New release: 2011-03-06

Hi all!

The new release if finally out! It’s been almost an year since the latest release.

The long time since the last update brings some interesting news for you:

  • kernel 2.6.37.2 with reiser4 patches
  • gcc-4.5.2, glibc-2.13-r1, linux-headers-2.6.36.1
  • NTFS kernel module has been disabled in favor of external ntfs3g to avoid conflicts (ntfs3g has much much wider NTFS support than in-kernel module anyway)
  • everything is built from ~arch now. This is to avoid a lot of work in terms of troubleshooting. Building from arch and unmasking only certain packages means that some others, at some point, won’t build, thus requiring additional unmaskings in a never ending cycle
  • everything is built using metro, thus the stages are compressed using xz-utils. The distributed stages are now built from ~arch, of course
  • the final strip phase has been disabled: this means that apart from /usr/portage and /usr/src you have now a fully working stage3 setup + additional goodies. The one I like most is having man pages available. Theorethically, you can also compile source files or entire packages directly from the liveCD. I haven’t tested this possibility though. This comes at the cost of about +100Mb for each CD, but I think it is a fair price
  • the versioning has changed: now both liveCDs and stages are marked with the release date (no more unique 2008.0 naming)

Along with the new release I delivered some updates to the server:

  • (lighttpd + postgresql + drupal) instead of (apache2 + mysql + joomla)
  • 2.6.37.2 kernel + grsecurity + ck2 patches
  • switched to hardened profile
  • migrated root filesystem to ext4
  • general configuration cleanups
  • packed old releases in in a unique 2Gb file. Nobody should be using these anymore. I strongly recommend to only use the latest release available

Hoping that all of this will result in a more pleasant experience, I invite you to download and test the latest liveCDs, already available from the download page.

About the author

Fabio Scaccabarozzi

Ever since 2002, I experimented with Linux. After some time spent on Slackware and Mandriva, I found Gentoo, I've been using it since then and I acquired a lot of knowledge on the internals of the distribution. I have created and mantained a custom liveCD targeted to power users and systems engineers, with a lot of tools usually not included in standard distributions and exotic filesystems. I'm currently working as a senior system administrator in Zurich, Switzerland.

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