User talk:NeddySeagoon/Historical Gentoo

Don't Delete
Don't delete this page. I created what I thought was a subpage incorrectly that turned out to be a section. The I put the Delete tag in the wrong page. The page names only differ by a trailing /.

Delete the deletion message from this page please ande I'll tag the other page more carefully. Sorry for the mess. --NeddySeagoon (talk) 11:43, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Other Old Stuff

 * This is a fascinating little page. Would it be worth attaching things like building from a Stage 1 and possibly some links to old Gentoo boot ISO's? (probably the old LiveCD ones?)


 * I've got a box on OVH with a couple terabytes of storage and unmetered bandwidth. I'd love to help contribute resources to help keep a "historical record" of Gentoo in some fashion if I can


 * --Intelminer (talk) 04:08, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Intelminer, good to hear from you again :)

All the old stuff I have is at Old Gentoo except for the distfiles at olde-distfiles There was a load of distfiles in Old Gentoo but I've merged them.

The wayback machine is a good source of rendered Guide XML documents and all the old CVS repos are online too as individual tarball fragments at VCS history. I don't see the CVS-root there, so it may not be enough to make CVS work again. Its almost all been ported to git anyway.

I do need to put CVS back together to see if I can find the old fortune history. It's not in git as it appears that some moves were done directly in CVS, so the history is going to be hard to find.

Feel free to mirror anything you want from that server. My total bandwidth is 100Mbit/sec but traffic is unlimited. As long as you don't use all my bandwidth, you are good. Drop me an email before you start, so I know to ignore traffic reports. :)

All the old stages and GRPs as gone as far as I know but I've not looked very hard.

I wouldn't have done any of this if I had not found that stage1 on my original 2003 minimalCD.

--NeddySeagoon (talk) 12:48, 4 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Hello! :D I'm still around and doing terrible things with Gentoo, haha!


 * I found the bloodnoc mirror and already started scraping it yesterday. It's currently at 1.6 terabytes copied. Though it's capped at about 4MB/s. I was going to set up a HTTP mirror of my own to serve from once that completes


 * I might see about piecing together revisions of the old Gentoo.org website from archive.org so it's easier to browse, especially on older browsers


 * I'll hop on Gentoo's IRC channels maybe later this week. I've got an old AMD Athlon XP machine I thought would look nice running Gentoo circa 2005 that I'll send you some pictures of when I'm done


 * Update: I made what I believe is a full copy of the DISTFILES.year folder. It kept recursively grabbing files from within the distfiles folder that seemed to just be duplicates, so I killed wget. What I have now is roughly 270GB


 * Sorry again for hogging all your bandwidth for like a day there. Hopefully I got everything though. I'm updating the old OVH box I have first and then I'll set up an HTTP server on it


 * --Intelminer (talk) 08:07, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

DISTFILES.year is just a set of symlinks into distfiles-olde and distfiles-olde has a symlink poining to itself too. All the distfiles I have are in distfiles-olde.

You can't do anything horrible with Gentoo. Its just a toolkit. A few of the tools are sharp. Be careful you don't cut yourself.

The much of the old gentoo gentoo.org was written in GuideXML and saved as .xml files, then rendered on the fly, as required. The rendering tool was unmaintained for years before it was retired. You will get the GuideXML files out of Gentoo archives, not the html pages you need to serve a static site. Hence my suggestion to use the wayback machine.

Compare the rendered page with with the original

270G is about right. I had lots of traffic warnings last night but I was asleep :)

Stay safe.

