News

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.

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.

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.

Happy New Year 2022!

The past year 2021 brought us all both great and sad news, with the world still fighting the COVID pandemic. Gentoo is going strong however, and we are happy to present once more our review of the events of the last 12 months. Read on for new developers, exciting changes and improvements, and up-to-date numbers on Gentoo development.

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.

Following some technical reorganization and the introduction of new hardware, the Gentoo Release Engineering team is happy to offer a much-expanded set of stage files for download. Highlights are in particular the inclusion of musl-based stages and of POWER9-optimized ppc64 downloads, as well as additional systemd-based variants for many architectures.

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.

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.

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:

• Christian (Fuchs)’s Freenode resignation
• @freenodestaff tweet
• Open Letter On freenode’s independence
• Andrew Lee, We grew up with IRC. Let’s take it further.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

• sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel - providing a kernel with genpatches applied, built using the package manager with either a distribution default or a custom configuration
• sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin - prebuilt version of gentoo-kernel, saving time on compiling
• sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel - providing a vanilla (unmodified) upstream kernel

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!

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

• Tracking Gentoo bugs of specific packages (Bugzilla integration)
• Tracking available upstream package versions (Repology integration)
• QA check warnings for specific packages (QA reports integration)

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

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!

Gentoo Project Android is pleased to announce a new 64-bit release of the stage3 Android prefix tarball. This is a major release after 2.5 years of development, featuring gcc-10.1.0, binutils-2.34 and glibc-2.31. Enjoy Gentoo in your pocket!

Did you already know that we have official Gentoo Docker images available on Docker Hub?! The most popular one is based on the amd64 stage. Images are created automatically; you can peek at the source code for this on our git server. Thanks to the Gentoo Docker project!

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 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!

It’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. This year’s FOSDEM 2020 will be held on February 1st and 2nd.

Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand in building K where we will also celebrate 20 years compiling! Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming.

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.

The SKS keyserver network has been a victim of certificate poisoning attack lately. The OpenPGP verification used for repository syncing is protected against the attack. However, our users can be affected when using GnuPG directly. In this post, we would like to shortly summarize what the attack is, what we did to protect Gentoo against it and what can you do to protect your system.

The Gentoo Foundation has partnered with Nitrokey to equip all Gentoo developers with free Nitrokey Pro 2 devices. Gentoo developers will use the Nitrokey devices to store cryptographic keys for signing of git commits and software packages, GnuPG keys, and SSH accounts.

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.

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!

ANSSI, the National Cybersecurity Agency of France, has released the sources of CLIP OS, that aims to build a hardened, multi-level operating system, based on the Linux kernel and a lot of free and open source software. We are happy to hear that it is based on Gentoo Hardened!

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:

• Gibix: Journey into Gentoo eclass, GSoC timeline
• JSteward: Final_report

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.

As last year, there will be a Gentoo booth again at the upcoming FrOSCon “Free and Open Source Conference” in St. Augustin near Bonn! Visitors can meet Gentoo developers to ask any question, get Gentoo swag, and prepare, configure, and compile their own Gentoo buttons.

The conference is 25th and 26th of August 2018, and there is no entry fee. See you there!

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.

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.

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:

• Andreas K. Huettel (dilfridge ) – Perl in the Physics Lab
• Andrew Savchenko (bircoph ) – The Invisible Internet Project

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!

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.

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.

Upcoming weekend, 19-20th August 2017, there will be a Gentoo booth again at the FrOSCon “Free and Open Source Conference” 12, in St. Augustin near Bonn! Visitors can see Gentoo live in action, get Gentoo swag, and prepare, configure, and compile their own Gentoo buttons. See you there!

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:

• Vladimir Smirnov (civil ) – Graphite@Scale or How to store millions metrics per second
• Andrew Savchenko (bircoph ) – Quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography
• Rafael Martins (rafaelmartins ) – Improving your virtualization development workflow with Lago
• Hanno Böck (hanno ) – Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10?
• Jason A. Donenfeld (zx2c4 ) – WireGuard: Next Generation Secure Kernel Network Tunnel

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

It's that time of year again! Gentoo will be present at FOSDEM 2017!

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.

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!

We’re happy to announce the availability of an updated Gentoo LiveDVD. As usual, you can find it on our downloads page.

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 Miniconf 2016 will be held in Prague, Czech Republic during the weekend of 8 and 9 October 2016. Like last time, is hosted together with the LinuxDays by the Faculty of Information Technology of the Czech Technical University.

Want to participate? The call for papers is open until 1 August 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.

The new year kicks off with two large events with Gentoo participation: The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE14x and FOSDEM 2016, both featuring a Gentoo booth.

Get all the details and a special discount code for attending SCALE.

Good things come to those who wait: The main Gentoo package repository (also known as the Portage tree or by its historic name gentoo-x86) is now based on Git.

Learn more about the history of the undergoing and what changes this move entails.

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.

Thank you for participating in Gentoo’s 2015 April Fools’ joke!

Now that April 1 has passed, we shed a tear as we say goodbye CGA Web™ but also to our website. Our previous website, that is, that has been with us for more than a decade.