I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova.  Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.  As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out.  (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF).  According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo.  We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be.  So I launch it up in VirtualBox.

I had done a second review of Gentoo 2008.0.  People suggested I do a completely commandline install and I did.  But my blog post got corrupted and I’m not typing that up again.  My Gentoo install was unsuccessful anyway.  So I fared no better with the commandline than with the GUI install.  I’ll give it another shot sometime in the future.

Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo.  As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo.  If this was the case for most people, then the fact that they will no longer produce one is a good riddance.  Sabayon, like most of the “modern” distros (or at least Ubuntu and Fedora), display a loading screen instead of the “ok” messages.

Another distro in the seven distros included in Linux Format Magazine issue #110 is Gentoo 2008.0.  This is an interesting release given the recent news that, at least for the time being, Gentoo is not going to be releasing these discs anymore.  Apparently for both of the last two years there has been a lot of trouble with compiling the LiveCDs.

On the one hand, yearly (or biannual like Ubuntu) releases are redundant for Gentoo users.  You just install Gentoo and from then on you just emerge newer versions of packages and always stay up to date.  I have to say this is one of the features that makes Gentoo very attractive to me considering all the problems I’ve had with Fedora in-place upgrades.  But if they are no longer making these annual LiveCDs, what will the Linux magazines feature on their distro discs?  After all, there are people who have bandwidth issues and can’t download Linux distros to instasll.  They are dependent upon magazines to carry the latest releases.  And you know the magazine isn’t going to make a LiveCD for Gentoo.  I still think that a yearly snapshot makes sense.  Also, there has to be a starting point from which the user has a rolling updating system.