Developer Gentoo Foundation Working state Current | OS family Unix-like Source model Open source | |
Initial release 26 July 2000; 16 years ago (2000-07-26) Latest release Rolling release / weekly (approximately) | ||
Gentoo Linux (pronounced /ˈdʒɛntuː/ JEN-too) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the specific type of computer. Precompiled binaries are available for some larger packages or those with no available source code.
Contents
- History
- Features
- Portage
- Portability
- Installation
- Stages
- Gentoo Reference Platform
- Versions
- Special releases
- Practical jokes
- Logo and mascots
- Popularity
- Derived distributions
- References
Gentoo Linux is named after the fast-swimming gentoo penguin. The name was chosen to reflect the potential speed improvements of machine-specific optimization, which is a major feature of Gentoo. Gentoo package management is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, and flexible. Gentoo describes itself as a meta-distribution because of its adaptability, in that the majority of users have configurations and sets of installed programs which are unique to themselves.
History
Gentoo Linux was initially created by Daniel Robbins as the Enoch Linux distribution. The goal was to create a distribution without precompiled binaries that was tuned to the hardware and only included required programs. At least one version of Enoch was distributed: version 0.75, in December 1999.
Daniel Robbins and the other contributors experimented with a fork of GCC known as EGCS developed by Cygnus Solutions. At this point, "Enoch" was renamed "Gentoo" Linux (the Gentoo species is the fastest swimming penguin). The modifications to EGCS eventually became part of the official GCC (version 2.95), and other Linux distributions experienced similar speed increases.
After problems with a bug on his own system, Robbins halted Gentoo development and switched to FreeBSD for several months, later saying "I decided to add several FreeBSD features to make our autobuild system (now called Portage) a true next-generation ports system."
Gentoo Linux 1.0 was released March 31, 2002. In 2004, Robbins set up the non-profit Gentoo Foundation, transferred all copyrights and trademarks to it, and stepped down as chief architect of the project.
The current board of trustees is composed of five members who were announced (following an election) on March 2, 2008. There is also a seven-member Gentoo Council that oversees the technical issues and policies of Gentoo. The Gentoo Council members are elected for a period of one year, each year by the active Gentoo developers. When a member of the Council retires, the successor is voted into place by the existing Council members.
The Gentoo Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit foundation, registered in the State of New Mexico. In late 2007, the Foundation's charter was revoked, but by May 2008 the State of New Mexico declared that the Gentoo Foundation, Inc. had returned to good standing and was free to do business.
Features
Gentoo appeals to Linux users who want full control of the software that is installed and running on their computer. People who are prepared to invest the time required to configure and tune a Gentoo system can build very efficient desktops and servers. Gentoo encourages users to build a Linux kernel tailored to their particular hardware. It allows very fine control of which services are installed and running; also, memory usage can be reduced, compared to other distributions, by omitting unnecessary kernel features and services.
Gentoo is a good distribution for fairly technical people who want to learn more about Linux, as well as for Linux enthusiasts, programmers, and system administrators. The quantity and quality of the documentation is exceptionally high, and there is a large community of users who are able to assist with problems.
A very large collection of software is available. Each package contains details of any dependencies on other software, so only the minimum set need be installed to run the required applications. Optional features of individual packages, for example whether they require LDAP support, can be selected by the user and any resulting package requirements are automatically included in the set of dependencies.
As Gentoo does not impose a standard look-and-feel, installed packages usually appear as their authors intended.
Portage
Portage is Gentoo's software distribution and package management system. The original design was based on the ports system used by the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) based operating systems. The portage tree contains over 19,000 packages ready for installation in a Gentoo system.
A single invocation of portage's emerge command can update the local copy of the portage tree, search for a package, or download, compile, and install one or more packages and their dependencies. The built-in features can be set for individual packages, or globally, with so-called "use flags".
Pre-compiled binaries are provided for some applications with long build times, such as LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice and Mozilla Firefox, but users lose the ability to customize optional features. There are configuration options to reduce compilation times by enabling parallel compilation and using pipes instead of temporary files; package compilation may also be distributed over multiple computers. In addition, the user may be able to mount a large filesystem in RAM to greatly speed up the process of building packages. Some of these approaches have drawbacks and so are not enabled by default. When installing the same package on multiple computers with sufficiently similar hardware, the package may be compiled once and a binary package created for quick installation on the other computers.
Portability
As Gentoo is a source-based distribution with a portage tree describing how to build the packages, adding instructions to build on different machine architectures is particularly easy.
Originally built on the x86 architecture, Gentoo has since been ported to many others. It is officially supported and considered stable on x86, x86-64, IA-64, PA-RISC, PowerPC, PowerPC 970, SPARC 64-bit, and DEC Alpha architectures. It is also officially supported but considered in development state on MIPS, PS3 Cell Processor, System Z/s390, ARM, and SuperH. Official support for 32-bit SPARC hardware has been dropped.
Portability toward other operating systems, such as BSD-derived ones including Mac OS X, is under active development by the Gentoo/Alt project. The Gentoo/FreeBSD project already has a working guide based on FreeSBIE, while Gentoo/NetBSD, Gentoo/OpenBSD and Gentoo/DragonFly are being developed. There is also a project to get Portage working on OpenSolaris. There was an unofficial project to create a Gentoo port to GNU Hurd, but it has been inactive since 2006.
