Diego Petten

June 2005
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Its been crazy the last few days with Gentoo's infra. I helped setup this planet site for dsd over the weekend and will be released in a few days. So far it seems to be working great! The next site I've been helping bring to life is the scripts repository site. This site will help bring together any scripts that people have created for Gentoo. Ian Leitch has been great to work with to get this site up and running. Now he'll finally be able to test it in a better format :)

Another project I worked on lately was helping setup a box for Brian Harring for the xdelta project he's working on. He'll have a server all to himself to torture and see how things go.
Recent migrations galore
Its been crazy lately with all the service migrations for Gentoo infrastructure. I'm just glad that most of gone smoothly! I'll be glad when we get all the services off of eagle so we can finally move that server to its new rack. Finally got around to getting Planet Gentoo setup for dsd and it looks sweet! I can't wait for us to nail any issues with that and and have our users start using it. It'll be a great addition to Gentoo for sure.

Gentoo

/dev/urandom thoughts.
On Saturday I visited the folks at Salford uni to attend the Gentoo UK 2005 Conference. There is a fine write-up on it in this weeks GWN so I won't elaborate on this too much, but I would like to extend my thanks to all of those participating in the event this year. It was a pleasure to meet those dev's I've never met before in person. Shouts out to Tim, Tom, Dan, Stuart, Rob, Stephen, and although I never recognized you on the day Marcus! If there is anyone I have forgotten, my apologies and shouts to you too!

Gareth Bult of Flash Linux fame spoke about the technical limitations of USB keys, which I found most interesting, and also (indirectly) raised a few points which I would like to rant about. Documentation! Everyone knows our documentation team do a great job and our handbooks are nothing short of superb, however there are so many other documents which we look after which are terribly outdated or have not been made aware of. Hopefully the planet is a good push towards the aggregation of information, although I for one will be making more of an effort to keep documentation well organized and up to date. Daniel Drake (dsd) spoke about his views of the kernel, mostly the 2.6 branch and its organization and touched on a few nice subjects. Monolithic vs. Modular for example. I felt a little embarrassed that I attended and didn't put in any talks of my own so I must apologize for that, however I thoroughly enjoyed Dan's talk and he would have shown me up anyway ;) Something I would like to add however is that in the coming few months I am going to make a more conscious effort to keep the project page updated and our TLP roadmap accessible. With 2005.0 still being up-in-the-air I am going to hold off however. Unfortunately I missed most other peoples talks in full as Stuart and I ran off to the side-room together! But from what I hear Rob only swore once, so way to go! All in all, thoroughly enjoyable.

On a different note I went to Alton Towers on Friday and even the weather held out! It was a lovely day, and it was an awesome amount of fun. Anyone who's going, I recommend staying the night in "The Bulls Head Inn" its just down the road, and the breakfast is fantastic. I think I went on every ride coming close to 4 times or so. Hex was the biggest dissapointment but numerous goes on Oblivion and Nemesis made up for it :)

Gentoo wise, there are several things coming up in the next few weeks with Kernel. There is of course the 2005.0 release which has been prepped for and requires further work once released to clean up old packages in the tree and so on. There has been some excellent progress made in migrating all the older sources to kernel-2 and older kernel module ebuilds to linux-info/mod eclasses. I will also be auditing our version detection mechanisms in the eclasses to ensure the recent move to a more refined upstream release scheme will be sanely catered for, and also addressing any issues which may have popped up from my recent unipatch change. Which reminds me, I am actually going to finish that re-write soon so devs can expect a much more powerful unipatch syntax and speed-ups. I would also like to welcome Carlos Silva (r3pek) on board! It's going to be a pleasure working with you.

So there is my first ever blog post! And I would just like to take this opportunity to thank Dan and all else involved for their dedication and initiative which made Planet Gentoo. It truly is an excellent tool!
Asus Pundit-R's, Asterisk and Kids on Bikes
So its been a little while since I last posted so let me update you all.

My Girlfriend (Claire) and I are looking around for a house, making the big move in together. I never realised how stressful just looking is! We have seen a fair few that we like, and have arranged several viewings but time will tell. I've also got quite addicted to "Ladette to Lady" on TV. I didnt realise watching stupid pompous old grannies and crazy young girls would be so entertaining.

