News

Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available (Feb 4, 2024)

Larry the cow with packages

End of December 2023 we already made our official announcement of binary Gentoo package hosting. The initial package set for amd64 was and is base-line x86-64, i.e., it should work on any 64bit Intel or AMD machine. Now, we are happy to announce that there is also a separate package set using the extended x86-64-v3 ISA (i.e., microarchitecture level) available for the same software. If your hardware supports it, use it and enjoy the speed-up! Read on for more details…

2023 in retrospect & happy new year 2024! (Jan 22, 2024)

Gentoo Fireworks A Happy New Year 2024 to all of you! We hope you enjoyed the fireworks; we tried to contribute to these too with the binary package news just before new year! That’s not the only thing in Gentoo that was new in 2023 though; as in the previous years, let’s look back and give it a review.

Gentoo goes Binary! (Dec 29, 2023)

Larry the cow with packages

You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed?

To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!

Gentoo accepted into Google Summer of Code 2023 (Feb 22, 2023)

GSoC logo

Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favourite free software project?! Once again, now for the 11th time, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, but new projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 4th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributors refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

Potential GSoC contributors are encouraged to e-mail the GSoC admins with their name, IRC nickname, and the desired project, and discuss ideas in the #gentoo-soc IRC channel on Libera Chat. Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2023 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should also not hesitate to contact the Summer of Code mentors via their mailing list.

2022 in retrospect & late happy new year 2023! (Feb 9, 2023)

Gentoo Fireworks A quite late Happy New Year 2023 to all of you!

Once again with 2022 an eventful year has passed, and Gentoo is still alive and kicking! 2023 already started some time ago and some of us have even already been meeting up and networking at FOSDEM 2023. Still, we are happy to present once more a review of the Gentoo news of the past year 2022. Read on for new developers, distribution wide initiatives and improvements, up-to-date numbers on Gentoo development, tales from the infrastructure, and all the fresh new packages you can emerge now.

New Gentoo LiveGUI ISO and artwork / branding contest! (Apr 3, 2022)

Artist Larry

After a long break, we now have again a weekly LiveGUI ISO image for amd64 available! The download, suitable for an USB stick or a dual-layer DVD, boots directly into KDE Plasma and comes with a ton of up-to-date software. This ranges from office applicactions such as LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Gimp all the way to many system administrator tools.

Now, we need your help! Let’s make this the coolest and most beautiful Linux live image ever. We’re calling for submissions of artwork, themes, actually anything from a desktop background to a boot manager animation, on the topic of Gentoo! The winning entry will be added as default setting to the official LiveGUI images, and also be available for download and installation.

Gentoo accepted into Google Summer of Code 2022 (Mar 10, 2022)

GSoC logo

Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favourite free software project?! Once again, now for the 10th time, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, but new projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 19th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributors refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

Potential GSoC contributors are encouraged to e-mail the GSoC admins with their name, IRC nickname, and the desired project, and discuss ideas in the #gentoo-soc IRC channel on Libera Chat. Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2022 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should also not hesitate to contact the Summer of Code mentors via their mailing list.

Format of download file signatures has changed (Feb 17, 2022)

Gentoo logo

We have simplified the format of the downloadable file (i.e. stage 3 and iso image) signatures. Now, each of these files is accompanied by a detached GnuPG signature where the file itself is signed. The signing key remains unchanged; see our web page on release media signatures for the fingerprints.

An unsigned DIGESTS file remains available as well.

Unexpected database server downtime, affecting bugs, forums, wiki (Nov 27, 2021)

Gentoo logo

Due to an unexpected breakage on our database servers, several Gentoo websites are currently down. In particular, this includes Forums, Wiki, and Bugzilla. Please visit our Infrastructure status page for real-time monitoring and eventual outage notices.

Update, Dec 5, 2021: The outage, apparently caused by a subtle bug in the depths of MariaDB and Galera, should mostly be over. Our infrastructure team is watching the database servers closely though.

Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked (May 26, 2021)

Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.

Please note that at this point the only official Gentoo IRC channels, as well as developer accounts, can be found on Libera Chat.

2021-06-15 update

As a part of an unannounced switch to a different IRC daemon, the Freenode staff has removed all channel and nickname registrations. Since many Gentoo developers have left Freenode permanently and are not interested in registering their nicknames again, this opens up further possibilities of malicious impersonation.

Gentoo IRC presence moving to Libera Chat (May 23, 2021)

Libera.Chat logo

The Gentoo Council held an emergency single agenda item meeting today. At this meeting, we have decided to move the official IRC presence of Gentoo to the Libera Chat IRC network. We intend to have this move complete at latest by 13/June/2021. A full log of the meeting will be available for download soon.

At the moment it is unclear whether we will retain any presence on Freenode at all; we urge all users of the #gentoo channel namespace to move to Libera Chat immediately. IRC channel names will (mostly) remain identical. You will be able to recognize Gentoo developers on Libera Chat by their IRC cloak in the usual form gentoo/developer/*. All other technical aspects will feel rather familiar to all of us as well. Detailed instructions for setting up various IRC clients can be found on the help pages of the IRC network.

Freenode IRC and Gentoo (May 20, 2021)

According to the information published recently, there have been major changes in the way the Freenode IRC network is administered. This has resulted in a number of staff members raising concerns about the new administration and/or resigning. A large number of open source projects have already announced the transition to other IRC networks, or are actively discussing it.

It is not yet clear whether and how these changes will affect Gentoo. We are observing as the situation develops. It is possible that we will decide to move the official Gentoo channels to another network in the best interest of our users. At the same time, we realize that such a move will be an inconvenience to them.

At the same time, it has came to our attention that certain individuals have been using the situation to impersonate Gentoo developers on other IRC networks. The official Gentoo developers can be identified on Freenode by their gentoo/developer cloak. If we move to another network, we will announce claiming a respective cloak.

Please check this page for future updates.

More information on the Freenode situation can be found at:

2021-05-22 update

The Gentoo Council will be meeting tomorrow (Sunday, 2021-05-23) at 19:00 UTC to discuss the problem and the possible solutions.

The Gentoo Group Contacts team has been taking steps in order to ensure readiness for the most likely options.

Google Summer of Code 2021 students welcome (May 18, 2021)

We are glad to welcome Leo and Mark to the Google Summer of Code 2021.

Mark will work on improving Catalyst, our release building tool. Leo will work on improving our Java packaging support, with a special focus on big-data and scientific software.

In Memory of Kent “kentnl” Fredric (Feb 12, 2021)

Gentoo mourns the sudden loss of Kent Fredric, also known to us by his IRC handle kent\n. He passed away following a tragic accident a few days ago.

Kent was an active member of the Gentoo community for many years. He tirelessly managed Gentoo’s Perl support, and was active in the Rust project as well as in many other corners. We all remember him as an enthusiastic, bright person, with lots of eye for detail and constant willingness to help out and improve things. On behalf of the world-wide Gentoo community, our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and friends.

Please join us in remembering Kent on the Gentoo forums.

2020 in retrospect & happy new year 2021! (Jan 15, 2021)

Gentoo Fireworks Happy New Year 2021! Due to the COVID pandemic, 2020 was a year unlike any other, and this has also impacted many open source projects. Nevertheless, at Gentoo we have made some great strides forward. While we now start into 2021 with fresh energy (and maybe soon antibodies), let’s also take a look back. We’re happy to share with our community the most exciting news of the past 12 months – including numbers on Gentoo activity, our new developers, and featured changes and improvements!

Distribution kernel for Gentoo (Sep 15, 2020)

Larry with Tux as cowboy

The Gentoo Distribution Kernel project is excited to announce that our new Linux Kernel packages are ready for a wide audience! The project aims to create a better Linux Kernel maintenance experience by providing ebuilds that can be used to configure, compile, and install a kernel entirely through the package manager as well as prebuilt binary kernels. We are currently shipping three kernel packages:

All the packages install the kernel as part of the package installation process — just like the rest of your system! More information can be found in the Gentoo Handbook and on the Distribution Kernel project page. Happy hacking!

New Packages site features (Sep 9, 2020)

Gentoo in a package

Our packages.gentoo.org site has recently received major feature upgrades thanks to the continued efforts of Gentoo developer Max Magorsch (arzano). Highlights include:

Additionally, an experimental command-line client for packages.gentoo.org named “pgo” is in preparation, specifically also for our users with accesssibility needs.

Portage 3.0 stabilized (Sep 5, 2020)

Skating Larry

We have good news! Gentoo’s Portage project has recently stabilized version 3.0 of the package manager.

What’s new? Well, this third version of Portage removes support for Python 2.7, which has been an ongoing effort across the main Gentoo repository by Gentoo’s Python project during the 2020 year (see this blog post).

In addition, due to a user provided patch, updating to the latest version of Portage can vastly speed up dependency calculations by around 50-60%. We love to see our community engaging in our software! For more details, see this Reddit post from the community member who provided the patch. Stay healthy and keep cooking with Gentoo!

200th Gentoo Council meeting (May 10, 2020)

council group photo

Way back in 2005, the reorganization of Gentoo led to the formation of the Gentoo Council, a steering body elected annually by the Gentoo developers. Forward 15 years, and today we had our 200th meeting! (No earth shaking decisions were taken today though.) The logs and summaries of all meetings can be read online on the archive page.

Reviving Gentoo Bugday (May 8, 2020)

bug outline

Reviving an old tradition, the next Gentoo Bugday will take place on Saturday 2020-06-06. Let’s contribute to Gentoo and fix bugs! We will focus on two topics in particular:

  • Adding or improving documentation on the Gentoo wiki
  • Fixing packages that fail with -fno-common (bug #705764)

Join us on channel #gentoo-bugday, freenode IRC, for real-time help. See you on 2020-06-06!

AArch64 (arm64) profiles are now stable! (Aug 11, 2019)

Packet.com logo

The ARM64 project is pleased to announce that all ARM64 profiles are now stable.

While our developers and users have contributed significantly in this accomplishment, we must also thank our Packet sponsor for their contribution. Providing the Gentoo developer community with access to bare metal hardware has accelerated progress in achieving the stabilization of the ARM64 profiles.

Gentoo GNOME 3.30 for all init systems (Mar 27, 2019)

GNOME logo

GNOME 3.30 is now available in Gentoo Linux testing branch. Starting with this release, GNOME on Gentoo once again works with OpenRC, in addition to the usual systemd option. This is achieved through the elogind project, a standalone logind implementation based on systemd code, which is currently maintained by a fellow Gentoo user. Gentoo would like to thank Mart Raudsepp (leio), Gavin Ferris, and all others working on this for their contributions. More information can be found in Mart’s blog post.

FOSDEM 2019 (Jan 9, 2019)

FOSDEM logo

It’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. This year’s FOSDEM 2019 will be held on February 2nd and 3rd.

Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand in building K. Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming. So far eight developers have specified their attendance, with most likely many more on the way!

Gentoo congratulates our GSoC participants (Sep 7, 2018)

GSOC logo Gentoo would like to congratulate Gibix and JSteward for finishing and passing Google’s Summer of Code for the 2018 calendar year. Gibix contributed by enhancing Rust (programming language) support within Gentoo. JSteward contributed by making a full Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution, managed by Portage, run on devices which use the original Android-customized kernel.

The final reports of their projects can be reviewed on their personal blogs:

Congratulations: Hanno Böck and co-authors win Pwnie! (Aug 12, 2018)

Pwnies logo

Congratulations to security researcher and Gentoo developer Hanno Böck and his co-authors Juraj Somorovsky and Craig Young for winning one of this year’s coveted Pwnie awards!

The award is for their work on the Return Of Bleichenbacher’s Oracle Threat or ROBOT vulnerability, which at the time of discovery affected such illustrious sites as Facebook and Paypal. Technical details can be found in the full paper published at the Cryptology ePrint Archive.

Github Gentoo organization hacked - resolved (Jun 28, 2018)

2018-07-04 14:00 UTC

We believe this incident is now resolved. Please see the incident report for details about the incident, its impact, and resolution.

2018-06-29 15:15 UTC

The community raised questions about the provenance of Gentoo packages. Gentoo development is performed on hardware run by the Gentoo Infrastructure team (not github). The Gentoo hardware was unaffected by this incident. Users using the default Gentoo mirroring infrastructure should not be affected.

If you are still concerned about provenance or are unsure what solution you are using, please consult https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Portage/Repository_Verification. This will instruct you on how to verify your repository.

2018-06-29 06:45 UTC

The gentoo GitHub organization remains temporarily locked down by GitHub support, pending fixes to pull-request content.

For ongoing status, please see the Gentoo infra-status incident page.

For later followup, please see the Gentoo Wiki page for GitHub 2018-06-28. An incident post-mortem will follow on the wiki.

Gentoo accepted into Google Summer of Code 2018 (Feb 19, 2018)

Students who want to spend their summer having fun and writing code can do so now for Gentoo. Gentoo has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making one’s self known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume.

Initial project ideas can be found here, although new projects ideas are welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: there is typically some idea-polishing which must occur before the March 27th deadline. Because of this it is strongly recommended that students refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

GSoC students are encouraged to begin discussing ideas in the #gentoo-soc IRC channel on the Freenode network.

Further information can be found on the Gentoo GSoC 2018 wiki page. Those with unanswered questions should not hesitate to contact the Summer of Code mentors via the mailing list.

FOSDEM is near (Jan 30, 2018)

Excitement is building with FOSDEM 2018 only a few days away. There are now 14 current and one former developer in planned attendance, along with many from the Gentoo community.

This year one Gentoo related talk titled Unix? Windows? Gentoo! will be given by Michael Haubenwallner (haubi ) of the Gentoo Prefix project.

Two more non-Gentoo related talks will be given by current Gentoo developers:

If you attend don’t miss out on your opportunity to build the Gentoo web-of-trust by bringing a valid governmental ID, a printed key fingerprint, and various UIDs you want certified. See you at FOSDEM!

FOSDEM 2018 (Jan 3, 2018)

FOSDEM 2018 logo

Put on your cow bells and follow the herd of Gentoo developers to Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. This year FOSDEM 2018 will be held on February 3rd and 4th.

Our developers will be ready to candidly greet all open source enthusiasts at the Gentoo stand in building K. Visit this year’s wiki page to see which developer will be running the stand during the different visitation time slots. So far seven developers have specified their attendance, with most-likely more on the way!

Unlike past years, Gentoo will not be hosting a keysigning party, however participants are encouraged to exchange and verify OpenPGP key data to continue building the Gentoo Web of Trust. See the wiki article for more details.

Hardened Linux kernel sources removal (Aug 19, 2017)

As you may know the core of sys-kernel/hardened-sources has been the grsecurity patches. Recently the grsecurity developers have decided to limit access to these patches. As a result, the Gentoo Hardened team is unable to ensure a regular patching schedule and therefore the security of the users of these kernel sources. Thus, we will be masking hardened-sources on the 27th of August and will proceed to remove them from the main ebuild repository by the end of September. We recommend to use sys-kernel/gentoo-sources instead. Userspace hardening and support for SELinux will of course remain in the Gentoo ebuild repository. Please see the full news item for additional information and links.

Five Gentoo developers scheduled for talks at FOSDEM (Feb 2, 2017)

FOSDEM 2017 logo

As FOSDEM 2017 approaches we are happy to announce there are a total of five Gentoo developers scheduled to give talks!

Developers and their talks include:

Only a few hours remain until the event kicks off. See you at FOSDEM!

In Memory of Jonathan “avenj” Portnoy (Aug 23, 2016)

The Gentoo project mourns the loss of Jonathan Portnoy, better known amongst us as Jon, or avenj.

Jon was an active member of the International Gentoo community, almost since its founding in 1999. He was still active until his last day.

His passing has struck us deeply and with disbelief. We all remember him as a vivid and enjoyable person, easy to reach out to and energetic in all his endeavors.

On behalf of the entire Gentoo Community, all over the world, we would like to convey our deepest sympathy for his family and friends. As per his wishes, the Gentoo Foundation has made a donation in his memory to the Perl Foundation.

Please join the community in remembering Jon on our forums.

Events: FrOSCon 11 (Aug 18, 2016)

This weekend, the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg will host the Free and Open Source Software Conference, better known as FrOSCon. Gentoo will be present there on 20 and 21 August with a chance for you to meet devs and other users, grab merchandise, and compile your own Gentoo button badges.

See you there!

GSoC 2016: Five projects accepted (Apr 28, 2016)

We are excited to announce that 5 students have been selected to participate with Gentoo during the Google Summer of Code 2016!

You can follow our students’ progress on the gentoo-soc mailing list and chat with us regarding our GSoC projects via IRC in #gentoo-soc on freenode.
Congratulations to all the students. We look forward to their contributions!

Find out more about the accepted projects

Gentoo accepted to GSoC 2016 (Feb 29, 2016)

Students are encouraged to start working now on their project proposals. You can peruse the list of ideas or come up with your own. In any case, it is highly recommended you talk to a mentor sooner rather than later. The official application period for student proposals starts on March 14th.

Do not hesitate to join us in the #gentoo-soc channel on freenode. We will be happy to answer your questions there.
More information on Gentoo’s GSoC effort is also available on our Wiki.

Git changes & impact to Overlays hostnames (Apr 25, 2015)

Changes to the Gentoo Git hosting setup may require URL changes in your checkouts: Repositories are now only available via git.gentoo.org for authenticated users and anongit.gentoo.org for read-only traffic.