It is also possible to install a Gentoo Prefix (provided by a project that maintains alternative installation methods for Gentoo) in a Cygwin environment on Windows, but this configuration is somewhat experimental.
Installation
Gentoo may be installed in several ways. The most common way is to use the Gentoo minimal CD with a stage3 tarball (see below for more explanation on stages). As with many Linux distributions, Gentoo may be installed from almost any Linux environment, such as another Linux distribution's LiveCD, LiveUSB or Network Booting using the "Gentoo Alternative Install Guide". A normal install requires a connection to the Internet, but there is also a guide for a network-less install.
Previously, Gentoo supported installation from stage1 and stage2 tarballs. However, this is no longer recommended officially by the Gentoo foundation, and is meant only for Gentoo developers.
Following the initial install steps, the Gentoo Linux install process in the Gentoo Handbook describes compiling a new Linux kernel. This process is generally not required by other Linux distributions. Although this is widely regarded as a complex task, Gentoo provides documentation and tools such as Genkernel to simplify the process and make it straightforward for novice users. In addition, users may also use an existing kernel known to work on their system by simply copying it to the boot directory and updating their bootloader. Support for installation is provided on the Gentoo forum and on IRC.
A Live USB of Gentoo Linux can be created manually or using UNetbootin.
Stages
Before October 2005, installation could be started from any of three base stages:
Since October 2005, only the stage3 installations have been officially supported, due to the inherent complexities of bootstrapping from earlier stages (which requires resolving and then breaking numerous circular dependencies). Tarballs for stage1 and stage2 were distributed for some time after this, although the instructions for installing from these stages had been removed from the handbook and moved into the Gentoo FAQ. As of September 2015, only the supported stage3 tarballs are publicly available; stage1 and stage2 tarballs are only "officially" generated and used internally by Gentoo development teams. However, if so desired, a user may still rebuild the toolchain or reinstall the base system software during or after a normal stage3 installation, effectively simulating the old bootstrap process.
Gentoo Reference Platform
From 2003 until 2008, the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP) was a snapshot of prebuilt packages that users could quickly install during the Gentoo installation process, to give faster access to fully functional Gentoo installation. These packages included KDE, X Window System, OpenOffice, GNOME, and Mozilla. Once the installation was complete, the packages installed as part of the GRP were intended to be replaced by the user with the same or newer versions built though Portage which would be built using the users' system configuration rather than the generic builds provided by the GRP. As of 2011, the GRP is discontinued, the final reference to it appearing in the 2008.0 handbook.
Versions
Once Gentoo is installed, it becomes effectively "versionless"; that is, once an emerge update is done, the system is completely current, with all the latest software readily available to it (subject to restrictions that a user may have specified in their Portage configuration files). For example, if a system is installed using a stage3 from March 2011, and the user performs a full emerge update one month later, they will upgrade the installed Gentoo system to the same as they would have if they had performed a fresh installation from an April 2011 CD. Thus, Gentoo users may upgrade to the latest version of all of their installed software the day that new versions are released and have an ebuild available. Like other Linux distributions, Gentoo systems have an /etc/gentoo-release file, but this contains the version of the installed sys-apps/baselayout package.
In 2004, Gentoo began to version its Live media by year rather than numerically. This continued until 2008, when it was announced that the 2008.1 LiveCD release had been cancelled in favour of weekly automated builds of both Stages 3 and Minimal CDs. On 20 December 2008, the first weekly builds were published. In 2009, a special LiveDVD was created to celebrate the Gentoo 10-year anniversary.
Special releases
In 2009, a special LiveDVD was released to celebrate Gentoo's tenth anniversary. Initially planned as a once-off, the LiveDVD was updated to the latest package versions in 2011 due to its popularity among new users.
Practical jokes
The developers and community behind Gentoo Linux have performed many practical jokes, a number of them on or around April Fools' Day. This kind of practical trickery and playfulness has been a tenet of the Gentoo since its creation.
Logo and mascots
The Gentoo penguin is thought to be the fastest underwater-swimming penguin. The name "Gentoo Linux" acknowledges both the Linux mascot, a penguin called "Tux", and the project's aim to produce a high performance operating system.
The official Gentoo logo is a stylized 'g' resembling a silver magatama. Unofficial mascots include Larry The Cow and Znurt the Flying Saucer.
Popularity
Upon launch, Gentoo quickly became a popular distribution, with 326 hits per day on average in 2002 on DistroWatch.com – the third highest. However, over the years Gentoo has suffered from a dropping popularity. In 2003, Gentoo was fourth most popular, and dropped to seventh in 2004, ninth in 2005, tenth in 2006 and thirteenth in 2007. For 2008, Gentoo dropped to 18th, but the following year it ended its dropping streak by rising to 17th. Gentoo was placed 18th in 2010, 20th in 2011, 22nd in 2012, 33rd in 2013, and 38th in 2014. In 2016 it became slightly more popular reaching 35th place.
Derived distributions
There are a number of independently-developed variants of Gentoo Linux. An active and fairly complete list is maintained on the wiki.gentoo.org.
Distributions based on Gentoo Linux include:
In the past, the following were also Gentoo-based:
Distributions using Gentoo's Portage system include:
Gentoo's Portage system is also used by the developers, but not end-users, of: