Turned out that xorg-server 1.6 is pretty much ready for stabilization, as only a handful of bugs were reported over the testing period since last week, and they only concerned the stabilization list.

Without further ado, I've asked our faithful Arch Teams (pretty much all of 'em) to stabilize xorg-server 1.6 and friends. amd64 was the first one to the finish line with a stabilization done in under a day!

Gentoo is again back in business for X. Woo!

Now to all stable users, don't forget to read the upgrade guides we wrote :

• server upgrade guide
• libxcb upgrade guide

Don't forget, please file bugs in bugzilla.

As promised, I released a new version, flagedit-0.0.8.

Nothing really exciting in here, flagedit now supports /etc/portage/*.keyword as folders (bug #241668 )

I'll move on and try to implement features suggested in the previous blog entry comments, namely :

• metadata.xml description support from Donnie Berkholz : not sure what the idea is ?
• set/unset/(reset) hardmask on a package from pavel : that's a great idea.
• clean obsolete package.keywords entries : I can do that.

It's been quite a while since I've done anything for Gentoo. It's a new year, and it's a good time to start contributing again.

You know how it is : real life versus OSS contributions... Well the real life got the best of me for too long, but although things was very interesting - albeit time consuming - I miss the good old satisfaction of updating the ebuild of my small software that nobody uses :)

I'm even more motivated by the fact that I realized recently that I own some piece of software that are actually used by quite a lot of people (more than 2 is a lot for me).

Namely : Flagedit the Ultimate Console Based Use Flags Editor. Albeit a bit old, it's still used b quit a lot of people, and it really needs some love from me.

So I'm going to start committing stuff again. My motto : start small so you don't stop. So I started by updating the homepage and gave flagedit a new home .

Next on list : bug 241668 to support folder structure of portage

But hey, you fellow reader : what would you like to see improved in flagedit ?

Note : if you want to beta test upcoming versions of flagedit, drop me a mail, or comment.

It's been a long time since my last commit in the gentoo tree ! I had lost motivation and interest. But now I'm back with one simple goal for now : just maintain my ebuilds, don't get involved in any discussion, and take it easy :)

So I'm happy to celebrate my comeback with the much awaited ebuild for the new version of booh : 0.9.1.

This new version (well actually 0.9.0) brings a lot of new features and programs : album2booh booh-classifier booh-fix-whitebalance booh-gamma-correction webalbum2booh

Enjoy!

The server I'm paying for (dedibox) crashed for unknown reason, I had to reinstall it. Luckilly enough I could boot in rescue mode and archive my important data, it helped to get everything up and running again, or at least the important bits (gentoo, apache, this blog, postgresql)

The newest addition on this server :

• squid to act as proxy
• backup-manager as a backup solution

backup-manager is not very powerful, but it's small, light and simple to install and configure. All you need is Perl and gettext :) It'll do until I migrate to bacula.

On our way back from FOSDEM, I had a quick discussion about ssh with Chris, and it motivated me to clean up all my ssh keys, passphrases, agents.

So now I use different keys for work and home, and ssh keychain on both.

Next move is to add my work identity to my home session to be able to connect directly to servers at work without having to go through my workstation at work. Without putting my home private id on my machine at work, nor copying my home public id on all servers at work. It should be possible I've heard :)

Anyway, here is briefly how I did it : ssh-keygen (dsa as main key). Then install keychain (see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/ and con figure it a bit. I added the following script in /etc/profile.d/keychain.sh (gentoo host), and I use the built in keychain on my mac.

#!/bin/bash
# start keychain, with the private keys to be cached
/usr/bin/keychain ~/.ssh/id_dsa
# then load the generated files
for i in ~/.keychain/*-sh*; do
echo "sourcing $i"
source $i
done

I know, I know, everybody is supposed to know everything about ssh, but I'm happy to admit that I learnt 2 or 3 things while setting up everything properly. Besides, how many of you have no passphrase on your ssh key ? :)

This blog now runs on apache + mod_fastcgi. I can feel the difference, especially given the fact that the hardware is not that powerful. I was curious aboud mod_fcgid, which claims to be better but compatible, but I'm not sure why exactly (I think something to do with better timing in spawning / killing cgi persistents processes).

I was willing to move to lighttpd as well, but it looks like it's more work than just installing and configuring mod_fastcgi for apache. By the way, you have to make sure that FCGI (the Perl module) is installed otherwise Movable Type will refuse to work.

On Monday 21 September we packed the majority of our belongings into the back of a Penske truck and made the 500 mile drive (in convoy - Louise, William, Dax and myself) from Pittsburgh, PA to Clifton Park, NY. Since then we have been unloading the truck, unpacking our things into our new home and doing all those things you have to do when you move house, and several things necessary when moving between states and jobs.

This is certainly the most rural house I have lived in since I was very young. We found a nice duplex on the outskirts of Clifton Park, it uses well water and I am the proud owner of the contents of two full propane tanks (no natural gas lines run out to the house). We also have a really nice wood fire in the living room, and I snagged the family room and am using it as a large home office! Thankfully they were able to hook up a cable Internet connection on Tuesday last week, and so I was not offline for too long.

Tomorrow is my first day with Kitware, I will be attending a training course being run by Kitware for the remainder of the week and so won't have my first day in the office until next Monday. I will be working in the scientific visualization group on projects such as ParaView, and have had lots of ideas for future Avogadro development over the last few weeks. I am very much looking forward to working in some new areas, but also to enhancing the previous research and development I have done in the area of visualization in chemistry. I am also looking forward to working on CMake.

Global Financial Derivative trading company, OSTC Poland, uses Gentoo Linux in significant sectors of its IT infrastructure. We spoke with long time Gentoo user and head of OSTC Poland's IT department, Patryk Rządziński, to learn more about how and where Gentoo is used. We discovered, as you will read in the full interview, that Gentoo, and more generally open source software, serves well in the commercial world.

(For readers on planet.g.o: This one is in German language only, but i do consider this important enough to be published on planet.g.o although.)

Wichtig: Ich schreibe hier als Privatperson, nicht als Vorstandsmitglied des Förderverein Gentoo e.V.!

Die am vergangenen Freitag stattgefundene Mitgliederversammlung hat sich mehrheitlich dafür ausgesprochen, den Förderverein Gentoo e.V. aufzulösen. Entgegen der Tagesordnung wurde mangels Kandidaten kein neuer Vorstand gewählt, so dass der bisherige Vorstand weiterhin geschäftsführend im Amt bleibt. Alle Mitglieder des Vereins werden in den kommenden Tagen angeschrieben und zu einer außerordentlichen Mitgliederversammlung eingeladen, die voraussichtlich am 07.11. in Bottrop stattfinden wird und in welcher über die Auflösung formal beschlossen werden kann.

Vorweg: Auf die Gentoo-Distribution an sich hat dies keinerlei Auswirkungen, Gentoo ist nicht tot und wird weiter bestehen – auch unabhängig von einem Förderverein im deutschsprachigen Raum.

Was ist der Förderverein Gentoo e.V.? Der Verein wurde im Herbst 2003 am Rande der Practical Linux in Gießen mit dem Ziel gegründet, die Verbreitung und Präsenz von Gentoo im deutschsprachigen Raum zu fördern und unterstützen.

Warum will sich der Verein auflösen? Es konnte aus dem – kleinen – Kreis der bei der Mitgliederversammlung anwesenden Mitglieder kein neuer Vorstand gefunden werden. Die Mehrheit der anwesenden Mitglieder sieht keine Perspektive den Verein weiter sinnvoll zu betreiben. Es ist seit Gründung des Vereins im Jahr 2003 nicht gelungen, eine kritische Maße zu erzeugen, die sich und den Verein gegenseitig pusht und weiterbringt, aktiv am Vereinsleben teilnimmt. Realistisch betrachtet war ich in der vergangenen Zeit ein Einzelkämpfer – zu wenig für einen Verein.

Welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich aus der Entscheidung? Die Präsenz von Gentoo auf Messen und Veranstaltungen wird darunter leiden. Auch wenn es um den Verein in der Vergangenheit ruhig war, konnte dieser dennoch über Mitgliedsbeiträge und Zuwendungen die Finanzierung von Flyern und Bannern, Vorfinanzierung von T-Shirts, etc. pp. sicherstellen. Ob sich Privatpersonen finden, die künftig nicht unerhebliche Beträge vorfinanzieren oder für Flyer etc. aufwenden wollen und können, wird sich zeigen müssen. Insgesamt gehe ich davon aus, dass sich die Präsenz auf Veranstaltungen zunächst nicht großartig verändern wird – langfristig mag ich keine Perspektiven abgeben. Was diese Entscheidung für mich persönlich bedeutet, wird sich auch noch zeigen müssen – meiner Motivation sind insbesondere diverse Begleitumstände der Mitgliederversammlung nicht sonderlich zuträglich. Auch fraglich ist zunächst, inwieweit es das Portal gentoo.de künftig noch geben wird, wenn kein Verein zur Finanzierung des Betrieb des Servers bereit steht. Und: Es gibt sicherlich weitere Implikationen einer Vereinsauflösung, die sich erst im Nachhinein zeigen werden.

Schade.

Attention Gentoo Community,

In honor of Gentoo's 10th birthday, we are producing a new livedvd! We need YOU to test it on as many x86 and x86_64 machines as you can and post bugs. Please report your bugs. Feel free to entertain yourself and fellow Gentoo rock stars on our forum.

The livedvd-x86-x86_64 will work on x86 or x86_64. If your arch is x86 boot with the default gentoo. If your arch is amd64 boot with gentoo64. The livedvd-amd64 is for well, amd64 only.

UPDATE: Due to demand, we have moved the files onto the regular mirror infrastructure. Please select your archiecture to be redirected to a mirror: x86amd64

So, give us a hand by testing like crazy AND posting bugs and we'll have the greatest livedvd ever.

Thanks for your continued support,

The Gentoo-Ten Project

David Abbott contributed to the draft for this announcement.

Just sent this to the gentoo-dev@ mailinglist in the hope of getting some excellent propaganda material out of it:

[snip]
Hello everybody!

As Gentoo approaches its 10th birthday I've been wondering how and where it is used. We used to have some great stories from companies in the weekly newsletter, but that one has become very dormant a while ago.

I'd like to collect your success stories, endorsements and case studies so we can present to the rest of the world how using Gentoo makes your life easier and is totally awesome. If you don't want to have that information public I'll gladly anonymize it as long as I can be reasonably certain that you really exist. What is important is that you, if you actively use it in a commercial environment, write me whatever you think is important. Or you motivate someone you know to write it. Do your contribution to making things better :)

Everything from "I use it and it's great!" to a story starting on a rainy day in November 1885 is good. Don't be afraid, I'll work with you on making it into something readable.
And if you have specific criticism I'll take that too - maybe we can find an easy way to improve things. That is in your best interest too, so go ahead. Invest a few minutes of your time so we can save you more time!
[snip]

If you think you can contribute something just send me an email and I'll see what I can do.

When I saw people do codeswarms of amarok and banshee and other small projects I thought "Hey, I can do that too!"

Now, after some work, and lots of CPU-cycles used, I have some results to show. And they are quite ... nice? awesome? For you to decide.

It all begins with pulling the data from cvs. Since I was in a hurry I did a naughty thing - do a checkout from anoncvs.gentoo.org, run cvs log > logfile
That is naughty because it causes a huge load on the server. Polite persons will create a local copy of the repository and run their own cvs server.

After ca. 50 minutes I had a logfile of 456926138 bytes, or roughly 450MB. This gets transformed into a list of events for codeswarm. The transformation itself is quite fast, but takes lots of RAM. In this case just over a gigabyte. So there I was with a 220MB XML dump to feed into the renderer ...

The first attempt died nicely because the default of using 1GB RAM cripples the render speed. Well, actually, my first first attempt died a horrible death because some [censored] in the Java world don't check what dynamic objects they load. And this means I had to run it all in a 32bit chroot. Grate phun. Grrr :D

Processing that amount of data looked quite reasonable for the first hour or so. Then it slowed down quite a bit, then even more. Increasing the memory helped a lot - I just let the JVM have 3.5G (it's a crippled 32bit process after all) and it effectively used ~2.5G. I think this shows the limitations of the current approach quite well.

Still it was too slow and too dense. The amount of files overwhelmed the screen so that it was looking very ... crowded

And that's a bit bland. I did notice that you can colour things, so obviously I split by categories. The colours are mostly random, but seem to work well. And in testing things I realized that the drawing time is negligible compared to the physics / preprocessing, so obviously I increased the resolution a bit. Hey, we live in the modern times of Full HD ... why compromise with legacy formats!

real    2876m48.775s
user    2897m44.342s
sys     10m28.831s

That's what "time" had to say about my little experiment. Almost 2 days of CPU-time at 2.6Ghz ... and that's with a naughty tweak. I reduced the amount of items because I realized that it was going to take Too Long (tm). So instead of representing each file ... why not represent each directory as one "thing"?

                    filename = filename.replace('files/','')
                    filename = filename.replace('/var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/','')
                    filename = filename.replace('Attic','')
                    filename = "/".join(filename.split('/')[:-1])

That's all the mods I needed - strip the repo location at the front, fold files/ and Attic/ away and cut off the filename. Ends up with "category/package" instead, which for the purposes of Gentoo is a much more useful identifier. And the rendering time went down from one frame every 30 minutes worst case to about one frame every 3 minutes worst case. Y'know, the "unmodified" version is still processing after over 118 hours CPU time ... not that nice :)

One positive effect is that it reduces the input from over 200MB to just around 100MB.
Now after 48h CPU I have 13367 single PNGs with a total size of pretty exactly 5GB. Feeding those into mencoder generates 557.8 seconds of video with an average bitrate of 1737.2kB. The encoding takes 22 minutes walltime or 40 minutes CPU-time - in other words mencoder uses two threads properly. Good to know!

So just to warn you, the result of my little experiment is a high-bitrate 1080p video. It is about 116MB in size ...
Get it here
(US mirror)

Enjoy!

Here we go again. This time, we're going for the double sweepstakes as we're trying to stabilize both libxcb 1.4 and xorg-server 1.6!

For once, the server upgrade shouldn't be too hard and the server upgrade guide is remarkably slim. There's been no change in input, nor HAL, nor just about anything else for most users.

Only Intel users might have a few surprises with DRI2 and UXA. But at this point, they should be good surprises

However, the libxcb upgrade is going to cause more troubles for some users. If you are/were using x11-libs/libX11 with USE="xcb", then you might have to rebuild lots of packages. This is why we've taken such a long time to unmask and stabilize libxcb 1.4. But now, we've worked hard to write a proper libxcb upgrade guide, which users are definitely going to want to read.

I would say the libxcb guide is more important than the xorg-server upgrade guide.

Anyhow, right now, I calling out for help among our stable users. If you've always wanted to contribute to Gentoo but didn't know how, here's your chance.

1. Grab the stabilization list from bug #282290
2. Append it to your /etc/portage/package.keywords
3. run : emerge -DuNa world like always to update

Again, don't forget to read both upgrade guides before running the update, just so you don't start panicking when portage is unable to continue the upgrade.

As always, you're more than welcome to CC yourself in the stabilization tracker, but please DO NOT COMMENT IN THE TRACKER if you have issues, you'll just annoy everyone there. Just file a new bug and we'll look at it.

Don't forget that most X maintainers lurk in #gentoo-desktop on FreeNode if you have any questions.

That's all for today

I've just commited PEAR 1.8.1 to the tree (and will do 1.9.0 shortly to get us up to speed), but I wanted to let users know about a change in the way packages are installed.  Actually, it only affects the base packages.  Up until now, the PEAR-PEAR package in portage included all the necessary deps in one ebuild.  With this new version, I've split each package up into its own ebuild.

There's a couple of reasons for this, but the most important is that it will give us flexibility to deal with changes from upstream.  For example, with 1.8.1 and above, PEAR changed it's base XML dependency to XML_Util.  That one was already in the tree, and so the new pear base system relies on that.  If the other base ones change between versions, we can focus on that.

Another nice little change is that the base system ebuild now is just dev-php/pear.  So, "emerge pear" and you're done.

The new versions are all currently marked as unstable across the arches.  I would appreciate any and all feedback on the change.  I'm still a bit skeptical that this is the best approach, and a bit nervous at any fallout that may occur, so please file bug reports and let me know if you have any issues.  Thanks, all.

To add a new USE flag, that's globally enabled for all Linux profiles, what's the minimum set of profiles that need to change? Deprecated profiles must be handled as well, for users that need to migrate still.

I ran into this today, while working on the USE=modules changes for linux-mod.eclass.

As an attempt to solve this, I munged up some GraphViz work to show profile inheritance, pictures as the end. Both sets have the trailing profiles "/desktop", "/developer", "/server" turned off for the 2008.0 and 10.0 releases, to cut down on the noise.

Graphs and script for download.

My answers as to which profiles:

• default-linux
• default/linux
• base
• embedded

Odd observations

• Several Prefix profiles (linux/{amd64,ia64,x86} link to 2008.0 profiles explicitly instead of the generic architecture)
• default/linux does not bring in base. Some profiles at a glance neglect this and might not have base brought in at all.
• "embedded" is all alone in the tree.

Thumbnail of one graph

Question for any skilled GraphViz users:

If all nodes in a given subgroup/cluster have an edge going to a single destination node, is there any way to get graphviz to replace them with a single fat edge from cluster to destination node?

So I recently was messing around with Opera 64bit on Gentoo and trying to get Java to work. The process was actually a lot easier than I expected. First I made sure I had the latest sun-jdk installed, which was dev-java/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16 in this case. Now to make it work with Opera I did the following:

cd /opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/amd64/

Opera doesn’t seem to work by default like this, probably because it ignores the plugin and uses java directly. Because of this, you need to symlink the libjvm.so so Opera can find it:

ln -s server/libjvm.so .

Set opera to use /opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/amd64/ as the java path and restart opera. All should be working now, you can check by following this test page: http://www.opera.com/media/applets/clock/

If anyone knows a more proper way of doing this, be sure to let me know

So it seems that Ciaran is upset again. Which seems to be quite normal. But he has some good advice, and I thought I'd share some with you too.

Let's start with an easy one. Descriptive error messages. This is good:

$ bash -x foobar.sh
bash: foobar.sh: No such file or directory

This is not:

  ... In program paludis -ip portage:                                                                                                
  ... When performing install action from command line:                                                                              
  ... When adding install target 'portage':                                                                                          
  ... When parsing user package dep spec 'portage':                                                                                  
  ... When parsing generic package dep spec 'portage':                                                                               
  ... When disambiguating package name 'portage':                                                                                    
  ... When finding all versions in some arbitrary order from packages matching */portage with filter all matches filtered through supports action install:                                                                                                                
  ... When loading entries for virtuals repository:                                                                                  
  ... When finding all versions sorted from packages matching sys-kernel/gentoo-sources with filter all matches filtered through supports action install:                                                                                                                 
  ... When generating metadata for ID 'sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r5::gentoo':                                                 
  ... When running an ebuild command on 'sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r5::gentoo':                                               
  ... When running ebuild command to generate metadata for 'sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r5::gentoo':                            
  ... When running command 'sandbox /usr/libexec/paludis/ebuild.bash '/usr/portage/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources/gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r5.ebuild' metadata':                                                                                                                  
  ... In ebuild pipe command handler for 'LOG0qaglobal scope tr':                                                                    
  ... global scope tr                                                                                                                
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] (same context) global scope tr                                                              
paludis@1253390790: [QA e.child.message] In thread ID '19463':

That's about 1/35th of the whole output ... which is just drowning out any reasonable information. Complete output is just under 750 lines, so good luck finding any error. But I guess there's a reason for that.

Now something really neat:

  ... In program paludis -ip portage:                                                                                                
  ... When performing install action from command line:                                                                              
  ... When adding install target 'portage':                                                                                          
  ... When parsing user package dep spec 'portage':                                                                                  
  ... When parsing generic package dep spec 'portage':                                                                               
  ... When disambiguating package name 'portage':                                                                                    
  ... Package name 'portage' is ambiguous, assuming you meant 'sys-apps/portage' (candidates were 'sys-apps/portage', 'virtual/portage')  

Let me say this as clearly as possible. Never assume. If you try to guess what I might have meant to say you may do something I explicitly do not want to happen or even something which breaks things. If your app is unable to unambiguously parse my input quit.
Failure to do so will reduce in lots of tears and you falling on sharp objects. Multiple times.

And of course ...

Fetch error:
  * In program paludis -ip portage:
  * When performing install action from command line:
  * When executing install task:
  * When performing pretend actions:
  * When fetching 'dev-db/sqlite-3.6.18:3::gentoo':
  * Fetch error: Fetch of 'dev-db/sqlite-3.6.18:3::gentoo' failed

I don't think that means what you think it does. A pretend action that doesn't only pretend, but claims to fetch things? That better be a small oopsie in the explanation that doesn't, in any way, describe what actually happens.

Now, Ciaran. You can try to ridicule me through your blog. You can relabel comments as my name if you don't like them (it's your blog after all - even though that's exquisitely rude) and then deny you did it (we call that lying).
But if you have to do so do it directly. Don't try to be funny (you saw what that did in the Funtoo-uses-Internet-Explorer Situation).
Don't label any criticism as FUD (see "Ten Ways PMS Raped your Baby").

And if you fork PMS then do so. You have your own hosting already. Now all you need is your own mailinglist and please leave those that work on the official version alone. And don't command us around, we're not your slaves.

Think you can do that? That would be awesome. Thanks!

If you ever get bored enough (which, on an epic scale from fighting with the Spartans at the Thermopylae to reading the telephone book should be just around counting the grains of rice in a 50kg-bag) and start reading PMS, you might get a few of those "Wait a minute ..." thoughts that happen when things aren't quite right.

One of those is around page 26, where PMS defines that bash 3.0 or higher is to be used. Which actually means "it has to be bash 3.0 compatible, but may be any higher version". Or to be even more precise: Ebuilds are not allowed to use any features not in bash 3.0, but the execution environment may be any higher version if it is compatible. How could we have a straightforward text that doesn't need interpretation! The lack of flamewars! The lack of circular reasoning!

