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Gentoo after DRobbins

The move surprised even the most ardent followers of the Gentoo Linux distribution. As the news about the resignation of Daniel Robbins (also known as "drobbins") from his position as Gentoo's Chief Architect quickly spread around the Internet, many users expressed utter surprise, even doubts about the future of what has become one of the fastest growing Linux distributions. Will our beloved Gentoo survive? Will we still be able to get fast security updates and keep our installations up-to-date with the latest software? Will we still be able to "emerge"? Yes, we will.

While the initial reaction of users is understandable, there is little need to panic. Let's look at the situation through a similar event in the history of another Linux distribution - Debian GNU/Linux. Debian's founder Ian Murdock created the project in 1993, and left the project some three years later, even before the first official Debian release, version 1.1, hit the FTP servers in June 1996. But despite the sudden absence of the project's founder, Debian did not collapse; instead it went on to become one of the most widely-used Linux distributions, with hundreds of developers and thousands of users in all corners of the world. Ironically, it was Murdock's second attempt at creating a Linux distribution that proved to be a failure: Progeny Linux, a commercial offspring of Debian, launched in early 2000, was discontinued 6 months later (although there is an ongoing effort to revive the product, thanks to Murdock's new development initiatives of grouping individual software packages into logical components).

Like Murdock, Daniel Robbins is one of the greatest contributors to the success of Linux that we are witnessing today. He first came into contact with Linux while working as a system administrator at the University of New Mexico, and it wasn't long before he was confident enough to join the development team of Stampede Linux, his preferred distribution at the time. This experience was later transposed into Daniel's own distribution, originally called Enoch Linux. Unfortunately, its development encountered a number of early setbacks and it wasn't until after a lengthy foray into the world of FreeBSD that this new project, now renamed to Gentoo Linux, began to take shape. Little by little, Gentoo was turning out to be a huge success. One of the main reasons for it was the fact that it incorporated several ideas from FreeBSD, notably the FreeBSD ports system (called "portage" in Gentoo) which provided users with sophisticated tools to compile all applications from source code, instead of installing precompiled binary packages. This gave Gentoo the innovative edge over most mainstream distributions, attracting many users who found Gentoo's ease of software installation and instant package availability highly appealing.

Up until recently, the development of Gentoo Linux was largely determined by its fearless leader, but this model is about to change. The work will be taken over by Gentoo Foundation, Inc, a new Not For Profit (NFP) organization, or more precisely, by the foundation's Board of Trustees: "The purpose of this foundation is to hold the intellectual property of the Gentoo free software project. It will have a Board of Trustees. This not-for-profit will be an open membership trade association." Originally Daniel Robbins intended to become a member of the Board of Trustees, at least during the initial period, but changed his mind later. The board will have around 20 members.

The resignation of Gentoo's founder wasn't the only news coming out from Albuquerque this week, as the Gentoo project also announced a new release of Gentoo Linux, version 2004.1. To many, this was far more reassuring news, especially since unlike most previous Gentoo releases, this one came out on schedule. What's new in the latest version? Besides the usual package updates, security and bug fixes, some of the more visible changes include newly introduced GPG signatures for online listing of packages, availability of "LiveCD" and "PackageCD" sets for every architecture, and substantial improvements in Catalyst, the Gentoo tool for generating stage installation tarballs and LiveCDs. Gentoo Linux is now fully compatible with kernel 2.6, version 2.6.5 of which is included as an option on the Universal LiveCD, together with kernel 2.4.26.

The events this week prompted some users to revisit Zynot, a high-profile attempt of an unsatisfied Gentoo developer to fork Gentoo Linux in June 2003. Long on idealistic writing reminiscent of naïve revolutionaries of yesteryear, the founder of Zynot went on explaining how the new fork would soon become the best thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately, 10 months later the project has little to show for its work. With a poorly designed web site, inactive user forums and a broken Wiki, Zynot has a long way to go before it starts delivering on those ideals, let alone becomes a viable alternative to Gentoo Linux.

The current changes within the management structure of Gentoo Linux represent a natural evolution of a highly successful project and won't have any major impact on the users of the distribution. With 200 active developers and a well-defined development framework firmly in place, there is no reason to believe that the project will suddenly disappear. Instead, Gentoo Linux will become a more democratic institution, perhaps with some inevitable political bickering on occasions, but definitely a better place to further advance the already excellent product.

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Distribution News

Conectiva Linux 10 Release Candidate 1 now available

Conectiva Linux 10 Release Candidate 1 is now available. Click below for download links and release notes.

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Fedora Core

The third and final test release of Fedora Core 2 is now available. Some of the changes in this release include: SELinux disabled by default, the 'CD1 won't boot' issue appears to be resolved, Anaconda now installs in 31 languages. Get it, test it, report those bugs.

The 10th issue of the Fedora News Updates has been released. This issue looks at the fedora-desktop-list, new documentation, SELinux, configuration tools and yum testing are needed, and several other topics.

Packages of the latest unstable Evolution release (1.5.7) are available. "Works for me (I'm using it to send this email), though this is built from an UNSTABLE tarball, so expect it to crash, eat your mail, and do other Bad Things from time to time. You have been Warned!"

Here's a reminder of the mailing lists for the Fedora Project. There are a growing number of these lists, targeted towards various Fedora topics including: SELinux, Fedora Legacy, translation efforts, and more.

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TurboLinux announces Turbolinux 10 F

TurboLinux has announced "Turbolinux 10 F", a new Linux operating system designed for home computer users. Turbolinux 10F ships with a media player capable of streaming pure Windows Media format audio and video. 10F is based on Turbolinux 10 Desktop.

