fidzu : gentoo

It's taken a lot of time, but we have finally made the big step to upgrade our Gentoo Forums to phpBB3. You will notice a few differences between phpBB2 and today:

• It's definitely not Discourse.
• Everyone must change their password at first login, just to freshen them up.
• Reports are more private-like now, but we may get the old public reporting topic back later.

Discussion and feedback are welcome on the 'The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade' discussion thread.

At the moment there are still a few know rough edges around, e.g.,

• Styles may need more or less tweaks, especially the dark one.
• Some BB codes are missing or/and need tweaking.
• The only language available is English.

And of course new issues may still pop up. In any case, enjoy the forums!

02 Apr 2026 5:00am GMT

This turned out to be an April Fool's post. For the real upgrade announcement see here.

The Gentoo Forums are being upgraded for us to be able to leverage the latest in modern bleeding edge technologies. As many of you are no doubt aware, phpBB has been a challenging maintenance burden and despite years of effort, migrating to phpBB 3 has been eternally stuck. It is time to acknowledge this and find another solution. Fortunately, there is precedent from other FOSS communities that faced a similar problem.

tl;dr, we have chosen Discourse as the new forum software.

It seems doubtful that we will be able to import any of the old posts, and will likely start completely clean. However, we have been working on implementing AI features utilised via the Discourse API, which will scrape the internet for our old forums content (and more!), and post them for us in our new home. Due to this, viewing new posts will include old posts as well for the next few years or so, depending on how much of the old forums are backed up via the Internet Archive and similar archival sites. We have reasonably high hopes that many threads will appear exactly as they used to (after all, AI can only regurgitate what already existed…).

We understand that this move will be controversial, and have been working on some light themeing skins that will make it look a bit more like the classic phpbb2 of old, which hopefully should help alleviate most concern.

01 Apr 2026 5:00am GMT

We are proud to announce a new port of Gentoo to GNU Hurd! Our crack team has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that they've succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage. You can try Gentoo GNU/Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU:

$ wget https://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/x86/hurd/hurd-i686-preview.qcow2.sig
$ wget https://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/x86/hurd/hurd-i686-preview.qcow2
$ gpg --verify hurd-i686-preview.qcow2.sig hurd-i686-preview.qcow2
$ qemu-system-i386 -drive file=hurd-i686-preview.qcow2,format=qcow2 -m 2G -net user,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:2222-:2222 -net nic,model=ne2k_pci --enable-kvm -M q35

To log in, input login root, then use gnuhurdrox as the password. Upon logging in, you can run ./setup-net.sh and /etc/init.d/sshd restart to get SSH. Connect via ssh -p 2222 root@127.0.0.1 on your host.

We have developed scripts to build this image locally and conveniently work on further development of the Hurd port. Release media like stages and automated image builds are future goals, as is feature parity on x86-64. Further contributions are welcome, encouraged, and needed. Be patient, expect to get your hands dirty, anticipate breakage, and have fun!

Oh, and Gentoo GNU/Hurd also works on real hardware!

April Fool's post

This was originally the topic of a post on April 1st. Here's the original text for posterity…

We are proud to announce that Gentoo plans to switch to GNU Hurd as its primary kernel. Our crack team of boffins has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that that they've succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage.

Linux has long been a source of unreliability. Despite the experimental status of the port, we've found the Hurd to be immensely more robust, and hope to be able to discontinue Linux support by the end of 2026. Previous generations of developers already attempted to port Gentoo to the Hurd, but the world was not yet ready. It is now. You can try Gentoo GNU Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU: (…)

01 Apr 2026 5:00am GMT