Delayed one month from its original release schedule, Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Beta 1 makes its appearance into the Linux world last night, April 1... and NO, it's not a joke. "Since this is the first beta, we're looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork. We expect to release a second beta once your testing has helped us fix problems with this first beta. [...] A migration to RPM was carefully considered again for this release, but in the end we decided to wait for the few remaining RPM-using distributions to migrate to the superior packaging format of ebuilds. [...] Your support and enthusiasm are greatly appreciated-thank you. - says Donnie Berkholz in the release announcement.

Powered by the lightweight Xfce 4.4.2 desktop environment and the powerful Portage software management system, Gentoo 2008.0 Beta 1 Live CD comes packed with a lot of new software and improvements over previews versions. Take a look at the screenshots below!





Below is the Gentoo 2008.0 Release Schedule:

April 3 2008 - Beta 1 release
April 14 2008 - Final upload
April 17 2008 - Gentoo 2008.0 release

And, as you can see from the above release schedule, in about two weeks, the final release will be available to general public! But a second beta release is also expected, as Donnie Berkholz said in the release announcement.

Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Report bugs to the Gentoo Bug Tracker

What is Gentoo Linux?

Gentoo is a source distribution. While there are various "stages," which have different levels of already compiled binary packages included, the main idea is building every package from source code. There are GRP packages, which reduce the need of compiling certain packages that take a very long time to compile.

The creation of this distribution was inspired by the ports system of FreeBSD, there's even an experimental stage with a FreeBSD kernel and the Gentoo "portage" called Gentoo/FreeBSD.

Download and test Gentoo Linux 2008.0 right now from Softpedia.

Download and test Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Live CD right now from Softpedia.

Download the stable version of Gentoo Linux, 2007.0 right now from Softpedia.

Download the stable version of Gentoo Linux Live CD, 2007.0 right now from Softpedia.