Mark Kowarsky

linux.conf.au has been great so far. The Gentoo Mini-conf went almost flawlessly - but more about that will be written in the GMN.

The next event the Gentoo Australia (and a few internationals) contigency will be taking part in is Open Day.

* When: 12pm - 4pm, Saturday 2nd February (this Saturday)
* Where: Union House, Melbourne University (Building 130)
* What: Cool Open Source stuff!

Bring along your friends, family, colleagues to find out about this great thing called Open Source Software. Play Frets on Fire (a game like Guitar Hero), Stepmania (similar to Dance Dance Revolution) and other open source games. Discover Inkscape and other Open Source design tools. Learn about Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Software Freedom Day. See MythTV in action, showing how you can build a cheap but extremely powerful personal video recorder (better than TiVo). Experience linking real world tools with online games like Second Life. And much more!

All users are welcome to drop by to ask questions and discuss ideas about Gentoo. There will also be a bunch of Gentoo stickers being given out.

I hope to see you there.

If you are one of the lucky 600 or so people on their way to linux.conf.au, are coming to the Gentoo Mini-conf and want a really cool polo shirt to go with it, please leave your name on the Gentoo Australia wiki or contact me directly.

The polos will be 100% cotton, black in colour with the Gentoo 'G' Logo on them with the words "gentoo \n miniconf '08" below it embroidered on the pocket. The current design (which may change slightly) can be found at http://omploader.org/vOHRh. Prices are ~$20-25 and your request will need to be put in by noon this Friday (Jan 18) to guarantee that it is ordered.

I am currently in the process of organising the half-day Gentoo mini-conf at the next linux.conf.au, Australia's annual technical conference about Free Software. Fun, informal and seriously technical, linux.conf.au draws together Free and Open Source Software developers from across the world. The upcoming conference will be held from January 28th to February 2nd, 2008 at The University of Melbourne.

One of the sessions being planned will be a series of three tutorials, each devoted to one of Gentoo's package managers. We already have a speaker for Paludis, but still need presenters for Portage and Pkgcore. Each tutorial only needs to last 10-20 minutes, and can target new or experienced users.

Any interested speakers should contact me on mark_alec|AT|gentoo.org as soon as possible.

As promised, here are some of my thoughts about the first release candidate of KDE4.

I am not going to comment on the artwork or plasma at this point in time, because I know that it has been significantly improved in SVN, so when RC2 comes out in a few days, it should be in a better state for review.

System

Dolphin is a very nice file manager. The breadcrumb navigation resembles GTK+'s file dialog, but is much more powerful. Being able to click the little arrow to navigate to other directories is great. It does take a little while to get used to the fact that you can't ctrl + t to open a new tab, but Konqueror is still available, seemingly as powerful as ever.

Konsole's configuration has gotten an overhaul. Customising the appearance is now much more streamlined.

Games

These are all great. The SVG graphics are a real improvement upon the older pixmap ones in KDE3. Gameplay is the same as before, just in a slicker interface.

Graphics

Kuickshow has been replaces by Gwenview, which has a nicer interface. Unfortunately it wasn't stable, crashing multiple times. For PDF viewing, KPDF has been superceded by Okular, which has a nicer interface and actually seems to render documents faster.

That is about all there is for now. I haven't had the opportunity to try any of the EDU, PIM, multimedia or office applications. Neither have I attempted to try any of the new fancy technologies like Phonon, Solid or Strigi. If Plasma is in a good state by the next release, I can see that KDE4 will be a solid release. It will not be as feature complete as KDE3, since many important applications still need to be ported and polished, but it should provide a base for my desktop environment for quite some time.

My secondary school education has finished. At 11:45, Monday November 26^th, I finished my last exam. I won't be getting my results until mid-December, but I am happy with my performance over the past few weeks. The conclusion of the exam has meant that I can now devote more time to organising the Gentoo Mini-conf.

Plans for it are going well. Interesting talks have been lined up, just in the stages of adding them to the schedule at the moment. It is likely that there will be a 25 or 50 minute slot still available due to changes in the timetable, but another Call for Presentations will be put out if that is the case. Besides talks, I need to find some local producers of shirts, stickers and other cool merchandise

The extra free time has enabled me to start reading for pleasure again. I decided that if I am reading it may as well be something of epic proportions, so I chose Tolstoy's War and Peace. Only through one part of the first volume, but I am liking it already.

Also decided to try out KDE4 from the overlay yesterday. First impressions are not very good, since Plasma in RC1 is very much unusable. The applications however seemed stable, and at least as usable as their KDE3 counterparts, if not more so. I will test it out some more this weekend and write a more thorough review.

I am pleased to announce that the proposal for a Gentoo mini-conf has been accepted by the linux.conf.au 2008 team! This will be the first ever Gentoo mini-conf, with the aim of bringing together and educating Gentoo users or people interested in the Gentoo metadistribution. Gentoo Down Under is slated to run for half a day on Tuesday 29th January 2008, with a finishing time of around mid-afternoon. The mini-conf will take place at the University of Melbourne (together with the rest of linux.conf.au)

Call For Papers

There are speaking slots for:

• three 50 minute talks, or
• six 25 minute talks, or
• many 10 minute talks

How these slots will be allocated will depend on the proposals submitted.

Presentations should be related to Gentoo use, and can be targeted at either current users or new users. Proposal submissions should include: the author's name, contact details, topic title, expected running time, experience and any other relevant details.