Now if you look around on your installed machines you may notice that:

• The oldest available ebuild is app-shells/bash-3.1_p17
• Portage depends on >=app-shells/bash-3.2
• Current stable on amd64 and x86 is bash4

Which means that you can't even use bash 3.0 anymore. And if you had an install that old you'd run into many upgrade issues - portage blocking bash, bash blocking portage, portage being unable to read EAPI1 ebuilds. A big mess with no clean upgrade path ... apart from injecting binpkgs and pretending that mess never happened.
From bash Changelog:

*bash-3.0-r12 (05 Jul 2005)
*bash-3.1 (10 Dec 2005)
*bash-3.2 (12 Oct 2006)
*bash-4.0 (21 Feb 2009)

So anyone not having bash 3.2 hasn't updated since May 2007. Seriously. That's when bash-3.2_p17 went stable. (October was just when the ebuild was added, the Changelogs are a bit tricky to parse)

So for all intensive purposes (and of course all intents and purposes) we can assume bash 3.2 installed anyway. Plus there's no older ebuild anyway, apart from the 3.1_p17 that is a leftover from a horrible upgrade path.
Even worse, for at least a year there has been a "contamination" of the tree in the form of bash 3.2 features like the "+=" assignment. Which means that some ebuilds won't work with 3.0 anyway. Extra bonus? Many eclasses use it, which means, in short, that you need 3.2 or higher. And it has been tolerated (maybe even encouraged) for such a long time that there's no way to undo that change now.

The obvious thing to do (fix PMS) has been ignored for quite some time. So I thought I'd send an email to the gentoo-pms mailinglist to get it sorted out. Guess what?
The amazing one-character patch was denied.

That's the best way to make PMS irrelevant - refuse to let it document reality.

Today I am pleased to introduce to all of you, Jorge Manuel Vicetto, Gentoo Developer, KDE Lead, and also a member of, Forums, Sparc, UserRel, DevRel, and in his spare time helps run the elections. Jorge is from Terceira island in the Azores.

If you would prefer to read the interview;
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/20090918-jmbsvicetto-interview.xml

LINKS:
Gentoo KDE Project
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/index.xml
Jorge's Boxes
http://dev.gentoo.org/~jmbsvicetto/boxes/
Get Involved
http://dev.gentoo.org/~jmbsvicetto/recruiting/default-recruiters.txt
Bugzilla
https://bugs.gentoo.org/

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

Searched high and low to find this silly little info. Finally found it here.

# define a pattern for the host url finding
# %% => % sign
# %0 => domain name + tld
# %1 => tld
# %2 => domain name without tld
# %3 => subdomain 1 name
# %4 => subdomain 2 name

# Set default vhost server location here
evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%0/htdocs"

# If we don't have a %3, default to htdocs
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^[^.]+\.[^.]+$" {
    evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%2.%1/htdocs/"
}

# If we don't have a %4, find the subdomain
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^[^.]+\.[^.]+\.[^.]+$" {
    evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%2.%1/subdomains/%3/"
}

# If we have a %4, find the subdomain2.subdomain1. If we have have %4+, use %4
# anyway. If you have 4+, write a explicit rule for doc-root.
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^.+\.[^.]+\.[^.]+\.[^.]+$" {
    evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%2.%1/subdomains/%4.%3/"
}

Now my only wishlist is to do something similar for var.logdir, but %[1-4] is only set up with evhost. So, do you do anything smarter than this for your server?

Earlier this month, I found myself embarking on a last-minute journey to a One Laptop per Child workshop in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. They are preparing for a 6000 XO laptop deployment in that region of the country. I attended to support the 5-day event, which was coordinated by Michael Tempel and Claudia Urrea.

The laptops were donated by Rusal/Alscom, and the deployment will be primarily run by Schlumberger’s Excellence in Educational Development division. SEED already uses its local staff to run some education projects in Nigeria (and many other countries).

We covered a range of activities including Write, Record and Paint, then spent a decent amount of time on TurtleArt and Scratch. We also handed out 75 sensors and ran some activities around the measurement of humidity, temperature and light.
The abilities of the attendees (the vast majority of which were first-time users) grew very nicely during the workshop.

The group consisted of about 80 teachers and 20 children. Both the size of the group and the wide age range presented some challenges. Usually, such workshops would be run only with the core teams behind the deployments (a smaller group overall), but the way that things are developing in Nigeria meant that it made more sense for us to work with a larger group at this time.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks of the workshop was working with the Scratch activity – while a very valuable activity, its integration with the Sugar desktop environment is damagingly minimal. For example, instead of using Sugar’s simplistic “Journal” storage system, it presents regular-looking Load and Save dialogs which proved very challenging for the new users. Seeing people struggle with interfaces that we see all over the desktop computing world really reminds you just how ground-breaking and significant the simplicity of Sugar is.

We also ran into some problems with the Paint activity regularly freezing the systems, unreliable saving/loading with USB disks, and some confusion relating to Measure’s sensors interface. We were kept on our feet at all times, meaning that I didn’t really have time to sit down and diagnose the issues in detail, but they should not be hard to reproduce at a later date. The issues were not significant enough to cause any major disruption.

I ran a few technical sessions with a few people who will become the basis of the technical team, plus some interested volunteers and teachers. As I’ve seen in other places, this was challenging because prior experience with Linux is low and internet access is scarce, so “look up this topic on the OLPC wiki” is not an answer that everyone is able to work with, and “run this command at the terminal” requires a decent amount of explanation. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm is overwhelming (as always) and I went away feeling confident that the core team is now comfortably in a position to get things moving and pass on knowledge to a wider group.

Our hours were cut short by the high security around us, meaning that we didn’t have much non-workshop time to interact with the attendees (or really see the country at all), but overall it was a lovely group to work with and I’m confident that we’re going to see great things come out of their efforts. I’m now back in Nepal until November.

I figured I’d blog this so I wouldn’t stop forgetting how to do this and possibly learn a “better” way to do this. I’m going to assume that vanilla x11 forwarding works outside the chroot as a starting point.

The process is relatively simple that I use. First I ssh into my server as a user using the -Y option like so:

ssh -Y ken@fooserver

Then I su to root:

su

Now comes the part that makes the forwarding work. We need to export the magic cookie that our current session is using so that the chroot can import it and use it. We do this like so:

xauth list > /tmp/X

This saves the magic cookie info into a file under /tmp so that we may access it later. Now its time to chroot in:

chroot /mnt/devchroot/ /bin/zsh

and I generally like to set my PS1 to remind me that it’s a chroot but is not necessary:

PS1="dev $PS1"

Now we need to import the magic cookie after chrooting in:

xauth add $(cat /tmp/X)

At this point x11 forwarding should now be working in the chroot. An easy way to test is to simply launch an xterm inside the chroot. xterm&

If the xterm appears everything is in working condition. At this point you should probably delete the /tmp/X file for security.

I presume my liking of Java is known well enough ;)

So I tried a Java app today just to see how well it works. And suddenly ... this:

*** glibc detected *** /usr/lib/jvm/sun-jdk-1.6/bin/java: free():
invalid pointer: 0x00000000420eef40 ***                                        
    
======= Backtrace: ========= 
/lib/libc.so.6[0x3002271e46]
/opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/amd64/libdcpr.so[0x7f8c503d2b52]             
/opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/amd64/libdcpr.so[0x7f8c503dbe05]             
/opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/amd64/libdcpr.so(Java_sun_dc_pr_PathFiller_reset+
0x43)[0x7f8c503d51c3]                                                      
[0x7f8cf52a4f50]                                                                
                                                                          
======= Memory map: ========                                                    
                                                                           
40000000-40009000 r-xp 00000000 09:00 85671701 /opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/bin/java  
40108000-4010b000 rwxp 00008000 09:00 85671701 /opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/bin/java   
41716000-42288000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0        [heap]

So I think "well, sun-jdk is teh shizzle, I'll try ... err ... no, that one is fetch restricted. So is this one. Err, yeah, icedtea-bin!
Guess what. Same result. Not good.
Now I'm thinking "A crash _in the Java core_? No wai!".

/opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/amd64/libzip.so(
Java_java_util_zip_Deflater_deflateBytes+0x305)[0x7fe671a33e95]
[0x7fe66eb3d4a2]

What, a crash in libzip? That smells bad. Random code execution bad. I find that very unlikely! How on earth does this happen?
Now, let's go bleeding edge and try to build icedtea from source. That only takes ... sigh. About one hour on a quadcore. Grumble grumble yell moan grumble.

And? Can you guess it? Implodes the same way. This is getting really interesting!

Hmm. Looks like all the code this app uses is pure Java. Hmm, this makes no sense. But ... wait ... what's that? "core.jar" - guessing from imports this is the Processing library. That looks like a candidate. Let's have a look at the homepage ... yes, this seems to be C++ code with a Java interface. Ok, this could mess with things. But how?
Just injecting the .jar with the newest version doesn't change a thing. Crummy. And I do notice that their LINUX tarball has files with the .dll ending. File says:

PE32 executable for MS Windows (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit

Uhm. Yah. No good.
But I can try to build it from source, yes?
Yes. These nice people have a svn repository I can pull from. And as a Gentoo user I'm used to playing with such things.

If you have a weak stomach you should stop reading now!
Now, svn checkout. unzip, make, c++, I have all of those (Gentoo sei Dank!). Let's have a look at the build syste... the build... what the ...
Ok, there's a build/ directory with linux/ and windows/ and other directories. And in those directories are, uhm, scripts. And the eclipse editor preferences? What the ... but I digress. Scripts. There's one called "make.sh". Good! Let's have a look.

#!/bin/sh

Ok, so they aren't using any bash features I hope!

  ARCH=`uname -m`
  if [ $ARCH = "i686" ]
  then
    echo Extracting JRE...
    tar --extract --file=jre.tgz --ungzip --directory=work
  else
#    echo This is not my beautiful house.
#    if [ $ARCH = "x86_64" ]
#    then
#      echo You gots the 64.
#    fi

Wat. SRSLY. I lack words to describe this. So the whole 64bit part is commented out. Why do I think that that's not a good idea? And what is "Extracting JRE..." supposed to mean? Noone sane would ... but ... omg. MAH BRAINZ. There's a FULL JRE in the svn checkout.

    echo "
The Java bundle that is included with Processing supports only i686 by default.
To build the code, you will need to install the Java 1.5.0_15 JDK (not a JRE,
and not any other version), and create a symlink to the directory where it is
installed. Create the symlink in the \"work\" directory, and named it \"java\":
ln -s /path/to/jdk1.5.0_15 `pwd`/work/java"
    exit

Some things are not meant to be seen. Like this message, which throws up many questions (and the rest of my lunch). At this point my motivation approached zero (or rather, my motivation to do useful things. I had a strong motivation to hurt some people).

And I try to run that crashy code in my i686 chroot. Guess what. Yes!

Now I do wonder. Who is to blame here?
The clueless upstream that doesn't even know how to cut a release without including their editor config?
The Java runtime that loads any crap without doing sanity checks? (Seriously ... how can you load a 32bit .so or even a .dll into your adress space without immediately exploding?)
Or me, who still thinks there are Java apps out there that don't make you go insane?

So, after a few hours of tracking it down I'm again reminded why I usually don't touch Java at all. The amount of stupid I've found today is enough to last a small african country for a year ...
Oh, one small final note. I can't really blame people for not knowing platform-specific things. But there's a fine line between being a bit ignorant and being purposefully incompetent. If you don't know how to package for a platform find someone who does. Ask on IRC, or if you don't like that on mailinglists. But please, don't release broken stuff like that. It's very rude and can be devastating for the mental state of people that might use your software!

I just ran into “No space left on device” from Portage again. In such a situation previously I ran

# df -H

just to find that there was space left on all mounted devices! Confused I deleted a few distfiles through

# rm -vf /usr/portage/distfiles/*

and found Portage to work again magically. This time I remembered a chat with rbu: Inodes can run out, too. Checking the number of free inodes I was in trouble indeed:

# df -i -H
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
..
/dev/sda7               1.3M    1.3M       1  100% /var
..

That’s all I wanted to share.

(PS: With /var on a different partition now deleting distfiles no longer helps…)

Today's blog post shall be focussed on how to efficiently build packages. So here's the boring part: Hardware specs.

Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) 9950 Quad-Core Processor @ 2.6Ghz
RAM: 8GB
/var/tmp/portage: 8GB SSD (2x4GB Compact Flash / RAID0 )
Storage: 4-disk SATA RAID-5 (mdadm)

Now that's quite powerful, but still you easily end up waiting some time for things to be compiled. And of course you usually don't want to test in your livesystem environment. So chroots to the rescue!
Currently I have 4 chroots I regularly use: i686 and amd64, stable and testing. That makes testing things quite a bit easier, especially when you run into some bugs that only happen on stable systems. The setup is quite simple, and because I'm lazy I've added some small scripts that mount everything I need.
All chroots share /usr/portage and /usr/portage/distfiles. That's a bindmount - saves lots of space and keeps them all in sync. One "special" thing is /usr/portage/packages, that's a bindmount per chroot. So I have a packages dir with amd64-stable, amd64-unstable etc. subdirectories, which makes searching quite a bit easier if I ever need a binpkg.

The make.conf is as default as possible, but if you build lots 'o stuff you end up with a few interesting mods:

FEATURES="buildpkg"
NOCOLOR="true"
PORT_LOGDIR="/var/log/portage"
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="info warn error log qa"
USE="X gcj objc"
VIDEO_CARDS="vga"

Why would I do that? Well, first of all buildpkg. That saves a binpkg of everything built, which saves quite a bit of time. The whole logging thing is very convenient if you build things with a script like this:

for i in `pquery --max -a 'x11-drivers/*'`; do emerge $i; done

Why would I do such a thing? Well, maybe someone asks me if all x11-drivers work with the new mesa or xorg-server. And like this I just kick it off and grep the logfiles later. Obvious, eh?
Lastly the useflags are optimized to make the toolchain capable of building exotic stuff like gnustep or java packages out of the box. Otherwise you'd soon be rebuilding gcc, which takes time and effort ... so let's add it as early as possible. And VIDEO_CARDS to make xorg "thinner" - less drivers installed, and we don't actually use the drivers anyway!

Now if I want to test a package I usually use:

FEATURES="test" emerge -1avk somepackage

which has the advantage that it uses binpkgs if available (k), shows me what will happen and (a)sks. And -1 / --oneshot so it doesn't end up in world file, so I can get rid of everything with a simple emerge --depclean.
Since there are so many packages where tests fail I often short-circuit and use --onlydeps to get everything installed without having to run and fail tests and only run the tests of the package I actually want to test. As you can see that's quite streamlined to get as many things compiled with as little effort as possible. To work on things I usually group one console tab in the shared PORTDIR (which in my case is a cvs checkout) with one console tab in the chroot. That way I can easily toggle between ebuild editing and compiling. Usually I only have two such tab groups open because otherwise I tend to forget things. Whenever possible I try to avoid doing two things at once in one chroot because that can cause some headaches, it is easier for me to use a different chroot for it. And setting up a new one is quite easy :)

A short while ago I deleted ~12000 binary packages because I was getting a few inconsistencies - the gcc 4.3 to 4.4 migration cost me quite a lot in terms of build time. But now I've mostly caught up, the common packages exist as binaries for fast install and everything else would need to be compiled anyway.
So much for the "how to compile things" part. Next week on BBC: How to make an omelette without eggs!

