Gentoo Linux 1.4 rc1 2 or 3

monkeymartin · 03-18-2003, 10:40 AM

I'm new to Gentoo Linux and don't know the differance between 1.4 rc1 1.4 rc2 and 1.4 rc3. What does the rc mean?

viciousfish · 03-18-2003, 02:14 PM

rc means 'Release Candidate'.

Before a new stable version is released, a series of release candidates are let out for testing. The later the rc number, the newer the release. When 1.4 proper is released, it will not have the 'rc-*' suffux.

Lots of software projects, including Mozilla and Linux Mandrake, use this sort of version numbering to make releases, especially for version-numbering a release that is very close to being a full-blown release.

busbarn · 03-20-2003, 11:01 AM

One of the main differences between rc2 and rc3 is rc3 does not have optimized iso's for stage 1 2 and 3 tarballs. There's some software issues, but that isn't really important since Gentoo basically does everything from scratch.

crashmeister · 03-20-2003, 11:51 AM

If you install gentoo for the first time you might want to give rc1 a spin and use the stage3 tarball.There seem to be some issues with the rc3 install.With stage3 you didn't waste a lot of time compiling if something goes wrong and you can always update to the latest version and have everything compiled on your box then - just watch out with updating gcc.

yngwin · 03-20-2003, 05:41 PM

I'd recommend you start with rc2 and the stage3 tarball for your architecture. Then do an emerge -u system to get everything up to date.