--NeddySeagoon (talk) 11:22, 5 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Is there anywhere that the various architecture stage3 (or stage1/2) files can be found? I know your bloodnoc mirror has at least some files. Though I'm unclear how comprehensive it is


 * I've looked through all of the public git trees on the gitweb.gentoo.org but have not found anything conclusive. The internet at large also appears to no longer have copies of many of the old LiveCD/LiveDVD ISO files (2007/2008 in particular)


 * --Intelminer (talk) 15:46, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

I have most of the old LiveDVDs. The first LiveDVD was produced for Gentoos tenth birthday. I have a few beta testing LiveDVDs too. The old ones are no longer on line at their source site. poking around there, the latest release is dataed 02-Sep-2020. Its a low bandwidth site so I'm not about to put a link here. I even wrote Installing From the LiveDVD because I was reliably informed that it couldn't be done. :)

The LiveCDs and stages were (and still are) all built automatically approximately every week. That's a lot of stuff to keep. I didn't ever try. This historical Gentoo would not have got started had my original CD not have had a usable stage file too. That was an unexpected bonus.

--NeddySeagoon (talk) 12:06, 16 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I'd be happy to (slowly) mirror anything and everything I can on http://old.intelminer.com of course. I just don't know what still exists out there.


 * I did see under http://bloodnoc.org/~roy/old_Gentoo/AMD64/ that there's a  which would be about what I'm after. But no corresponding stage3-amd64-2007.0 to go with it?


 * If you'd like I can hop on IRC and you can link me that old mirror so I can mirror it for public use, or shoot it through to my intelminer@[the-same-domain] dot com email


 * If you can link me the old LiveCD's and DVD's I'd love to get them mirrored too. Ideally I'd want to get a historical archive of everything possible.


 * The machine it's all being mirrored to is an old OVH ARM "storage" appliance with a 4TB disk and 100 megabit unmetered traffic. It costs about 20 bucks a year to run so I'm more than happy to run it as a public repository for other "historians" to access (and take some pressure off yours at bloodnoc)


 * --Intelminer (talk) 06:15, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

I have a directory  which du says is 15G, I'll host that, since Ive found it. It is what it is, I've just put stuff there when I have been tidying up.

I have more LiveDVDs than that low bandwidth site I linked, including what's there too, so I'll host them.

Feel free to mirror whatever you want on bloodnoc.org grytpype-thynne.org is the same server but I use bloodnoc for IPv4 and grytpype-thynne for IPv6. I forget why now.

We can do this in email if you want. My @gentoo.org works.

--NeddySeagoon (talk) 08:31, 17 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I hopped on IRC (though Freenode has long since released my nick, unfortunately!) so you should be able to poke me there :)


 * --Intelminer (talk) 14:46, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Ive been busy this week. Overnight my time, I let some more stuff upload. You want Gentoo_Installers and Gentoo_liveDVD. I've not sorted it or rationalised it. There will be some duplication. e.g. stages will be there as tarballs and maybe unpacked into directories too, so I could unpick them. Gentoo_liveDVD includes assorted betas that were never released and are in various stages of polish.

As always, there is no warranty. Its all open source, so if it breaks you can keep the pieces. Enjoy.

--NeddySeagoon (talk) 09:36, 22 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Ooh! This looks very useful indeed! I'll go ahead and get that mirrored too just in case.


 * I've also been doing some digging and noticed a lot of files on https://dev.gentoo.org/~robbat2/release-historical/ along with an address to email for grabbing more content off tape backups


 * Would it be possible to loop in Robbat on this whole thing and get those tapes uploaded somewhere also for preservation? (Yours/My machine, dev.gentoo/Internet Archive etc)


 * I promise I'll jump on IRC as well so we can stop playing Wiki page table tennis. Just waiting for the dust to settle RE: Freenode :(


 * --Intelminer (talk) 16:16, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

I suspect that robbat2 has everything since he joined Gentoo. I don't have that much space :) Drop him an email, he can only say no.

--NeddySeagoon (talk) 13:55, 24 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the delayed reply. I tried reaching out to Robbat2 via his email from the mailing list you two spoke on, unfortunately he never replied :(


 * Is there anywhere else I may be able to reach him? I am very interested in historical preservation of Gentoo as a distribution


 * (also I've got many retro PC's from the late 90's/early 00's that (naturally!) would be great under Gentoo)


 * --Intelminer (talk) 12:12, 7 November 2021 (UTC)