Oh, and then there is my car. The accident magnet. As some of you probably know some stupid woman crashed into it, which I had to claim for an so on, and I have just now (after months of waiting) recieved the estimates. Well, I sat down for my dinner the other day and the door-bell rang so I went to see who it was. Some kid (good on him for not running off mind) appologised for riding down the road, losing control and crashing into the side of my car. It left a rather tidy scratch all down the rear passenger-side panel, and also a nice dint. Less than impressed :(

Also, no idea how many people have seen this but its pretty awesome. Basically, 18 real life taxi cabs fitted with GPS and split into teams of three. You pick a "team" as your online monopoly piece and when a cab is near/on your property after the round is up, you get paid rent. equally you pay rent in the same way. Very cool!

Anyways, on a more technical note I've been playing with the Asus PUNDIT-R's as a solution to running Asterisk with some difficulty. The digium card (TE110P) is based on a well documented, open card with open specs. Problem being there is just enough variation in it to make it a pig. Once you enable the spans on the card, the card will begin to send interrupts (in a frequency similar to the timer) and also enables DMA access. now, the IDE bus on this machine has a faulty DMA as it is, and also it appears a faulty (IO/L)APIC implementation.

Im still in the process of trying to diagnose as to why the box will hardlock under minimal load exactly, but it is almost certainly to do with the way it handles DMA, and more than likely it just clobbers userspace memory regions which will then be over-written by userspace, which then currupts kernel-space and hangs.
However, if anyone has any experience with these boxes, this hardware, and asterisk please give me a shout and let me know how you got on. I have even tried forcing interrupt allocation to the BIOS in a check to ensure sensible sharing.
death to modconf
for those faithful following my heartbreaking drama story of a car and its owner, there is still no progress been made. The weather is getting wetter, and my poor baby is trying to hold the fort against the elements to prevent itself from rusting, and although I fret I have began to come to terms. Still no news about claiming for its repair yet, and still no news about making a statement but I suppose thats just slack police :)

A few things happening in gentoo land.
modconf has been removed, excellent. Its been in the tree (same ebuild, only trivial changes) for 2 years. It had come to the decision of keeping it, and bumping it to working or dropping it. After brief discussion, the latter prevailed.

bugs #85410 and #84856 are closed. Anyone having problems with unipatch working on something other than base10, and madwifi not building if you use KBUILD_OUTPUT things are looking up! :)

bug #77190 has been closed. Anyone who was setting a LANG/LC_ALL variable which screwed up unipatch should now be working fine without needed to mess with anything.

And, plenty more to come. All in all, I don't have a great deal to add really. Only thing worth noting is I'm not feeling well and if things get much worse my availablity might become a little awkward.
Ex-employers can really suck!
So, all in all this has been a fun weekend. The weather has held out which is good, I have a new car (new Hyundai coupe UK US: works under epiphany!) which I've been driving around a lot all week.

I've been on the phone every day to Manx Telecom (my ex-employers) recently trying to arrange for my internet access to be reconnected. One of the perks of working there was free ADSL, however for some anomaly it was never added to my line. Therefore, it was ceased and I have had no internet access for almost a week. Apologies to those waiting on me for stuff with Gentoo, but the above explains my lack of activity this past week :)

I've also been dabbling a lot recently in the new multisync cvs builds, uclinux updates and a couple of other goodies. Hope to push some of it to the blog/tree soon. On top of this I'm going to commit nicer support within detect_version for the newer kernel scheme, something I've wanted to do but with 2005.0 and my lack of net access its had to wait.
Kernel Sources
For all of those awaiting a more permenant fix to bug #85559, this has now been done. Hopefully you vanilla-sources users (specifically) will benefit from a big bandwidth saving.

Also on a similar note, there has been a lot of confusion recently about 2.4/2.6 kernel versions and headers. Let me clear this up.

