The boring part is over! Everything has been recompiled and updated:

Xbox / # uptime
15:23:08 up 8 days, 16:45, 2 users, load average: 2.13, 1.24, 0.90

Now to carry out fixes. These fixes will make maintaining your Gentoox installation far easier than before (notably you wont need to be as careful with etc-update):

The dreaded checkroot/checkfs bug has been fixed for this release. This means you do not need to delete updates when running etc-update!

The ethernet scripts have been updated to the latest versions (which automatically support fallback). This means you do not need to delete updates when running etc-update! This also fixes the apparent double-mounting of /

GDM started as it should be (/etc/init.d/xdm)

local.start and local.stop emptied - all tasks originally performed by these files moved to other init scripts

After MUCH messing around, the on-screen keyboard has been disabled by default for the GDM login manager. To enable it, you now have to press "B" (or right mouse button) 5 times in a row. The reason for this is that with the newest version of GDM, the keyboard kept losing focus and going behind the GDM greeter - making it impossible to bring to the front again. This new method ensures that this does not happen.

ALSA has been moved into a custom ebuild that should not conflict with Gentoo's ALSA ebuilds - you no longer have to keep monitoring for an ALSA update from Gentoo overwriting one from Magic. ALSA has been upgraded to 1.0.11.

A "dummy" kernel ebuild has been added which should stop Gentoo from installing updated kernels that do not come from Magic.

The kernel has been upgraded to 2.4.32.

The filesystem is now ext3.

Read below for some finer details.

Unfortunately... I ran into some problems! One being the unmount process upon reboot, and another being that kernel 2.4.22 no longer compiles with the latest version of GCC marked as stable in Gentoox! I'm looking to upgrading to 2.4.32 - upgrading kernels has proven to be challenging in the past to say the least. This could delay the release significantly (might need to change filesystems from reiserfs to ext3).

*Update*
Yep, as I thought... kernel panic with the 2.4.32 - the culprit... reiserfs. So thats it, I'm done with Mr Reiser. After countless emails to him and his team, nothing has been sorted out. I'm going with ol' reliable: ext3. This will have the effect of deprecating all versions of Gentoox prior to these new releases. I'm sorry, but thats the cost of progress. This is going to significantly delay the release of any new versions as I now have to change Sparkle, Resctoox and Stardust along with Home and Pro.

*Update 2*
So it looks like ext3 is out of the question:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/tmp/home5/rootfs 4095868 3108396 987472 76% /tmp/home5/old
/tmp/home5/newfs 4031680 4016928 0 100% /tmp/home5/new

The top is the reiserfs loopback fs, it has 987MB free. The bottom is EXACTLY the same data on an ext3 loopback fs. Look - all the space is gone! That means that out of 4GiB, about 1GB is totally lost on filesystem overhead. Time to keep looking, I think.

*Update 3*
It's amazing what tweaking block sizes can do:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/tmp/home5/rootfs 4095868 3108396 987472 76% /tmp/home5/old
/tmp/home5/newfs 4030778 3134463 896315 78% /tmp/home5/new

newfs is still using ext3 and has lost only ~90MB which is acceptable!

*Update 4*
After a day trimming and optimising, I managed to get the Gentoox Home ISO back under 700MB. Providing everything works, this release is done... however, experience has shown that things rarely work out so easily!

*Update 5*
The Home distro is built. I'm just testing it out... then it'll be time to move on to Pro. You might want to see the bottom of this URL. It's a feature that has been much requested. Since I'm making all old versions of Gentoox obsolete, I thought I may as well fix some of this stuff.

*Update 6*
Hopefully the last update for this post. Pro edition is now done! I'm just making the distributable package, then I'll test an E: installation... then release everything! The more adventurous of you may have noticed the new manuals up in the "Manuals" section. Theres not much new in them other than the "Whats New" section... but if you've been following this news post then you'll already know whats new ;)