Viva Gentoo

There is some hooha again over on Distrowatch that Gentoo would be dying. Again! How come we're still not dead, you may ask. Well, maybe things are not as bad as they seem. Some random blog whipped up a post with some stats — hmm, remember that quote about “lies, damn lies and statistics”?

For a good retort, read my mentor Steve Dibb on Gentoo's growth. And, as I replied on the original article, I'd rather work for positive change than being overly dramatic from the sidelines. There is certainly a lot to do, a lot that could be improved. So let's try and do that. May Gentoo live long and prosper!

As one of these areas is release engineering, I'd like to point my readers to the announcement that was just published on the Gentoo website about the new release strategy. I recently joined the release team as PR liaison in order to improve communication with our users, which was a point of frustration in the months leading up to the 2008.0 release. I am really happy about the new developments here, and we should soon be able to give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis.

I've also added a few more packages to portage lately. We are the first distro to have added app-cdr/recorder to our official repository. It is a nice, simple and to the point graphical CD and DVD burner application. Especially for people who find k3b too heavy or bloated, and want a lighter desktop app to do this job, recorder is a package to check out.

Talking about a light desktop, there is now a Gentoo project to bring LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, to our beloved distro. I already committed PCManFM, a fast and lightweight, tabbed GTK+ file manager, which is used as the default file manager in LXDE. It also uses Openbox as default window manager, although this is easily interchangeable for another one. The Gentoo LXDE team is developing ebuilds in an overlay (available through layman), and I hope to get the latest release into portage soon. The overlay also has live ebuilds, in case you want to go with the latest code, which is actually very stable, at least in my experience.

23 Sep 08 - 18:23 | and | 7 Comments

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