Many moons ago portage didnt have support for cascading profiles, although the 2.5 kernel had just been made 2.6 and progress was being made on stabalising support for it in Gentoo. The issues we had meant that we had to rename the 2.6 versions into a new package. For example: linux-headers contained 2.4, and linux26-headers contained 2.6.
This meant that managing the dependancies within ebuilds was awkward and amongst other things, far from ideal.
It was also an illogical seperation of what is fundementally the same thing. You dont for example see vim5 vim6 etc, you just have vim.

Now then, what we did recently, with the help of cascading profiles was amalgamate these packages into their relevant counter-parts. Therefore, we now have vanilla-sources-2.{0,2,4,6}* and linux-headers-2.{4,6}* and it is up to the profiles you run to manage which versions should be unmasked for you.
As part of this move we also moved to 2.6 by default for many architectures. As a result, and in true gentoo philosophy, you will find underneath your profile either a 2.6 or most likely a 2.4 subdirectory. If you link your profile to that directory instead then you will no longer be forced to update to 2.6, however I do encourage you to upgrade if you have no valid technical reason to stay.

So with this concludes:
emerge yourfavourite-sources will emerge 2.4, OR 2.6 depending on your profile. Most likely 2.6
emerge linux-headers will merge the appropriate headers.

IF you are upgrading from 2.4 to the newer 2.6 as part of this move, PLEASE PLEASE ensure your new kernel is installed and running along side your new 2.6 headers, since there are several reports of random segfaults occuring with 2.6 headers on a 2.4 kernel.

If you find that its installing a version you dont want, then just relink your /etc/make.profile to ${PORTDIR}/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.0/XX where XX is 2.4 (or 2.6 on different archs in some cases).

Hopefully this has now brought some clarity to the situation :)
Stupid French Cars!!
So shortly following the purchase of my new car, I was driving home at a very reasonable speed, when all of a sudden a newly passed driver in a citroen ax came around the blind corner too fast hitting the car in front of me. So, I swerved to not get hit by the spinning AX, and bits of the cars were flying all over my bonet.

I rang 999, done the normal stuff - luckily everyone was completely fine. Anyways, checking the damage to my car and it was nothing worth crying over I left and went home. While at home I saw that it had ripped big chunks out of my paintwork all over my bonet, door panels and bumpers.
After spending a good half an hour on the phone to a police officer dealing with the accident, I think he finally believed me and so I took it to the local station so that they could check it. Now all I need to wait for is something to happen to pay for the damage to be repaired before it starts to rust!

And to add to the annoyance, the only reason I drove away from home in the first place was to pick something up from a shop which rang me to say something I wanted was in, only to find by the time I got there they were mistaken!

So, anyways, Gentoo stuffs.
kernel-2 changes have gone in to better accomodate KV_EXTRA and family.
linux-mod changes have gone into the tree to take over the pcmcia work from pcmcia.eclass, and pcmcia-cs changes will be made soon.

instead of it now working out and patching a load of odd pcmcia sources, it just tarballs up the pcmcia-cs sources at build time, and uses that for the future. Please please please dont delete /usr/src/pcmcia/pcmcia-cs-build-env.tbz2 once these changes go in or you might experience problems :)

Aside from that, nothing new to report.
tasting that fresh mono goodness.
So its been a while since I last blogged, and I've decided to give in on that whole "I promise to blog more often" routine which just doesn't work, but after having a few things happen recently which someone might actually like to read about, I decided to write a new installment of my crazed thoughts to entertain those religeous few :)

I've been looking for a simplistic, yet powerful Podcast client for quite some time now, without any of the ones i've found (iPodder/Juice, Rhythmbox etc) being simple and specific enough. I fairly recently came across monopod which I wrote an ebuild for (0.3) and after finding a bug open for it on bugzilla, submitted it to portage.

At the same time, I decided to clean up v0.4 and got right into mono development. So far I've fixed up the deprecated code, fixed and partially re-worked the iPod support, cleaned up a lot of smaller UI niggles and started writing a plugin system fairly similar to Banshee's to support automatic sync to iPod, daap, etc etc.

I've been in touch as well with Edd Dumbill and hope to start putting more time into turning monopod into a very convenient lightweight, but extensible podcast client. Of course, the fact that Banshee (which is awesome by the way, thanks Aaron) is actually getting a lot of attention from people writing podcast plugins for it means that monopod might end up being fairly short-lived. But obviously it has its purpose and I would never encourage playback support in it by standard anyways.

Anyways, on a totally different note Tim (Plasmaroo) lisa (lisa - funnily enough) and I met up in York for a bit of a gentoo get-together with a few other people on Saturday. It's nice to catch up with people face to face, and Tim's ability to shout russian in Pizza Hut impressed me! We met a rather interesting poet in the bookstore and ended up chatting about the ups and downs of (iirc) Jasper, XML, XSLT, Why not to use JavaScript, and then participating in some amateur filmography at the top of the stairs! :)

It was fun, hope to do it again sometime. The opportunity will come sooner than expected too with an unofficial meet in manchester shortly and a Gentoo UK gathering planned sometime near late May/June in London. Of course, everyone will be welcome and all interested parties should express their interest by badgering George (cokehabit) on #gentoo-uk ;) - I'm curious about rough numbers as I'm sure George is as well.

So, I could go on for a while with all the things I've been working on recently, but instead I'll give it a break and leave some beef for the next few days :)

Also to note, David Nielsen (Lovechild, some of you may remember him from his gentoo days) has been sexually abusing a lot of the UK developers recently. Word of warning for those tempted to visit us in London ;)

Gentoo

Dual Core G5s (970MP)
Looks like dual core G5s aren't that far off, if you take the update to MONster to be any indication. If you all remember last year the 970FX definition showed up all of 3 months before the machines hit the shelves. Apple has a tendency to only do major product releases three times a year, Mac World Expo in San Francisco, WWDC and Mac World Expo Paris. If the past is any indication of future results it looks like they are trying to push for production machines by WWDC in June. With the recent updates to the ppc64 kernel, and new fun stuff like AGP and iMac-G5 patches coming down the pike it looks like ppc64 is going to grow fast from here on out. Now if I could only get multilib working...
Hardened coming to ppc64
Just a heads up, I'm working to bring the Gentoo hardened profile to a ppc64 near you. A big thanks to solar for putting in the time to help me with this. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programing.
Some preliminary PaXtest data (no toolchain or noexec/pageexec yet):

Mode: blackhat
Linux Strife64 2.6.11-hardened-r1 #4 SMP Wed Mar 16 21:08:23 EST 2005 ppc64 PPC970, altivec supported PowerMac7,2 GNU/Linux

Executable anonymous mapping : Killed
Executable bss : Killed
Executable data : Killed
Executable heap : Killed
Executable stack : Killed
Executable anonymous mapping (mprotect) : Killed
Executable bss (mprotect) : Killed
Executable data (mprotect) : Killed
Executable heap (mprotect) : Killed
Executable stack (mprotect) : Killed
Executable shared library bss (mprotect) : Killed
Executable shared library data (mprotect): Killed
Writable text segments : Vulnerable
Anonymous mapping randomisation test : 24 bits (guessed)
Heap randomisation test (ET_EXEC) : 14 bits (guessed)
Heap randomisation test (ET_DYN) : 32 bits (guessed)
Main executable randomisation (ET_EXEC) : 20 bits (guessed)
Main executable randomisation (ET_DYN) : No randomisation
Shared library randomisation test : 24 bits (guessed)
Stack randomisation test (SEGMEXEC) : 32 bits (guessed)
Stack randomisation test (PAGEEXEC) : 32 bits (guessed)
Return to function (strcpy) : paxtest: bad luck, try different compiler options.
Return to function (memcpy) : Killed
Return to function (strcpy, RANDEXEC) : paxtest: bad luck, try different compiler options.
Return to function (memcpy, RANDEXEC) : Killed
Executable shared library bss : Killed
Executable shared library data : Killed
Nerd Score

Yeah, even though I'm on vacation I just had to jump on the band wagon. Damn peer preasure........
PowerPC to the People
10 PRINT Hello_World
20 BEEP
30 GOTO 10
Ah gotta love Apple Basic.

