Milan is from Foresight Media s.r.o, who produce interactive Touch Tables, that run Gentoo Linux. One of the products are a low cost alternative to Microsoft's Surface. Be sure to check out an overview of their products. Milan, thank you very much for your time. My first question is this:

1. Who is Milan and how did you get started with Gentoo?
   • I guess I'm a product designer, developer, entrepreneur and part time artist living in Central Europe usually in Vienna, Bratislava and Prague. To be able to create inventions, new gadgets you either need a ton of money or you learn how to do many things by yourself in a garage or in my case in my atelier. For me it would be quite depressing to ‘just design' something :) And so I create prototypes, which I push into serial production like my touch table designs. When I was 13 years old I accidentally saw a magazine with a penguin. I thought it was a cool logo of something. Then I saw it said that there's a free CD of an operating system that I haven't heard of. I could not hack my pre-installed commercial software enough and so I gave it a try and I guess it's the usual story of many Open Source and Linux geeks from there on :) After some time using various Linux distributions I saw that the complexity and the number of regressions in many of them has become so high over the years that I needed a system that would let me stay in control and a system that would value it's own design. Gentoo was a natural choice.

Be sure to check out the Full Interview!

Discuss this!

Southern California's premier open-source software event is just around the corner, running from Friday, January 20 through Sunday, January 22. Several Gentoo developers will be there; it will be even bigger than previous years.

We'll be showing off some nifty devices running Gentoo, and we'll be giving out installation media. Whether you're a developer, user, or simply curious, be sure to stop by booth #70. See you there!

Discuss this!

Figure 1.1: Heating your boxes since 1999

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

A special thanks to the Gentoo Infrastructure Team. Their hard work behind the scenes provide the resources, services and technology necessary to support the Gentoo Linux project.

• Packages included in this release: Linux Kernel 3.1.5, Xorg 1.10.4, KDE 4.7.4, Gnome 3.2.1 XFCE 4.8, Fluxbox 1.3.2 Firefox 9.0, LibreOffice 3.4.99.2, Gimp 2.6.11, Blender 2.60, Amarok 2.5 , VLC 1.1.13, Chromium 16.0 and much more ...
• If you want to see if your package is included we have generated both the x86 package list, and amd64 package list. You may also be interested in checking out the FAQ or the updated artwork plus dvd cases and covers for the 12.0 release.
• Special Features:
  • Writable file systems using AUFS so you can emerge new packages!
  • Persistence for $HOME is available; press F9 for more info!

The LiveDVD is available in two flavors: a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64 multi lib version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-12.0 version will work on 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64. If your CPU architecture is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64, boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64-bit kernel and install a customized 64-bit user land while using the provided 32-bit user land. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-12.0 version is for x86_64 only.

If you are ready to check it out, let our bouncer direct you to the closest x86 image or amd64 image file. If you would prefer to take it easy on the bandwidth and help the community, torrents are also provided.

If you need support or have any questions, please visit the discussion thread on our forum.

Thank you for your continued support,

Gentoo Linux Developers, the Gentoo Foundation, and the Gentoo-Ten Project.

As you would expect it from a herd of proper Gentoo developers, we have spent quite some time bikeshedding about various things concerning the wiki, including the color. It seems we have finally reached a verdict, much to everyone's surprise it will be purple!

Now, without further ado, we'd like to welcome you to our shiny new Wiki.

Feel free to browse around, look for answers to your questions and other cool stuff to do with your Gentoo system. Do you think you have something useful to share with other Gentoo users? Please go ahead and create an article about it - or extend an existing one.

To help you get started, we've compiled some information on how the wiki works. If you still got questions left you can find us on #gentoo-wiki at freenode, or reach us via email at wiki@gentoo.org.

We are looking forward to your articles!

Your Gentoo Wiki Team

As the quantity and quality of this year's entries will attest, Gentoo is alive, well, and taking no prisoners!

Special thanks to likewhoa for putting together the Screenshot content management system.

The Winners

1. whtwtr's Compiz desktop

2. ifenslave's Kde desktop

3. Berr's Xfce desktop

4. ramonovski's Scrotwm desktop

5. slashbeast's Openbox desktop

For all the specifications and cool details please visit the main Gentoo screenshots page. Make sure to check out all the entries!

discuss this!

