gentoo is far more than a project. Gentoo is representative of the notions of freedom and the existential open society, a choice we choose to make about our digital lives. However, with the idea and choice, we face the work of engineering solutions. There are many challenges devs are facing and there is much good work coming of it.
We recently celebrated our tenth anniversary. With that milestone we have released a new Live DVD, Gentoo 10.1, to highlight some of Gentoo’s capabilities. It is an exciting enterprise, and it will continue.
Accompanying the work on the LiveDVD, several developers and users have worked long hours improving accessibility subsystems. Accessibility is a major priority for Gentoo, we are working very hard in that area.
Portage, our package management system, has seen a ton of new features including automated blocker resolution and better dependency management. There are even more excellent features in Portage-2.2 like package sets, which is under heavy development currently.
One project that I and many others rely on for data center and workstation security, Hardened Gentoo, is seeing serious growth. Work is progressing quickly to integrate the latest tool chain and build system with technologies like SSP (stack smashing protector). The Hardened Project also provides Pax/GrSec and SELinux kernel support. There is also a complete distribution, called Tin Hat, designed to run completely in RAM based directly on the work of the Hardened Project for security research.
On the desktop environment front both the KDE and GNOME teams have been hard at work with the new major releases from upstream. In fact I’m using KDE 4.3.1 as I write this. Gentoo supports just about every window manager and desktop environment under the sun, with thousands of available applications and libraries. Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby support is superb, Erlang rocks on Gentoo. Really, I could go on and on, but I would encourage the reader to take a look themselves, so as to avoid any further wind-baggery from me.
Progress
The message appears to be, “We’re not dead.”
Indeed, the website is now updated regularly and although we also didn’t see the second release for 2008, the distro has changed models to offer smaller, more frequent releases.
These things suggest that the board is listening to the community, but how much other activity has been happening? Linux Magazine tried to get some firm statistics from Gentoo devs on the amount of development within the project, however this did not eventuate as promised.
What we can see however, is a commit to source code every five minutes over the last six years. While it might be a definitive benchmark, it does show that the devs are solidly continuing their work on the distro and that it’s not stagnant.
More Bleeding, Less Edge
So what do you get for your commit every five minutes? Gentoo used to have a reputation of being a bleeding edge distribution, but how true is that today?
While Portage often contains multiple versions of a package, only one will be the recommended version depending whether the system is running stable, or unstable. Gentoo also has the advantage of being a rolling release. As such it is more likely to have more up-to-date packages compared to a typical release based distro, which usually only releases bug fixes and security updates for the one version for the life of the release.
The following shows the current versions of several core packages in Gentoo compared to some other popular distributions.
The stable branch of Gentoo is actually not overly impressive. Both Fedora and Ubuntu will be out with a new version within the next two months, yet Gentoo is already lagging behind in many common packages.
Sure, the road to KDE4 has been rocky, but most distros have replaced it already and yet Gentoo is still at version 3.5.9. The unstable branch is of course more up-to-date, so what is needed to ensure packages can move more quickly into stable? Is the image of a bleeding edge distro even something that Gentoo is still trying to maintain?
Onwards And Upwards
Gentoo might be on the mend, but there is still a ways to go. One would have thought that a distribution which has been suffering bad public relations of late would jump at the opportunity to set the record straight and promote their project. Unfortunately in this case, it was like trying to get blood from a stone, taking almost three months for what we did get.
If Gentoo is to continue to be an attractive distribution, it needs to remain open with its community. As they say, perception is half the battle. If the community feels they are not being looked after, there is probably a good reason why. Without the users, Gentoo is nothing at all. They are their most valuable asset and developers come from dedicated users.
In any project there are bound to be some ups and downs. Developers come, and developers go – as do users. Gentoo has always had a very strong community however, which no doubt has played a very important role in pulling the distro through times like these.
Hopefully the board of trustees can continue to respect the members they serve and rebuild the glorious distro it used to be. Just were will Gentoo be in another two years? We’ll have to wait and see.
Christopher Smart has been using Linux since 1999. In 2005 he created Kororaa Linux, which delivered the world's first Live CD showcasing 3D
desktop effects. He also founded the
MakeTheMove website, which introduces users to free software and encourages them to switch. In his spare time he enjoys writing articles on free software.
Comments on "Gentoo: “We’re Not Dead”"
When Robbins left, the people controlling gentoo ruined it. There was no longer a vision, just a bunch of dudes fighting.