Somehow I got convinced to give a tutorial at LinuxCon this year, and it was originally scheduled to be my normal "Write a Real, Working, Linux Driver" tutorial I've been giving for the past 4 years or so (which happens to be online here, if you are bored and need something to fall asleep to.)

But that's old-hat, as people on 4 major continents have seen it before. So, to try to break up the boredom, I'm please to announce a change:

---

Write and Submit Your First Kernel Patch

This tutorial will cover the steps necessary to properly compose, describe, and submit a Linux kernel patch. It will cover the basic usage of git, and how that works with the Linux kernel development cycle. As part of the tutorial, every attendee will compose and submit a patch to the Linux kernel that will be included in the main kernel tree.

Every attendee should have a solid grasp of the C language, and know how to build and install, a Linux kernel from scratch (if not, reading the book, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, free online, ahead of time would be a very good idea.) The latest source tree, from the git repository, of the Linux kernel should be installed on every attendees laptop before they arrive.

---

Sign up on the tutorial web site if you are going to attend so I get a clue how many people to expect. Right now I have unique material for 100 people to write new patches for, but can come up with more if needed.

See you all at LinuxCon, should be a fun time. I'm also giving a few other talks there as well, so come and heckle.

In 2006 Jo Vermeulen compared Bazaar and Git performance-wise. Up to today Bazaar has a bad reputation regarding speed and from the results of Jo you see at least that Git is incredibly fast, Bazaar is usable but a bit slow on the uptake in some scenarios. Jo strictly did not use any remote operations which are hard to compare, but from some own tests I do know that Git is incredibly fast there, too, while Bazaar can be really slow on the initial clone operations. The latter fact may be history now, as the new 2a repository format has been introduced with Bazaar 1.17 and enabled by default in 2.0 (both are in Portage). It gives improved speed and flexibility while using up a bit more disk space than the old formats.

Back to what we are really looking at: The scenario. Operations chosen by Jo were:

• Repository initialisation
• Adding of a Linux kernel tree
• Diffing (not possible with current Git)
• Commit of many files (whole kernel tree)
• Diff on empty changeset
• Output of status information
• Small commit

The results were clearly in favour of Git, especially the empty diff was quite awkard for Bazaar. The same operations were done by Jordan Mantha in 2008, also including Mercurial in a follow-up.

A clever idea by Jordan was to provide time ratios, as test environments and settings were a bit different (other kernel version, different computer system). He concluded that Bazaar got faster, so did Git, but in the end Bazaar gained more ground. So now is the time to repeat the tests with current versions of both SCM systems, the following table only has the ratios of the other two guys.

You will note that Git is mostly faster than Bazaar (apart from the add operation), but the absolute time of Bazaar is more than sufficient (got faster since 2006 and 2008) and outweighed by its better user interface in my eyes. Ranked by used space Git (471MB) wins, followed by Bazaar (482MB) and Mercurial (554MB); the numbers are for the whole tree including working tree.

The used versions are given in the table, all times in seconds. For the sake of completeness, Mercurial is also listed in the table and compared to the ratios Jordan reached.

Edit: I corrected the repository sizes because Git's gc command gives a good improvement in repository size. Additionally I should add that no custom options were used, just the straight commands.

Task	Git 1.6.4.2	Bazaar 2.0 RC1	Ratio	Ratio Git 1.5.4.3/Bzr 1.3.1	Ratio Git 0.99.9c/Bzr 0.7pre	Mercurial 1.3.1	Ratio	Ratio Git 1.5.4.3/Bzr 1.3.1/Hg 0.9.5
Initialization	0.008	0.783	0.010	0.257	0.100	0.265	1 : 97.88 : 33.13	1: 3.88 : 1.59
Adding files	14.612	6.556	2.229	2.930	1.320	1.867	7.83 : 3.51 : 1	5.65 : 1.92 : 1
Committing large changes	5.270	52.685	0.100	0.410	0.440	41.836	1 : 10 : 7.94	1 : 2.41 : 1.68
Diffing no changes	0.110	0.182	0.604	0.007	0.00025	0.731	1 : 1.66 : 6.65	1 : 138 : 3.91
Getting repo status	0.313	0.818	0.383	0.305	0.022	0.630	1 : 2.61 : 2.01	1.14 : 3.74 : 1
Small commit	0.338	1.282	0.264	0.044	0.058	1.278	1 : 3.79 : 3.78	1 : 22.7 : 4.82

Maybe I’m the last to stumble upon this… anyway: Nabble is monitoring gentoo-dev offering a search and browse interface and two feeds for it: “new message” and “new threads”. I was thinking the “new threads” one could be a great tool to Gentoo users that are not interested in every single mail (I currently am) but still would like to keep on track of the big picture of gentoo-dev.   I would have needed just that for the Google Summer of Code mailing list.

... and I wish more devs would focus on getting things in the tree. The proliferation of overlays is really nice because some have quite exotic stuff, but I find it frustrating to have to use 12 overlays to get all the apps I want/need. So please, if you can, consolidate. Push things to sunrise instead of your private overlay. And if it works (even it a bit ugly) push it to our main tree. Mask it if you don't like it. But please try to avoid handing users this nice puzzle game with 12 incompatible overlays that break random other stuff ...

I've been trying to fix stuff as good as I can. Still there are tons of trivial bugs, so if something doesn't compile I usually just leave a note on the corresponding bug and continue with something else. It's kinda rude, but that way I get more fixes per timeunit done.

Y'all might have noticed me bumping postgresql and samba. Those were lagging behind so much, and many people use them - so I spent some time getting us up to speed there. Still lots of minor issues, but at least we have something from this decade now. Amusing thing: Just as I started bumping postgresql to 8.4 upstream reported a few security issues and bumped it. So I spent quite some time compiling postgresql 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 and 8.4 - 7.4 needs some more attention, but then who uses something that old ;)

I'm getting quite frustrated with test failures. In my chroots I use FEATURES="test buildpkg" so during the initial compile the tests are run, then reuse the binpkg to save time. With gcc 4.4.1 I had so many linking inconsistencies I decided to drop my binpkgs and start "from scratch". That has slowed me down a bit because I compile more, but it also makes me find lots of seriously messed up tests. Don't even think about suggesting that for future EAPIs as default. It's a retarded idea that does not work.
The amd64 chroot has close to 1k packages already after the gcc 4.4.1 upgrade, so I seem to build a bit of everything now. Lots of bumps, especially in dev-python. The quadcore definitely pays off for that. If anyone wants to motivate me ... I could use some more harddisks. Never enough of those ;)

I just bumped virtualbox to 3.0.6, a day after the announcement. I wouldn't be able to do that without helpers like Alessio who feed me things. They allow me to reduce my role to pure integration testing, so I can cover more ground, they get their favourite packages fixed and everyone profits. If you want to get involved feel free to bother me, that usually has a non-null chance of getting bugs fixed. We still have about 10k open bugs, so there's always something to do. And I can only fix what I'm aware of (same goes for everyone else. File bugs. Write patches. Make it easy for us to fix stuff.)

While I'm spending most of my time at the tip of bleeding edge these days I am aware of the lag with getting things marked stable. That's mostly a manpower issue, so if you have some spare time and want to improve things that might have the largest payoff at the moment. And don't think you're not qualified - they let n00bs like me have access to the tree, so you're qualified for stable testing.

So what's next? Things are getting into a better shape, but there's always room for improvement. Upstreams release a constant trickle of new stuff which we have to integrate. That takes time and we need to be aware of it, so if it hasn't been bumped after a week or so feel free to file us a bug. If you have ideas how to make things better don't hold back - maybe it's an awesome and helps a lot. Help us help you!

