Recent Community Updates: Live ISO, Website, Download Site, and Speedtest
A roundup of what the community has worked on recently, project by project. Each item links to its repo, so you can dig into the full history if you want.
Live ISO
The Chinese community’s custom KDE Plasma 6 desktop Live ISO (Gentoo-zh/Live-ISO):
- Three languages out of the box: the boot menu offers Simplified / Traditional / English, and the whole live environment follows your choice; the installed system also keeps whatever language you picked in the installer.
- Chinese input methods preinstalled: fcitx5 + rime, ready to type out of the box, with Luna Pinyin, Zhuyin, Wubi86, Cangjie, and Cantonese Pinyin built in.
- Proprietary NVIDIA, optional: pick the NVIDIA entry in the boot menu to load the proprietary driver normally (disable Secure Boot first); otherwise it uses open-source nouveau.
- Handy live-only desktop switches: the desktop has a few one-click toggles meant just for the live session, there when you need them — temporarily turn off auto-sleep / lock (so a long session or install isn’t interrupted), enable passwordless sudo, and start SSH (handy for a remote install or debugging).
- The installed system is clean: those live conveniences (along with the default passwordless SDDM autologin) only exist in the live session; the installer resets / clears them on install, so the installed system goes back to KDE’s normal defaults — login needs a password, sudo needs authorization, and sleep/lock behave normally.
- Out-of-the-box details: PipeWire audio, networking connects on boot, and MAKEOPTS / CPU instruction sets adapt to your machine.
For actually installing a system, following the Gentoo Handbook step by step is the more solid route; the live ISO also ships a graphical installer (Calamares) if you want a quick install.
The installer (Calamares)
The installer config lives in Gentoo-zh/calamares-settings-gig: after an install it clears out the live-only leftover settings and configures NVIDIA according to the GPU option you chose in the live session. On the partitioning step the root filesystem defaults to btrfs, with xfs / ext4 / ZFS also available — pick ZFS and tick encrypt and you get ZFS native encryption (aes-256-gcm), booted by ZFSBootMenu (GRUB can’t read a natively-encrypted ZFS pool, so a ZFS root uses ZBM instead). The install flow, including the encrypted-ZFS path, has been tested with real installs in a VM.
The overlay the Live ISO uses
The packages the Live ISO builds from come from Gentoo-zh/gig — a fork of the Gig OS overlay, specific to the Live ISO, and not the same thing as the community’s main overlay, gentoo-zh. This round updated its Calamares to 3.3.14-r8 (which supports Python 3.14), fixed an emerge --sync error, and cleaned out a batch of redundant / broken packages.
Build and release
The build pipeline, Zakkaus/gentoozh-liveiso-infra: the Live ISO is compiled automatically every Monday and uploaded to Cloudflare R2. The pipeline does a byte-for-byte check that “what’s on R2 == what was just built” and confirms the download page reflects the new image, publishing only when they match; it also copes with the USE / keyword churn of a rolling-tree transition automatically (see the Python 3.14 post).
Website
The website, gentoozh.org (source: gentoo-zh.github.io), migrated from Blowfish to Hextra — lighter, faster, and friendlier to docs and text browsers (details in the migration post). The presentation layer was split out into a standalone Hextra patch package, gentoozh-theme, which also rounded out SEO, the footer, and accessibility. The download page was wired up to the download site, with notes on the Live ISO’s features and hardware requirements, plus a new FAQ page. This round also added English to the public pages, so you can switch between Simplified / Traditional / English.
Download site
The download site, mirror.gentoozh.org (source: Zakkaus/gentoozh-mirror), moved to Cloudflare — no more self-hosted server: ISOs live on Cloudflare R2 (r2.gentoozh.org, zero egress, global edge, cacheable), and the landing page is now a Cloudflare Worker that reads R2 at the edge to list the latest image plus all past builds, always reflecting current contents. The page keeps Simplified / Traditional / English and light / dark mode.
Speedtest site
For speed testing we now point to Cloudflare’s own speed test — downloads already go through Cloudflare’s edge, so it reflects real download speed; the old self-hosted speed.gentoozh.org was retired together with the download server.
Want to try the Live ISO? Head to the download page. Questions are welcome on Telegram or each project’s GitHub.