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Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for April 27, 2004 is out. Topics include splitting binary firmware blobs of the Linux kernel, a new release of the linda policy checker, a report of the Linux User & Developer Expo, kernel security support for Sarge, and much more.

There is less than a month left until the fifth DebConf. The registration period is almost over and those who have registered should be receiving a confirmation email.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter - Volume 3, Issue 17

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of April 26, 2004 is out. This week's topics include the new apache maintainer and public mailing list, the search for a new squid maintainer, and several others.

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SUSE Linux

SUSE Linux 9.1 is now registered with the OpenGroup, as conforming to the LSB Runtime Environment for IA32 version 1.3 product standard.

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Lindows Introduces Lsongs

Lindows, Inc. has announced Lsongs, an all-in-one music management and playback software program for Linspire users.

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Slackware Linux

Many KDE packages have been upgraded this week, along with joe, gaim, slacktrack, syslinux, automake, and several other packages. Updated 2.4.26 kernels with security fixes are available for slackware-stable and slackware-current. GCC 3.4.0 has landed in testing. As always, check the slackware-current changelog for complete details.

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Trustix Secure Linux

Trustix has a feature update to the TSL 1.5 kernel, to bring it up-to-date with the newest kernel in the 2.2 series. Click below for more infomation.

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New Distributions

SmartPeer

SmartPeer is a free, open source load balancing solution that runs from a single bootable CD-ROM (based on Morphix). SmartPeer allows you to balance your web traffic to distribute the load across multiple servers and also gives you an easy way to keep your website running while individual web servers are removed from production for maintenance, replacement, or due to failure. SmartPeer joins the list at version 0.0.2, released April 26, 2004.

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Minor distribution updates

AGNULA/DeMuDi 1.1.1 Live released

A special version of the AGNULA/DeMuDi distribution for audio and video applications has been released for the Linux Audio Conference. Version 1.1.1 is a live CD distribution, based on Knoppix, but heavily tweaked for multimedia work. Click below for details and download information.

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Compact Flash Linux Project

The Compact Flash Linux Project has released v0.1.4-pre2 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Upgraded to use Linux 2.4.26, and other drivers. Most of the software included is up-to-date. FreeSWAN is now included in the distribution."

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dyne:bolic GNU/Linux

dyne:bolic GNU/Linux has released v1.3 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The audio streaming applications now all have integrated support for the Ogg/Vorbis codec, meaning 100% free technology for network radios. An important bug in the nesting mechanism was fixed. Some relevant updates were made to recent versions of audio and video software."

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Inside Security Rescue Toolkit

INSERT has released v1.2.8 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version updates ntfsutils, clamav, rkhunter, and the virus database, and adds telnet, smbmount, ettercap, fwlogwatch, and two keyboard layouts (fr and ch)."

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Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall

LEAF has released Bering-uClibc 2.1.1 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: This release adds RAID modules. Minor bugs have been fixed. Shorewall has been updated to version 1.4.10.e, SuperFreeS/WAN to Openswan 1.0.3, and busybox to 1.0pre10."

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LinuxTLE Gnome 2.6 Thai LiveCD!! (GnomeDesktop)

Footnotes reports the release of LinuxTLE 5.5 LiveCD (with GNOME 2.6) with Thai support and customizations.

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Openwall Linux

Here's a note (click below) from Solar Designer, about the latest OWL kernels. Linux 2.4.26-ow1, 2.0.40-ow1; new Owl ISO; Owl 1.1-stable have been updated with the latest security patches.

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Pingwinek GNU/Linux

Pingwinek GNU/Linux has released v1.0rc2 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: LiveCD is now fully separated from other CDs. The kernel is 2.6.5. The authors have switched from XFree86 to the X.Org implementation with freedesktop XLIBS. Many bugs have been fixed and many improvements have been added."

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PLD Live CD

PLD Live CD has released v0.90 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: There are several package updates (KDE 3.2.1, GNOME2.6, and others). The packages celestia, tuxracer, and foobilard have been added. NVidia drivers are included and automatically used if necessary. It boots into graphical mode (can be turned off) by default. There is greatly improved support for mounting home from various devices (disks, pen drives, etc.). The kernel has been switched to uni-processor (SMP caused too many problems). Eagle (DSL) drivers should work now. There are numerous other bugfixes and improvements."

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Concurrent releases RedHawk Linux 2.1

Concurrent has announced the availability of Red Hawk Real-Time Linux 2.1. "Concurrent's refinements include kernel-level priority inheritance support, a Frequency Based Scheduler (FBS), process and IRQ shielding extensions, user-level real-time Hyper-Treading control for Intel Xeon platforms, user-level spin locks, significant real-time performance tuning and many additional improvements." We have sent them a query as to when they will release source for their kernel enhancements - which certainly fall under the GPL - but have not yet received a response.

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RxLinux

RxLinux has released v1.7.0 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: added support for usb flash added support for I810-815 fbdev added support for SIS fbdev"

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ThinTUX

ThinTUX has released v0.14 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release added support for all USB host controllers and updated the installation guide."

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Webfish Linux

Webfish Linux has released v2.0pre3 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Appropriate changes have been made for using kernel 2.6.x. Packaging has been tidied up. Webfish workstation has been brought up to date with bleeding-edge multimedia software and KDE 3.2.1. There are many other little bits and pieces. nALFS profiles are now online."

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Distribution reviews

Cobind Desktop: Linux Done Right (OS News)

OS News reviews Cobind Desktop. "One of the big plusses of Cobind was the crispness and polished look and feel. With anti-aliased fonts (via XFce), the OS is clean and beautiful. With a bunch of icon sets and more window themes than you could fathom (again, via the massive XFce library), a system can be super customized in a few clicks without a single download. I found the default appearance of Cobind to be very attractive."

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