A worthy goal?
One bug a day. I challenge you to either open or fix one a day - doesn't take much time, but if we get 30 people doing it for a year that'd be the amount of open bugs we have. Or 300 people for one month ... Imagine what that'd do to your Gentoo! And now stop dreaming and go fix stuff.

I just committed gentoo-sources-2.6.31 to the portage tree.

Check out Kernel Newbies for the ChangeLog.

This was originally sent to the linux-kernel and driver-devel mailing lists. Based on some of the feedback I got, I figured I should post it here as well.

---

Here's a summary of the state of the drivers/staging/ tree, basically what will be coming in the 2.6.32 merge, and what the status of the different drivers are so far.

First off, drivers/staging/ is NOT a dumping ground for dead code. If no one steps up to maintain and work to get the code merged into the main portion of the kernel, the drivers will be removed.

As proof of that, the epl (Ethernet Power Link) driver will be removed in the .32 kernel, as no one is working on it, the upstream developers never respond to my emails, and no one seems to care about it.

The pata_rdc driver is also going to be removed, as there is a "better" one being merged through the libata tree for this hardware.

So, taking the drivers in chunks, here's some that have had active development on for the .32 release:

• rt* wireless drivers. Bart has done amazing work merging all of these together into something much better than they originally were. And even better, they still work! Great job Bart!

• rtl* wireless drivers. Again, Bart has been doing great work here.

• wlan-ng driver: a bit of work here, but this seems to be dropping off, with the loss of a test platform for the driver. Hopefully someone has a device around and can help out here.

• comedi drivers had only a bit of work done, lots more is needed here, let's not loose the fact that this is getting closer to a mergable shape.

• android drivers have had a bit of work done, but upstream seems to not care at all about what is going on here, as they are working to forward port their code to the 2.6.29! kernel. {sigh}. If this keeps up, the drivers will be dropped in the 2.6.32 kernel release. Note, Pavel has been adding some of the Dream hardware drivers, which are separate from the core Android drivers. I have no objection to those, but they should work to get merged to their "correct" places in the tree in another release or so.

• w35und driver. It's slowly being worked on.

• echo driver. This one is now in good enough shape to merge into the main kernel tree. I'll send out review patches soon for this.

• eth131x driver. Alan Cox is working on fixing up the issues in this driver. Hopefully it will get into mergable shape soon.

New drivers that will show up in the .32 kernel release:

• vt66* wireless drivers. These VIA drivers are being actively worked on to get into a much better shape. Nice job.

• new rt3090, and rtl8192e wireless drivers have been added and worked on cleaning up issues involved in them.

• hv (Microsoft Hyper-V) drivers. Over 200 patches make up the massive cleanup effort needed to just get this code into a semi-sane kernel coding style (someone owes me a bit bottle of rum for that work!) Unfortunately the Microsoft developers seem to have disappeared, and no one is answering my emails. If they do not show back up to claim this driver soon, it will be removed in the 2.6.33 release. So sad...

• quatech_usb2 driver. I don't know if it quite works, but someone is developing it, so I'm not complaining :)

• VME bus drivers. Yeah! They are progressing nicely.

• SEP and RAR drivers. Alan Cox has been working on cleaning these up a lot.

• IIO (Industrial I/O), these are new drivers that are being actively worked on.

• pohmelfs and dst. It seems that DST is dead, so I think I will remove it in .33. pohmelfs is under active development outside of the tree, and hopefully patches start moving in here to help out with keeping it up to date.

• cowloop. Yes, another COW driver! :) Seriously, this does things that DM can't do, so it might be useful. The upstream developer is interested in getting this merged properly, and is working on cleaning it up.

Drivers not being actively worked on:

• otus This is sitting here until a "real" wireless driver will be merged through the wireless tree. Hopefully that happens soon.

• agnx wireless driver. No one seems to care about it. If no one steps up soon, it will be removed in .33.

• altpciechdma Upstream developers seem to have disappeared. Again, if no one steps up, it will be removed in .33

• asus_oled This only needs minor cleanups to get merged properly into the main tree. If someone wants an easy project, this would be it.

• at76_usb wireless driver. Again, no one working on it, it will be dropped in .33.

• b3dfg I really do not think anyone cares about this. again, will be dropped if this is true in .33.

• cpc-usb After the initial flurry of development, everyone seems to have run away. Was it the fact that I hadn't showered in a few days? Again, will be removed if no one comes back. And I am wearing deodorant now...

• frontier A nice driver, again, should not be hard to get merged into the main tree, if someone wants an easy project...

• go7007 Ugh. Unless someone steps up now to take this over, it's going to be removed in .33. There is no hardware made with this anymore, and no specs around that I know of, and the code isn't the nicest in the world.

• heci A wonderful example of a company throwing code over the wall, watching it get rejected, and then running away as fast as possible, all the while yelling over their shoulder, "it's required on all new systems, you will love it!" We don't, it sucks, either fix it up, or I am removing it.

• line6 Another nice driver that should be simple to get merged. Please, if you are looking for something to do, this is it.

• me4000 and meilhaus They work on the same hardware, and they duplicate the existing COMEDI drivers. Someone thinks that custom userspace interfaces are fun and required. Turns out that being special and unique is not what to do here, use the COMEDI drivers instead. These will be removed. Heck, I'll go remove them for .32, there is no reason these should still be around, except to watch the RT guys squirm as they try to figure out the byzantine locking and build logic here (which certainly does count for something, cheap entertainment is always good.)

• mimio Another driver that should be simple to get merged. Someone just step up to do this please, there are users of this hardware out there.

• p9auth While it seemed like a good idea, I don't think that anyone actually uses this. It will be removed in .33 unless someone comes forward.

• panel Another one that should be simple to merge. Anyone?

• phison What? I thought I asked for this to be merged a while ago, sorry about that, no reason it should still be in staging anymore, it's just so small it slipped through the cracks...

• poch A long-suffering company is enduring the slowest developers in the world here. Hopefully the code will be replaced with a UIO driver, but testing the userspace side seems to be difficult and slow. I have to give Redrapids major credit for being patient here, they are being amazing.

• rspiusb A weird, very expensive camera, from a company that does not want to release the specs, and wants custom userspace interfaces. The code hasn't built since the 2.6.20 days. I'll go delete it now from .32, it doesn't deserve to live as no one cares about it, least of all, the original authors of the code :(

• slicoss and sxg These are being developed by a consulting company for the main producer of the chips. Yet they seem to have disappeared half-way through the job. Odd. Hopefully they come back soon.

• stlc45xx Another wireless driver that no one seems to care about. So sad. I guess no one will miss it when it goes away in .33.

• udlfb Video over USB, it doesn't get anymore whacked than that. This is still being developed but the developer doesn't like to do incremental updates for some odd reason. Hopefully he pops up again with an update. But for now, it is quite workable for a number of developers.

• usbip USB over IP. I guess if you ran video over IP to your USB device, that would be more whacked than just video over USB. This did get one big update during the .32 development cycle, hopefully the developer can come back again when they get some free time to continue working on it. Rumor has it that some major distros are starting to rely on this code, so it would be nice to get their help to get it working better...

That should cover all of the 600+ patches in the staging tree for the .32 kernel merge, and the existing drivers/staging/ tree. If I missed anything, please let me know.

Yesterday, I finally found the bug which prevented neatx from working on my system (thanks upstream for the debugging), so in your next portage sync, you'll find net-misc/neatx-0.3.1_p43 ready for your testing! If you don't need vnc/sound/printer tunneling or load-balancing, neatx is easier to set up than freenx and works great out-of-the-box. Thanks again to Mike Auty (ikelos) for his work on the ebuild.