A little story for introduction:

At the edge of the Architecture map the intrepid programmer found the words "Here there be PowerPCs". Having no fear of these mysterious processors he set his sails to catch the wind and found that indeed the world was not flat. What he found over the horizon was a land where code was no longer bound by the tyranny of x86, a veritable paradise. The programmer set up shop and hung a sign outside his door; "PowerPC to the People" it read. As people slowly realized there was another way they broke free from their shackles and came to the new land. Welcome the programmer said, stay a while.
The 'What we did in 2005' bandwagon
Ok, so jumping on the trend started by Simon and Diego here is the 'What did ppc and ppc64 do in 2005?' status update.
- The first thing to mention is 2 very successful releases each adding futher support for the machines using the powerpc processor. 2005.0 and 2005.1 were both successful. Additionally 2005.1-r1 fixed some minor issues on PPC64. Thanks got to Pylon, wolf31o2, jforman and the entire PPC, PPC64, RelEng and Infra teams.
- Along with 2005.1 we merged the ppc and ppc64 profiles into one common parent to better match the efforts of sparc and mips which both support similar structures. The merge was mostly stylistic but a further blending will be coming with 2006.0
- Support for the PPC970 processor found in the G5 transitioned over to the ppc64 team. Needing an easy way to transition users we created pure 32-bit, pure 64-bit and multilib userland profiles (the latter thanks in large part to the AMD64 team whos work made it possible). Gentoo is the only distro out there that fully supports all three types of installs. That is huge.
- 2005 saw the first support for Gnome in a pure 64-bit environment on PPC64 as we finally got mozilla to compile. Mozilla and Firefox still don't work but efforts are continuing to make these browsers ppc64 64-bit friendly.
- Hardened support has improved on ppc and ppc64 saw the first hardened profile. Neither one is really ready for prime time, but thanks to the great work of our Hardened team things are getting there.
- We started using ATs on the ppc team, they have been a great help, thanks all of you and thanks to the AMD64 team for coming up with the idea.
- Due to all these improvements, and the continued improvement of the PPC Faq and the Handbook we were able to close just shy of 950 bugs between the two groups.
- Because we have made such a name for ourselves as a strong reliable distro for both ppc and ppc64 we saw huge hardware sponsorship from Genesi and IBM. This relationship I'm sure will continue to grow. Thanks go out to both companies for their continued support.
- While not technically a Gentoo accomplishment work continues on the bcm43xx driver for the AirportExtreme (among others). I would personally like to thank JoseJX and Kugelfang for their contributions in bringing this project to where it is today. There is still work to be done for sure, but hell, I have wireless on my iBook now so I can't complain. I'd also like to thank all those who work on the driver that are not directly part of the Gentoo community, good job guys!
- I'd also like to thank all those that work on the ppc32 and ppc64 kernels as 2005 saw support for quite a bit of new hardware and without them it would not be possible.
- Finally I'll leave off quoting Simon, as it truely is the most important aspect of all: "We had lots of fun".
All told I'd say that's one hell of a year, here is to another great year for Gentoo, the PPC architecture and OpenSource as a whole.

Gentoo

Filtering TOFU
This morning I discovered net-mail/t-prot. It's specifically designed for mutt users, but it should work with other MUAs, providing they're not one of these new fangled bloated graphical things.

Anyway, here's a URL: URL

The idea behind it was originally just to filter out classic TOFU, that is, "text oben, full-quote unten". This is a mish-mash of German and English meaning "text above -- full quote below", or just top posting to the rest of us.

However, t-prot filters out more than just TOFU. It gets rid of Outlook garbage and it can trim commercial and mailing list footers (or whatever footer you like). It can truncate RFC uncomformant signatures that are over four lines long. It does a bunch of other things too: trimming whitespace, repeated punctuation, blank lines, etc.

The best bit is that because it's just used as a display_filter in mutt, the original mail is unchanged. This means there're no strings attached, so try it out.

Just for the hell of it, here's a screenshot before (left) and after (right). Click on the images for full-size, if you're bored.

