After multiple setbacks we have finally managed to stabilise KDE4 on both major desktop architectures (amd64 and x86), with other teams to follow.

For this and other reasons as discussed , those of you who still use KDE3 should be seriously considering an upgrade in the near future.

The KDE3 support is being deprecated with immediate effect. This means that ebuilds are dropping KDE3 support where they were broken, or clashing with KDE4.

If you wish to still use KDE3, and you want to help others with having KDE3 around, drop a mail to kde@gentoo.org, where we can give you commit access to the special overlay which will specifically contain only KDE3 packages.

This overlay (named kde-sunset) can be easily used via layman.

Sadly upstream is not supporting KDE3 anymore and we simply lack the manpower to keep support for both (as you might have noticed in the past few months KDE3 has become more and more rusty for which we humbly apologize).

Sorry to bring you the bad news and with hope that KDE4 will suit your needs,

Tomas Chvatal

KDE Teams substituting Lead

KUDOS to Nirbheek Chauhan and David Abbott for helping to put this announcement together and Alec Warner for proofreading it.

After numerous bug fixes and enhancements the Ten Team would like to encourage everyone to try out the 10.1 release.

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any BUGS you encounter.

Please download the latest testing release for your architecture Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 x86 | Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 amd64.

Thanks for your continued support,

The Gentoo-Ten Project

David Abbott contributed to the draft for this announcement.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest. There were 54 entries using 5 different window managers / desktop environments.

The Winners

1. Quick23t Compiz Fusion
2. ashtophet Fvwm 2.5.27
3. Integer Fluxbox

For all the specifications and cool details please visit the winners page.

discuss this!

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the immediate availability of a new, special edition LiveDVD to celebrate this monumental occasion. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• System packages include: Linux Kernel 2.6.30 (with gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup 3.1.3, BASH 4.0, GLIBC 2.9, GCC 4.3.2. Binutils 2.18, Python 2.6.2, Perl 5.8.8, and more.
• Desktop Environments and window managers include: KDE 4.3.1, GNOME 2.26.3, Xfce 4.6.1, Enlightenment 0.16.8.15, Openbox 3.4.7.2, Fluxbox 1.1.1, TWM 1.0.4, and more.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: OpenOffice 3.1.1, G/Vim 7.2.182, Abiword 2.6.4, GNUCash 2.2.9, Scribus 1.3.3.11, GIMP 2.6.4, Inkscape 0.46, Blender 2.49a, XSane 0.996, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox (Minefield) 3.5.3, Arora 0.7.11, Opera 10.0, Epiphany 2.26.3, Galeon 2.0.4, Seamonkey 1.1.17, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.5.9, Quassel 0.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.23, Claws Mail 3.7.2, Ekiga 2.0.12, Qtwitter 0.7.1, irssi 0.8.13, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.1.1, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, DvdAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.2, FFMPEG 0.5_p19928, GNOME-MPlayer 0.9.7, SMPlayer 0.6.6, and several others.

The Gentoo-Ten LiveDVD is available in two flavors, a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64-only version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-10.0 will work on x86 or x86_64. If your arch 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 64bit kernel and install a customized 64bit userland while using the provided 32bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-10.0 version is for x86_64 only.

Please select your architecture to be redirected to a mirror for download: x86amd64

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any bugs you encounter.

In addition, we have some exceptional new artwork from Ben Stedman, and Gentoo Developer Alex Legler.

Thank you for your continued support,

Gentoo Linux Developers, The Gentoo Linux Foundation, and The Gentoo-Ten Project

In honor of Gentoo's 10th birthday, we are producing a new livedvd! We need YOU to test it on as many x86 and x86_64 machines as you can and post bugs. Please report your bugs. Feel free to entertain yourself and fellow Gentoo rock stars on our forum.

The livedvd-x86-x86_64 will work on x86 or x86_64. If your arch is x86 boot with the default gentoo. If your arch is amd64 boot with gentoo64. The livedvd-amd64 is for well, amd64 only.

UPDATE: Due to demand, we have moved the files onto the regular mirror infrastructure. Please select your archiecture to be redirected to a mirror: x86amd64

So, give us a hand by testing like crazy AND posting bugs and we'll have the greatest livedvd ever.

Thanks for your continued support,

The Gentoo-Ten Project

David Abbott contributed to the draft for this announcement.

Many of you have, no doubt, learned of the recent loss to the Gentoo community. Known fondly as fmccor, Mr. Ferris E. McCormick's death was tragic and unexpected. His many contributions to the greater open source community will always be remembered as well as his generous friendship. It is in due honor to his life and good name that the Gentoo Foundation has donated a sum of $500 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The board of trustees believe that our donation is reflective of his wishes, given fmccor's professional life as a lawyer, and that this gift will further the movements he cared a great deal about, open source software and protecting our freedom.

The board would like to take this opportunity to encourage any and all individuals that personally knew fmccor or were benefiting from his life long contributions to donate, in kind and to the best of your ability, either to the EFF, the Gentoo Foundation, or another organization that you feel expresses these ideas.

Ferris studied mathematics in college at Indiana University, graduating in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts. Later he entered into the Law school at the University of Michigan, earning his Juris Doctor degree in 1991.

He passed the bar in Michigan that same year and has continued to be an actively certified Lawyer with the State of Michigan since then. He was also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Ferris joined Gentoo on April 16th 2004 as part of the sparc team and improved sparc support for the entire open source community. Within a year he also joined the Developer Relations team to help with mediation of any issues that might come up between people. As time went on Ferris continued to expand and assist Gentoo in many ways including assisting with the User Relations team and growing to become the Strategic Manager of the sparc project. Finally, he became a trustee and the Vice President of the Foundation assisting in getting the foundation back into good standing.

While it is too late to say in person, the Foundation would like to thank Ferris once again for all that he did for both Gentoo and the Open source community. He will be missed.

Please join the community in eulogizing Ferris in our forums here.

Robin is the backbone of the Gentoo infrastructure team which includes the forums, bugzilla, and most important, the Gentoo Portage tree.

He describes his first open source project, phpMyadmin, how he became a Gentoo developer, and the layout of the infrastructure.

"Nearly 50 percent of the infrastructure hardware is taken up by web applications, because we have a lot of separation between web applications that have a high security exposure. Admittedly some of the web services are a very big deal for Gentoo, like our Bugzilla service, running on 4 machines sponsored by the Dutch social network, Hyves. Very recently we've gotten new hardware for Forums, sponsored by Gossamer Threads. The next largest slice after that is the machines that provides rsync.gentoo.org service. Only then do we get down to individual machines for purposes. There's some cases where having more hardware as fail-over in case we lose a machine would be nice, but I think the place that'd we would benefit the most presently would be a newer mail server infrastructure, so that we can deploy heavier spam filtering."

Robin H. Johnson Interview

Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-birthday

When: Sunday, October 04, 2009, in a timezone near you

Introduction:

Gentoo is turning 10 years old. For the last ten years, Gentoo has been committed to bringing the cutting edge source based distro to users that need more flexibility than binary packages can give them. With a vibrant community and over 300 developers, much has been accomplished since the beginning, Gentoo remains true to its origin.

Special Activities:

Join us in the 2009 Screenshot Contest open to both Gentoo Developers and Users.

For more information and to enter your screenshots, visit the 2009 Gentoo Screenshot Contest page.

We are looking for screenshots from Gentoo's beginning, if you have any or know the links please send them to David Abbott. They will not be part of the contest.

History:

The anniversary date of 1999-10-04 was decided on by a couple of key dates in Gentoo's history. The name Enoch was changed to Gentoo and the domain name gentoo.org was registered. The founder of Gentoo Daniel Robbins, gives us this chronology:

Daniel Robbins Gentoo Chronology

• 1997-07: Started a new position at University of New Mexico, was using Debian 1.3
• 1998-11: Was using/developing for Stampede Linux at home, but had not (yet) started Enoch
• 1999-04: Was working on Enoch - wrote xpak .tbz2 code that is still in Portage
• 1999-05-27: First version of Enoch released, according to LWN.net. My blurb for Enoch: Enoch is an advanced GNU/Linux distribution for the x86 PC.
• 1999-09: My new dual Celeron mobo would not run Linux, went to FreeBSD, Achim Gottinger kept Enoch going.
• 1999-10-04: Domain name gentoo.org registered
• 1999-Late: Must have came back to Enoch and done the Gentoo name change right about now - the "Gentoo" name was Bob Mutch's idea - started incorporating some FreeBSD ideas into Enoch - Portage (as we know it today) was born.
• 2000-07-26: Gentoo 1.0 release "imminent", cvs online, rsync "coming soon"
• 2000-11-03: Gentoo 1.0 Release Candidate 2
• 2000-12-11: Gentoo 1.0 Release Candidate 3
• 2001-09-14: New Gentoo Logo/Web site debut - designed by me! Still in use today! :)
• 2002-02-16: Was in Brussels, Belgium to attend FOSDEM
• 2002-03-31: Gentoo Linux 1.0 Released !!!
• 2002-04-08: Gentoo Linux 1.1a released :)
• 2002-05-10: Gentoo Listed as one of the top 10 Linux distributions on DistroWatch
• 2002-06-10: Gentoo Linux 1.2 released :)

Thanks to Daniel for the chronology. You can read all about it here.

Gentoo 1.0 Screenshots:

Figure 1.1: Fluxbox, Gimp, Mplayer, Freeamp, rxvt, Heroes, Gkrellm

Figure 1.1: Xfce, Opera, Xine-ui, Terminal, Abiword

Figure 1.1: KDE, Think Free Office, Konqueror, Kedit, HancomShell2

Discuss this!

David Abbott contributed the draft for this announcement.