Another work-in-progress for me these days is a source ebuild for chromium (open-source version of Google Chrome). A binary version (chromium-bin) has been available in portage for some time now (with amd64 support added recently), but source version ebuild had some problems. Now my current version (available in my overlay for the curious) has fixed most of them, including use of system libraries, makefiles use instead of scons, --as-needed support, ... So why is it not yet in portage? Well, for now the tarballs from upstream are not yet available, so you won't go past the fetch phase These should be available soon, once available you can expect chromium to quickly land in a portage tree near you.

By the way, if chromium crashes at startup for you (either binary or source version), they finally found the cause: you are probably using nvidia-drivers and nvidia opengl (via eselect opengl). However the libGL.so from nvidia overrides dlsym/dlopen (dynamic linker functions) with broken replacements, breaking applications relying on these functions! Chromium devs implemented a workaround, available for -bin in versions >=4.0.208.0_p25708, but expect some breakage in time-related functions. All the gory details are here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16800

And now to change a bit from technical talks, I wanted to say a big "thank you" to all of you Gentoo users who spend time filing bugreports, fixing, writing or rewriting ebuilds, debugging and finding the cause for all sorts of bugs (finding that some dynamic linkers break with specific video cards for example...), in short to all of you who work to make your distro a better one! And recently, a special thanks to Bernd Lommerzheim, who helps me a lot in proftpd maintenance, up to providing an entirely new ebuild for latest version, with lots of fixes and new features.

Originally texmfind has been written by a Gentoo user to find out which TeX file (LaTeX, too) is available in which package so you can emerge the correct one. Unfortunately it has not been updated for TeXLive 2008 and so looses some functionality, although some entries are still valid. Now I forked the project and updated it. The ebuild 2008.1 is already available in testing. Check it out, a stabilisation should happen soon.

Nokia switched their Qt git master to version 4.7 recently, creating a new branch for 4.6.

They also created two new branches, master-stable and 4.6-stable. Commits pushed to those branches are tested in Nokia’s testing farms, ensuring that they’ll always build.

The Gentoo Qt team provides various live Qt ebuilds in our official overlay, qting-edge [1]. These ebuilds now include x11-libs/qt-*-4.6.9999, building code from the 4.6 Qt branch, as well as a new USE flag called stable-branch, available (and enabled by default) in 4.6.9999 and 4.9999. This USE flag enables/disables the use of the stable branches, allowing you to choose between last-minute code VS tested, known to compile code.

Either way, its bleeding edge!

If you need help, leave a comment or visit us @ Freenode IRC, #gentoo-kde

[1] to install qting-edge, make sure you have layman installed and configured, then run layman -a qting-edge.

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Ravelry is a knit and crochet community. In an interview with Tim Bray of ongoing,  their site engineer Casey Forbes says: “We have 7 servers running Gentoo Linux and virtualized into a total of 13 virtual servers with Xen.” On these servers they use nginx, HAProxy, Apache, MySQL, and of course Ruby on Rails (with Passenger). And how they use it!

We’ve got 430,000 registered users, in a month we’ll see 200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in a day.
We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That’s registered users only (doesn’t include the very few pages that are Google accessible) and does not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX.
Actual requests that hit Rails per day is 10 million.
900 new users sign up per day.
The forums are very active with about 50,000 new posts being written each day.

Thanks for sharing the details, it’s what keeps us developers running. At least those as vain as me.

Now a live ebuild for g-CTAN has been added to the tree as I now want some real life testing: Please go and emerge app-portage/g-ctan. g-CTAN is similar to g-cpan which creates an ebuild for packages from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). The usage is easy, just call the --help option to learn more after you emerged it. There are two posts by me, that explain some more details about it. There are still rough edges, but please don't hesitate to report bugs either over Gentoo Bugzilla, Launchpad or email. The one thing I still would like to solve is to filter out all packages from the listing that have not been updated since the release of TeXLive.

UPDATE: 4.3.1 is now unmasked for amd64/x86 and the masking issue has been fixed by jmbsvicetto, so we won’t have this issue again in the future! The post below is updated to reflect on it.

The first bugfix release for KDE 4.3, 4.3.1, is now available.

You can read about the improvements it brings here.

Ebuilds for KDE 4.3.1 are already available in gentoo for architectures amd64 and x86.

To upgrade from 4.3.0 you simply need to

emerge --sync
emerge -avDuN world

This should be a straightforward update for most people.

If you’re upgrading from an older KDE 4 version (or clean-installing KDE 4 on a stable system) you should keyword-unmask KDE 4.3 by following this post’s instructions. You’ll also find some troubleshooting hints there.

The ebuilds are hard.masked for all other architectures due to bug 280312.

As usual, if you have any issues, feel free to leave a comment or visit us @ IRC: freenode/#gentoo-kde

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One thing I'm noticing a bit of confusion on in general online is what the docs or me mean when it says to install the ALSA sound card drivers as modules.  So, lemme clarify real quick.

There are two *places* to get the drivers from: either in the kernel, or from the alsa-driver package.  But, when using the kernel drivers, like many other drivers there, they can either be compiled in statically or loaded as modules as the computer is booting up.  So, there are actually two ways to install the drivers as modules, which could be a bit confusing.

So, a quick list:

1) In-kernel drivers (statically compiled)

2) In-kernel drivers (modules)

3) External drivers (alsa-driver package, modules)

The first two are the officially supported methods by the ALSA team, so I'll quickly focus on those two.  Now the, recommended way to do things is #2 -- select them as modules in the kernel and build them that way when you are setting up ALSA for the very first time.  Why?  Well, the answer is really that it gives you a lot more options.

Let's say, for instance, that you aren't sure which driver your card requires.  So, you flip on a few that look like it's the right one, and set them to be installed as modules.  Once they are there,  you can run alsaconf, which is a part of alsa-utils.  The alsaconf program will do the detective work for you by looking at the modules that are available on the system, and the cards that you have on your box, and then load the modules and update your module list so that they will load up the next time you boot your box as well.  Pretty simple, right?  It sure is a lot faster than compiling one driver in the kernel, rebooting, testing if that works, trying a separate one, rebooting, etc.

Another reason is that there may be some options you need to pass to your module.  This is rare, but it does happen.  If you are loading them as modules already, then it's just a simple tweak to do change the settings, again, without having to reboot and re-test everything.

So, that's the reason we recommend you load them as modules.  It's just gonna make life a bit easier the first time around, as you are trying to determine what you have.  Once you know what driver is required, you can always go back into the kernel and compile it in statically, and be done with it.  There's no reason to keep it as a module, unless you want to.

Finally, a quick note about the alsa-driver package.  It's often said that it is unmaintained, and the reason for that is because I, personally, am the only one who is keeping it on life support.  That is, I'm the maintainer, not the ALSA herd.  It's only in the tree as a convenience to people who need to use it for whatever reason.  Some of the reasons could be that you needed to see if the latest release from upstream is fixing some issues of yours, so you'd use the live ebuild.  Or, you may want to use an older kernel but still keep the newer version of ALSA.  Or whatever.  The problem, though, is that I don't have the technical skills to troubleshoot your issues if something goes wrong.  My solution every time is  pretty much going to shrug and say "Sorry, that sucks.  Try the live ebuild, or something else."  It's not that I don't want to help, it's that in this case, I can't.

Anyway, that's it ... I hope that clears up a few issues.  When I have time, I'll be revising the ALSA docs.  No idea when that'll be though.  Don't hold your breath.  In the meantime, if you have issues, my recommendation is to post on the Gentoo Forums in the Multimedia forum and ask for some help, or there's always bugzilla.  Chances are you'll get a response faster on the forums, though.  Good luck, and God speed.