Interestingly, the person having their mail snipped by t-prot for having a huge RFC unconformant signature is also part of the ASCII ribbon campaign. It takes all sorts, I suppose.
Gentoo UK Conference 2005
Just got back home after my flight back from Manchester. I'm very tired, but I'll do my best to scribble down a few things. I apologise for not having any photographs, but there is a video/DVD in the pipeline.

Rob Holland (tigger^) gave a great talk on code auditing, in particular with doxygen and his work with that. The slides were a bit rough and ready (hehe), but it was excellently presented nonetheless. He didn't even swear once.

Stephen Bennett (spb) showed me and a few other people Gentoo/FreeBSD with the Gentoo init script system. Really quite impressive.

Daniel Drake (dsd) presented the kernel and user-relations projects. I think the talk will help a lot of users to report better bugs in the future, and maybe even George will sort out his DMA access now.

My talk was really rather scary for me and I was quite nervous (and unprepared!); I think it went fairly well though. The Zsh demo at the end seemed to get a few oohs and aahs.

Harry Moyes, a guest speaker from manchesterwireless.net, gave a talk on the process of setting up a charity in the UK, and the details thereof.

Also thanks to Gareth Bult for his talk on Flash Linux. It was really informative, and it looks like a very useful and interesting Gentoo-based distribution.

Thanks to the organisers, Stuart Herbert (Stuart) and Reuben Finch (grumpydog), for putting so much time and effort into the event. I'm looking forward to next year very much :).

you can find my talk in both LaTeX and PDF on my devspace. Compilation to any format other than PDF probably won't work (you'll need app-text/tetex or similar and dev-tex/latex-beamer at least, and also I would recommend dev-tex/rubber)
Haven't posted in a while, but...
I recently brought two new developers on board: Joe Sapp, A.K.A. nixphoeni (gdesklets) and Jory Pratt A.K.A. anarchy (qmail/vpopmail). Both seem to be settling in well.

I've bumped mail-mta/msmtp to 1.4.0. I think I'm the luckiest maintainer in the world with the package's upstream, a chap called Martin Lambers, who:
- Autotools his packages properly
- Announces releases on sourceforge and freshmeat in particular so I can track them easily
- Uses Gentoo
- Is active on the bugzilla
- Is a nice guy and easily approachable over email
- Writes good software (features, portability, good code, etc.)
It makes things very easy for me, and takes a lot of the nasty bits out of maintaing packages. I've gotten Markus Rothe (corsair), who is a PPC64 developer, to keyword 1.4.0 ~ppc64 too. In the next release, I'm going to try and push the current version to stable on all architectures so I can purge all the horrible old ebuilds without mailwrapper support.

I've convinced Simon Stelling (blubb) to add gtk-engines to emul-linux-x86-gtklibs. This means that anyone using the multilibbed GTK+ applications (the latest acroread, firefox-bin etc.) will not have to endure warnings about missing GTK+ theme engine modules on the command line, so long as they are using a GTK+ theme that uses an engine shipped with GNOME. Also, these programs will look a hell of a lot better.

Other than what I've mentioned, I haven't really done much. I've been enjoying winding down from school this Easter holiday. Back on Monday though.
In response to Donnie's post
In this post, Donnie mentioned the use of various spam filters and IMAP proxies.

I don't know about other people, but most of the spam I receive is in character sets that I can't even read. So, it only takes one simple procmail rule to filter them all out:
```
:0
* Content-Type:.*(big5|gb2312|euc-kr|ks_c_5601-1987).*
/dev/null
```
It makes sense to put this sort of thing before your spam filters, as it will use nowhere near the resources.
My nomination for the Gentoo Council
Elfyn McBratney, beu, (by the way, good work on the marriage!) very kindly nominated me for the Gentoo council. I'm happy to accept this nomination.

Well, usual rubbish as far as reasoning goes: I feel I'd be able to communicate well between projects and developers, and I think that... well, I'd enjoy the job. There's not much more to it than that.

Good luck to the other candidates.
Re: Flashy Desktop
Spider, I would recommend media-sound/synaesthesia for audio visualisation -- presuming you're using x86. It's not at all portable.

As for the desktop side of things, one man's flashy desktop isn't necessarily anothers. I'd say stick with stock gnome as far as possible. XComposite drop shadows always look good with it.