This is the final release of 2004 and is the culmination of the work of each of our developers. The main focus for this release was fixing bugs in previous releases and making the release tools more robust and easier to use. Releasing for 2004.3 are amd64, hppa, ppc, sparc, x86 and also our initial ppc64 release. There is also an experimental alpha release, along with stages for ia64 and s390. The embedded team has also released stages for arm, mips, ppc, and x86, all which can be found under /experimental. You can find out more about 2004.3 by checking out the release page or reading the ChangeLog.

Some points of interest include:

* amd64 and ppc switching to gcc 3.4 as their compiler of choice
* sparc releasing only sparc64 media
* amd64 and x86 switching to a single kernel for the LiveCD

Improved improved developer communication between the vaious arch teams for a more consistent release was also a point of interest, including the completion of switching Gentoo to using the new cascading profiles.

The Release Engineering project would like to thank all of the Gentoo developers and our many community testers for making this release our best ever and we're all looking forward to bringing you an awesome 2005.0!

You can grab the new release from one of our mirrors or via BitTorrent at our primary or secondary secondary torrent trackers. The secondary server is provided by Friends of Gentoo e.V.