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• System packages include: Linux kernel 3.0 (with Gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup, Bash 4.2, GLIBC 2.13-r2, GCC 4.5.2, Binutils 2.21.1, Python 2.7.2 and 3.2, Perl 5.12.4, and more.
• Desktop environments and window managers include: KDE 4.7.0, GNOME 3.0.0, Xfce 4.8, Enlightenment 1.0.8, Openbox 3.5.0, Fluxbox 1.3.1, XBMC 10.1 Awesome 3.4.10, and LXDE-Meta 0.5.5.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: LibreOffice 3.3.3, XEmacs 21.5.31 GVim 7.3.244, Abiword 2.8.6, Scribus 1.3.9, GIMP 2.6.11, Inkscape 0.48.2, Blender 2.57, XSane 0.998, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox 5.0, Chromium 13.0 Arora 0.11.0, Opera 11.50.1074, Epiphany 3.0.4, Seamonkey 2.2, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.9.0, Quassel 0.7.2, Mozilla Thunderbird 5.0, Claws Mail 3.7.9, QTwitter 0.10.0, Irssi 0.8.15, and many more.
• Development applications include: KDevelop 4.2.3, KDESvn 1.5.5, Qt-creator 2.2.1, Bluefish 2.0.3, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.4.3, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, MPlayer2 2.0, DVDAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.4, FFmpeg 0.6.90, GNOME-MPlayer 1.0.4, SMPlayer 0.6.9, and several others.
• Special Features:
  • Writable filesystems using AUFS so you can emerge new packages!
  • Persistancy for $HOME is available; press F9 for more info!

The LiveDVD is available in two flavors: a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64 multilib version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-11.2 version will work on 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64. If your CPU architecture is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64, boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64-bit kernel and install a customized 64-bit userland while using the provided 32-bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-11.2 version is for x86_64 only.

Please select your architecture to be redirected to a mirror for download:

• x86
• amd64
• Torrents are available at http://torrents.gentoo.org

If you need support or have any questions, please visit the discussion thread on our forum.

Thank you for your continued support,

Gentoo Linux Developers, the Gentoo Foundation, and the Gentoo-Ten Project.

Gentoo Users, Developers, and Staffers are encouraged to submit their sweetest screenshots. This year likewhoa went all out and put together a custom cms for us to use for the contest. Please head over to the 2011 Contest Page for all of the details.

You can visit this forum post for comments and suggestions. OK enough talk, get started tricking out that desktop.

Following discussions with Ethan Dunham, involving Sebastian Pipping from the Gentoo Artwork Project and Roy Bamford, on behalf of the Gentoo Foundation, Fonthead Design Inc. has agreed to grant permission to use the artwork of letter "s" of font "Font Heads" showing the head of a cow under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license so that the Gentoo community can enjoy the freedom to use their mascot.

We encourage our developers and users to create Gentoo artwork based on our newly released Larry.

You will see an update for sys-apps/baselayout to 2.x and a new package, sys-apps/openrc. It is recommended that you perform this update as soon as possible.

After these packages are emerged, it is absolutely critical that you immediately update your configuration files with dispatch-conf, etc-update or a similar tool then follow the steps in the OpenRC Migration Guide.

Failure to follow all of these steps will result in an unbootable system. If that happens, you will need to boot from a LiveCD or LiveDVD, mount your root filesystem, chroot into that environment and follow the above steps.

Christian Faulhammer and William Hubbs contributed this announcement.

As a special bonus, the stable upgrade will also include newer versions of several popular applications that take advantage of KDE 4.6 features. These include Digikam 1.9.0, KOffice 2.3.3, and KDevelop 4.2.2. There is a new bluetooth framework called Bluedevil, we no longer need HAL, and, and, and... :)

The upgrade should go very smoothly; if you encounter any problems, we have a specific Gentoo KDE 4.4 - 4.6 upgrade guide to help you with that. In addition, there is always the Gentoo KDE guide with general tips and tricks.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible!