Gentoo news

[Collins]

All is well in gentoo land (for me at least).

1) As you may know, gentoo has released the 1.0 version (after a year or
more of hard work).  The good news for faithful lackeys like me (rc6-15
level) is that no upgrade is required.  All you need to do is follow a
few simple instructions to upgrade to the latest portage, and there is a
followon script to update the list of installed packages to be analyzed
when you issue emerge update world (update any packages that have newer
versions).

2) I managed to gimp something royally in the update process and
destroyed portage (the rest of the system was running ok).  Never fear,
there is an emergency package on the gentoo cvs site to rebuild portage.

3) The documentation is improving.  The new installation instructions
are quite accurate.  I haven't actually installed the beast again, but
you now have two choices - 1) put up a fairly complete set of binary
packages or 2) put up a minimal system and emerge from sources as in the
past.  Still no orderable CDs, yet.

4) The new portage guide is quite usable, and it is being updated
continually.  A lot of the details you had to dig out of the archives in
the past are now easily found.

5) The kde3 release was superb for me, since I've never tinkered with
any of the beta releases.  Those who already had a beta kde3 experienced
considerable difficulty.  Everything, including sound!!!, is working as
advertized.  I've already blown away kde2.  I'm listening to The
Chieftains as I type.  The only problem is, the volume delivered is not
very loud.  I did discover that the CD Player will only work with
/dev/sr0 (even though /dev/cdrom and /dev/sg0 are linked to the same
underlying scsi device.)

6) The noise level is up on the gentoo-users list, because lots of
newbies are pouring in and lots of folks are trying all those strange
and wonderful things that bring tears to your eyes on any distro -
laptops, all the flavors of DSL, raid setups, LVM, gnome beta stuff, PPP
and modems, printers, etc.

7) I just completed making the microsoft tt-fonts available to X, and
now kde3 is a little more readable.

8) I may experiment with FreeBSD again one of these days, and I may
return to the xfce environment, but I won't be experimenting with any
other linux releases.  This one is solid gold!!!  If I ever get around
to putting a scanner and a color printer on this system, I might even be
able to convince the rest of the family to give it a whirl.

9) It all works, baby.

Enjoy,
-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD?
Gentoo_rc6-15(1.0) 2.4.19pre - kde3 + sylpheed + mozilla