[owl-users] Owl-current moved to GCC 4.6.1

Hi,

So we did it.  Today's Owl-current snapshot includes and has been built
with GCC 4.6.1 (C and C++ compilers) instead of the much older 3.4.5,
which we've been using before.  The system is fully capable of
rebuilding itself with this new version of GCC.  New installs and
upgrades from Owl 3.0 and 3.0-stable (if you like) appear to work fine -
but a lot more testing is desired.

New ISOs are linked right from the Owl homepage, as usual:

http://www.openwall.com/Owl/

Please note that unlike those of 3.0-stable and unlike older Owl-current
ISOs, these new ones require DVD media now (the .iso.gz files for
Owl-current uncompress to approximately 800 MB now).  Owl is not exactly
this large, though.  Rather, our ISOs effectively include three copies
of the system: live (almost full install), packages, and sources.

The corresponding OpenVZ container templates, RPMs, and sources are
found on our FTP mirrors (not all mirrors have already been updated,
though, but they should be within 24 hours).  (RPMs and sources, but not
OpenVZ container templates, are also found inside the ISOs.)

Besides the GCC update, today's Owl-current includes all of the updates
recently announced for Owl 3.0-stable:

http://www.openwall.com/lists/announce/2011/10/26/1

It also includes GMP, MPC, and MPFR - arbitrary precision arithmetic
libraries, which are required by the new GCC version.

One unrelated change is introduction of VLAN support into networking
startup scripts, due to a patch by Piotr Meyer (thanks!)

These changes are documented in the usual place:

http://www.openwall.com/Owl/CHANGES-current.shtml

The GCC update has mostly been worked on by Vasiliy Kulikov, with some
preparations by Georgi Geshev and final cleanups and testing by me.
It is a major development milestone towards Owl 4.0.  One of the next
steps enabled by this update is a glibc update.  Stay tuned!

Alexander