Project:Installer/Old/Release-0.4

Information regarding the 0.4 release of the Gentoo Linux Installer.

Version 0.4
The Gentoo Linux Installer team would like to announce is happy to announce the 0.4 release of the Gentoo Linux Installer. There are two major new features in this release and a number of smaller changes.

Improvements
The biggest change is an overhaul of the partitioning code. The installer will now be more gentle to people's drives and not recreate the partition map unless it must. Also, it will now abort an install _before_ partitioning if an unsupported layout or unknown filesystem is found. Note that unformatted partitions are currently considered "unknown" by the installer for safety reasons; please format them beforehand.

The second big change is the addition of a "Networkless" mode in the frontends. Selecting a networkless install pre-selects many options and disables other options. This is in an effort to avoid letting users easily create configurations that will break the installation. Because of a lack of an Internet connection, the installer limits the packages and versions available to emerge.

There have been a few other changes, mostly bug fixes, but the same general rules still apply. The installer is designed to be as flexible as possible, so despite our efforts to make it robust, if you really try to break it, you will likely succeed.

We apologize that we have not been able to provide more features this release; the lead developers have been preoccupied with making the 2006.1 release and getting the Scire project off the ground. Not to worry though! We still have a lot of things planned for the installer. Goals for the 2007.0 release include working internationalization in the front-ends, improved partitioning with possibly LVM support, an overhaul of some of the GTK front-end screens, and support for and  architectures.

Reporting bugs
As always, if you find a bug in the installer, please first READ THE FAQ, and if it is not a known issue or fixed in CVS, please file a bug using Bugzilla.