The Gentoo Team has released Gentoo Linux 2006.1, the second release of the year:

"The Gentoo Release Engineering team proudly announces the release of Gentoo Linux 2006.1, the second release of the year. Building on the strengths of previous releases and featuring all of Gentoo's well-documented flexibility, performance and portability, this release is now available on all supported architectures. The most popular architectures now use GCC 4.1, glibc 2.4 and baselayout 1.12.1, as well as including a new profile layout, with separate desktop and server profiles."

You can read the press release here.

Gentoo Linux 2006.1 was supposed to be released at the end of August, and it did! Well, I have downloaded the Live CD-Installer immediately this morning, from a mirror close to me, as I wanted to see what things are new and what things are improved in this version.

Let's get started!

First thing that appears when you boot from the CD are some boot options which you can access by pressing the F1 tru F7 buttons. You can read all those options or you can just press enter and the CD will start to boot. After about 1 minute, you'll see the classical Gentoo bootsplash.


After the boot process finished, a login prompt appeared and, in about 10 seconds, it automatically logged me in the GNOME desktop. My first impression about the desktop: kind of dark, but I have changed the wallpaper to something more colorful, the GNOME Curves wallpaper.


The applications are pretty much the same as in the previous version, 2006.0, except one program that captured my attention, Wireshark, the old and very popular Ethereal. I was also interested in the GNOME version, I thought it was 2.15.x or something newer, but I admit that I was disappointed when I saw it was still 2.14.2.


Let's have a look now at some applications included in this release:

Evince - Document Viewer
Eye of GNOME - Image Viewer
BitTorrent - Torrent Downloader
Epiphany - GNOME Web Browser
Mozilla Firefox - The popular Web Browser
Mozilla Thunderbird - The popular Mozilla e-mail client
NmapFE - nmap frontend
Pan - GNOME NewsReader
Wireshark (old Ethereal) - Network Analyzer
Xchat - IRC Client
Evolution - E-mail Client
OpenOffice.org - Office Suite (Calc, Draw, Impress, Writer)
Audacious - A very new and light Media Player
MPlayer - Linux's Number One Movie Player
Rhythmbox - GNOME's Music Player
Sound Juicer - CD Extractor


You'll also find a lot of games like:

Ataxx
Blackjack
Five or More
Four-in-a-Row
Gnometris
Iagno
Klotski
Mahjongg
Mines
Nibbles
Robots
Same GNOME
Tali
Tetravex


The most important feature of this Live CD is of course, the Gentoo Installer, which looks improved. First of all, I've noticed that it shows a counter of the guiding steps and that there are more such steps than in the previous version. My colleague, Bogdan Radulescu, made a review of the previous version and also the first of the Gentoo Installer, which you can read it here, if you want to know how to use it.


You can download Gentoo Linux 2006.1 Live CD now from Softpedia.

You can download Gentoo Linux 2006.1 now from Softpedia.