This does appear to be a common feeling among the community. I wonder what Gentoo developers are thinking..
-c
I use Gentoo on 6 machines. While I admit it is not as great as the initial experience I had with it, I still prefer it over the ununtu and fedora based distro\’s that I also use daily. (I run mostly a monolithic kernel with one module loaded at boot, Not initrd)
What may be misleading on many sites that like to put out stats on distro popularity is the difference a source distro has on those stats. I never downloaded from distrowatch. I continuously upgrade the machines. What has bitten me was the choice to remove packages and clean out the portage tree so aggressively. I ended up with difficulty updating machines left updated too long. I think and auto fallback to archive servers could of increased sync speed and still allowed the occasional machine to get up to date easily.
I have some ideas to help out and someday I want to contribute, to give back more than just on the forums.
Been using Gentoo for something like five years now. Have installed on SPARC x86 ARM and more recently PPC (Playstation 3) and x86_64.
Portage is a delight to work with none of the circular dependency hell that bothered me with RedHat6.1 and easy to clean out packages and dependencies unlike Slackware (which I moved to from RH after one too many circular dependency hair-pulling session!).
I don\’t think the stats on stable packages are overly important or fair (but then I run testing(/unstable) on all but PPC) as new packages/updates appear in testing/unstable relatively quickly.
There has been a lot to change the perception of Gentoo of late, not only is there more activity on the front page and the amalgamation of various developers blog posts, but also the development of documentation to aid those intererested in becoming a developer (see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml ).
The forums have remained as active as they\’ve ever been, and there are regular updates and patches to lots and lots of packages. I don\’t see why any distribution has to \”be seen\” to be \”alive\”, the activity is there if you get involved!!
The author treats the subject unprofessionally. Gentoo is not for masses, it\’s rather a tool to build an ecosystem, composed from dozens of machines. I see no reason to post misleading statistics, like how now KDE, GNOME in distro is, while not posting real advantages of the system. I got 6 hundred routers based on Gentoo and guess what, surprisingly I see no reason to install KDE on them.
There is plenty features which differ Gentoo from standard distribution and treating it as it was usual half-year-lasting Ubuntu is just horribly wrong.
Having said this, if you don\’t mind, I would put in my 2 cents and describe something which is *not* available through any other package manager in *any* of the distro the author is aware of.
simply, the Linux Kernel. We in Gentoo have six or seven *branches* and about 90 versions of kernel, including dozens of stable. This is what people *need* and *use*.
* sys-freebsd/freebsd-sources
Available versions:
(6.2-r5) ~*6.2-r5!b!s
(7.1-r1) ~*7.1-r1!b!s
(7.2) ~*7.2!b!s
(7.2-r1) ~*7.2-r1!b!s
(7.2-r2) ~*7.2-r2!b!s
{symlink}
Homepage: http://www.freebsd.org/
Description: FreeBSD kernel sources
* sys-kernel/cell-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.18-r6) ~*2.6.18-r6!b!s
(2.6.19_rc5-r1) ~*2.6.19_rc5-r1!b!s
(2.6.19_rc6-r1) ~*2.6.19_rc6-r1!b!s
(2.6.24-r1) ~*2.6.24-r1!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/ps3-linux/
Description: Full sources including the cell/ps3 patchset for the 2.6 kernel tree
[I] sys-kernel/gentoo-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.16-r13) 2.6.16-r13!b!s
(2.6.25-r9) ~2.6.25-r9!b!s
(2.6.26-r4) 2.6.26-r4!b!s
(2.6.27-r8) 2.6.27-r8!b!s
(2.6.27-r10) ~2.6.27-r10!b!s
(2.6.28-r5) 2.6.28-r5!b!s
(2.6.28-r6) ~2.6.28-r6!b!s
(2.6.29) ~2.6.29!b!s
(2.6.29-r1) ~2.6.29-r1!b!s
(2.6.29-r2) ~2.6.29-r2!b!s
(2.6.29-r3) ~2.6.29-r3!b!s
(2.6.29-r4) ~2.6.29-r4!b!s
(2.6.29-r5) 2.6.29-r5!b!s
(2.6.29-r6) ~2.6.29-r6!b!s
(2.6.30) ~2.6.30!b!s
(2.6.30-r3) ~2.6.30-r3!b!s
(2.6.30-r4) 2.6.30-r4!b!s
(2.6.30-r5) 2.6.30-r5!b!s
(2.6.30-r6) ~2.6.30-r6!b!s
(2.6.30-r7) ~2.6.30-r7!b!s
(2.6.30-r8) ~2.6.30-r8!b!s
(2.6.31) ~2.6.31!b!s
(2.6.31-r1) ~2.6.31-r1!b!s
(2.6.31-r2) ~2.6.31-r2!b!s
(2.6.31-r3) ~2.6.31-r3!b!s
{build symlink ultra1}
Installed versions: 2.6.30-r4(2.6.30-r4)!b!s(21:29:40 08/16/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.30-r5(2.6.30-r5)!b!s(00:43:29 10/04/09)(-build -symlink)
Homepage: http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches
Description: Full sources including the Gentoo patchset for the 2.6 kernel tree
* sys-kernel/git-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.32_rc1) ~2.6.32_rc1!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r1) ~2.6.32_rc1-r1!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r2) ~2.6.32_rc1-r2!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r3) ~2.6.32_rc1-r3!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r4) ~2.6.32_rc1-r4!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r5) ~2.6.32_rc1-r5!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r6) ~2.6.32_rc1-r6!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1-r7) ~2.6.32_rc1-r7!b!s
(2.6.32_rc3-r1) ~2.6.32_rc3-r1!b!s
(2.6.32_rc3-r2) ~2.6.32_rc3-r2!b!s
(2.6.32_rc3-r3) ~2.6.32_rc3-r3!b!s
(2.6.32_rc4-r1) ~2.6.32_rc4-r1!b!s
(2.6.32_rc4-r2) ~2.6.32_rc4-r2!b!s
(2.6.32_rc4-r3) ~2.6.32_rc4-r3!b!s
(2.6.32_rc4-r4) ~2.6.32_rc4-r4!b!s
(2.6.32_rc4-r5) ~2.6.32_rc4-r5!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org
Description: The very latest -git version of the Linux kernel
* sys-kernel/hardened-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.25-r13) 2.6.25-r13!b!s
(2.6.26-r9) 2.6.26-r9!b!s
(2.6.28-r7) 2.6.28-r7!b!s
(2.6.28-r9) 2.6.28-r9!b!s
(2.6.29) ~2.6.29!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/
Description: Hardened kernel sources (kernel series 2.6)
* sys-kernel/mips-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.27) ~*2.6.27.21-r1!b!s
(2.6.28) ~*2.6.28.9-r1!b!s
(2.6.29) ~*2.6.29.1!b!s
{build cobalt impactdebug ip27 ip28 ip30 ip32r10k symlink}
Homepage: http://www.linux-mips.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/
Description: Linux-Mips GIT sources for MIPS-based machines, dated 20090324
* sys-kernel/mm-sources
Available versions: (2.6.28_rc2-r1) ~2.6.28_rc2-r1!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/
Description: Andrew Morton\’s kernel, mostly fixes for 2.6 vanilla, some vm stuff too
* sys-kernel/openvz-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.18.028.064.7) ~2.6.18.028.064.7!b!s
(2.6.27-briullov.1-r2) 2.6.27.2.1-r2!b!s
(2.6.27-briullov.1-r3) [M]~2.6.27.2.1-r3!b!s
(2.6.27.9999) [M]**2.6.27.9999!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://openvz.org/
Description: Kernel sources with OpenVZ patchset
* sys-kernel/sh-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.13) *2.6.13!b!s
(2.6.14) *2.6.14!b!s
(2.6.15) *2.6.15!b!s
(2.6.16.20) *2.6.16.20!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches
Description: Full SuperH sources including the gentoo patchset for the 2.6 kernel tree
* sys-kernel/sparc-sources
Available versions: (2.4.34) *2.4.34!b!s
{build symlink ultra1}
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org/ http://www.gentoo.org
Description: Full sources for the Gentoo Sparc Linux kernel
* sys-kernel/tuxonice-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.28-r10) 2.6.28-r10!b!s
(2.6.28-r11) ~2.6.28-r11!b!s
(2.6.29-r4) ~2.6.29-r4!b!s
(2.6.30-r6) ~2.6.30-r6!b!s
(2.6.31) ~2.6.31!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches/ http://www.tuxonice.net
Description: TuxOnIce + Gentoo patchset sources
* sys-kernel/usermode-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.16-r3) ~2.6.16-r3!b!s
(2.6.16-r4) ~2.6.16-r4!b!s
(2.6.16-r5) ~2.6.16-r5!b!s
(2.6.18) ~2.6.18!b!s
(2.6.18-r1) ~2.6.18-r1!b!s
(2.6.18-r2) ~2.6.18-r2!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org/ http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net
Description: Full sources for the User Mode Linux kernel
[D] sys-kernel/vanilla-sources
Available versions:
(2.4.37) (~)2.4.37!b!s
(2.4.37.5) (~)2.4.37.5!b!s
(2.6.16.62) (~)2.6.16.62!b!s
(2.6.19.7) 2.6.19.7!b!s
(2.6.23.17) 2.6.23.17!b!s
(2.6.24.7) 2.6.24.7!b!s
(2.6.25.20) (~)2.6.25.20!b!s
(2.6.26.7) 2.6.26.7!b!s
(2.6.26.8) (~)2.6.26.8!b!s
(2.6.27.10) 2.6.27.10!b!s
(2.6.27.12) (~)2.6.27.12!b!s
(2.6.27.31) (~)2.6.27.31!b!s
(2.6.27.32) (~)2.6.27.32!b!s
(2.6.27.33) (~)2.6.27.33!b!s
(2.6.27.34) (~)2.6.27.34!b!s
(2.6.27.35) (~)2.6.27.35!b!s
(2.6.27.36) (~)2.6.27.36!b!s
(2.6.27.37) (~)2.6.27.37!b!s
(2.6.28) (~)2.6.28!b!s
(2.6.28.9) 2.6.28.9!b!s
(2.6.28.10) (~)2.6.28.10!b!s
(2.6.29) (~)2.6.29!b!s
(2.6.29.4) 2.6.29.4!b!s
(2.6.29.5) (~)2.6.29.5!b!s
(2.6.29.6) (~)2.6.29.6!b!s
(2.6.30) (~)2.6.30!b!s
(2.6.30.3) 2.6.30.3!b!s
(2.6.30.5) (~)2.6.30.5!b!s
(2.6.30.6) (~)2.6.30.6!b!s
(2.6.30.7) (~)2.6.30.7!b!s
(2.6.30.8) (~)2.6.30.8!b!s
(2.6.30.9) (~)2.6.30.9!b!s
(2.6.31) (~)2.6.31!b!s
(2.6.31.1) (~)2.6.31.1!b!s
(2.6.31.2) (~)2.6.31.2!b!s
(2.6.31.3) (~)2.6.31.3!b!s
(2.6.31.4) (~)2.6.31.4!b!s
(2.6.32_rc1) (~)2.6.32_rc1!b!s
(2.6.32_rc3) (~)2.6.32_rc3!b!s
(2.6.32_rc4) (~)2.6.32_rc4!b!s
(2.6.32_rc5) (~)2.6.32_rc5!b!s
{build symlink}
Installed versions: 2.6.29_rc8(2.6.29_rc8)!b!s(19:11:29 03/22/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.29.4(2.6.29.4)!b!s(01:23:19 07/20/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.30.5(2.6.30.5)!b!s(21:10:42 08/19/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.32_rc1(2.6.32_rc1)!b!s(01:03:04 10/04/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.32_rc3(2.6.32_rc3)!b!s(22:19:28 10/10/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.32_rc4(2.6.32_rc4)!b!s(21:47:08 10/13/09)(-build -symlink)
2.6.32_rc5(2.6.32_rc5)!b!s(23:19:49 10/18/09)(-build -symlink)
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org
Description: Full sources for the Linux kernel
* sys-kernel/vserver-sources
Available versions:
(2.2.0.7) 2.2.0.7!b!s
(2.2.0.7-r1) ~2.2.0.7-r1!b!s
(2.3.0.36.14-r1) [M]~2.3.0.36.14-r1!b!s
(2.3.0.36.19) [M]~2.3.0.36.19!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/vps/
Description: Full sources including Gentoo and Linux-VServer patchsets for the 2.6 kernel tree.
* sys-kernel/xbox-sources
Available versions: (2.6.16.26) ~*2.6.16.26!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://www.kernel.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/
Description: Full sources for the Xbox Linux kernel
* sys-kernel/xen-sources
Available versions:
(2.6.18-r11) ~2.6.18-r11!b!s
(2.6.18-r12) ~2.6.18-r12!b!s
(2.6.20-r7) [M]~2.6.20-r7!b!s
(2.6.21) [M]~2.6.21!b!s
{build symlink}
Homepage: http://xen.org/
Description: Full sources for a dom0/domU Linux kernel to run under Xen
Aren\’t you fed up yet? ;-)