Anyone interested in giving a talk should email their submission to mark_alec|AT|gentoo.org

More Information?

If you would like more information about what is being planned for GDU, or have any suggestions about what you would like to see, contact mark_alec via email or in #gentoo-au.

Like many people, I often use Mozilla's browser and email client, but find that without some customisation, they are not to my liking.

The first task is to get them both to fit into my desktop environment. Since I use the Tango icons, using the Tango Firefox theme and Thunderbird theme is only natural. Note that Thunderbird will crash if you have the mail notification feature enabled, so best disable that.

Then some settings must be added in about:config, so that both programs can talk to each other. Open about:config in Firefox, right click and add network.protocol-handler.app.mailto. Set it to xdg-email and it will now open up whichever email program you set as default (make sure that you have emerged xdg-utils otherwise xdg-* won't exist)

A similar method exists for Thunderbird. Edit Preferences Advanced Config Editor... will get you to the about:config equivalent. Then add network.protocol-handler.app.http and network.protocol-handler.app.https and set both to xdg-open. Now when you click on links in Thunderbird, they should open up in your browser.

Then you get onto extensions. Now, I don't use an excessive number, just a few that I have found useful.

In Firefox the ones I recommend are:

• All-In-One Gestures to let me have control of many browser featuress by just moving the mouse
• omploader, adds 'Ompload!' to the right click menu, allowing you to easily upload any file type to omploaer
• Finally, not one that I am using currently, but one that is certainly very interesting is vimperator which makes Firefox behave like the best editor in the world, Vim

In Thunderbird I use:

• enigmail, for all my PGP needs
• moztraybiff, which adds a system-tray icon for Thunderbird that notes how many new messages you have

Hopefully somebody will find some of this useful

I have been neglecting my blog, but felt that I should try to keep it current with happenings in my life...

• Bought a D-Link DI-524 wireless router, and am happy to say it worked perfectly out of the box.
• Entrusted with Administrator powers on our forums. Now spammers have more to fear
• Became a member of the Proctors, which was certainly an interesting experience.
• Found a 3GHz P4 box with a gigabyte of RAM and a nVidia 5700 video card, but not much else. Still needs some work, and it isn't playing nice turning on at the moment, but it soon should.
• Managed to get my older 2.66GHz booting, but am having trouble getting Gentoo/FreeBSD working on it.
• Finally, today is my birthday, eighteen years young

Seems the modem/router I had been happily using for months decided to give up the ghost while I was trying to get a wireless network running in my house.

This annoys me hugely, because yesterday I spent about 12 hours trying to get wifi working, only to discover tonight that the hardware was broken, so it wasn't a problem I should have spent all that time on

So, tomorrow I need to go buy a new hub/switch, so that I can have multiple computers on my LAN.

RIP (20062301):

Just happened to notice that my first and oldest Gentoo box, 'rockley', is now two years old

The box stopped being my primary box here on March 4^th when I acquired kensington, an 800MHz P3. It has now been regulated to a headless stable box that I very occasionally use for x86 arch testing.

Some statistics:

• --synced 138 times
• merged packages 2590 times
• unmerged packages 1155 times
• Estimated update time (for emerge -e world): 3 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes.
• number of packages in 'world': 76

mark@rockley ~ $ emerge --info
Portage 2.1.1-r2 (default-linux/x86/2006.1, gcc-4.1.1, glibc-2.4-r4, 2.6.17-gentoo-r4 i586)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.17-gentoo-r4 i586 AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
Gentoo Base System version 1.12.6
Last Sync: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:50:01 +0000
app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present]
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.0.30
dev-lang/python: 2.3.5-r2, 2.4.3-r4
dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5
dev-util/ccache: [Not Present]
dev-util/confcache: [Not Present]
sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17
sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.60
sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2
sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1-r3
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.14
sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22
virtual/os-headers: 2.6.17-r2
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CBUILD="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=k6-2 -pipe"
CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/X11/xkb /usr/share/config"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/gconf /etc/java-config/vms/ /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/terminfo"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=k6-2 -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoconfig collision-protect distlocks metadata-transfer parallel-fetch sandbox sfperms strict test"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.swin.edu.au/gentoo http://ftp.swin.edu.au/gentoo "
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats --timeout=180 --exclude='/distfiles' --exclude='/local' --exclude='/packages'"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://192.168.0.194/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 3dnow X alsa berkdb bitmap-fonts cli cracklib crypt cups dlloader dri elibc_glibc foomaticdb fortran gdbm gpm gtk gtk2 iconv input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse ipv6 isdnlog kernel_linux libg++ ncurses nls nptl nptlonly pam pcre perl ppds pppd python readline reflection samba session spl ssl tcpd test truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode userland_GNU video_cards_nv xorg zlib"
Unset: CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS

For those that don't know, for 19 weeks we have had an IRC channel for Australian Gentoo users. Logically, the channel is named #gentoo-au and is now on the Gentoo IRC channels list, thanks to astinus. You can find statistics to the channel here. So, for those hundreds of aussies that IRC, pop in and say "g'day", we won't bite

LCA

linux.conf.au is fast approaching with less than a month to go. Will be fun to put faces to all the people I only know via IRC.

I got the results to some of my year 12 exams back; and they weren't exactly what I was hoping for. It is a strange experience to realise that your efforts were not rewarded as you might have hoped.

My head feels like a frisbee; twice its normal size. Feels like a football and someone's moved the goal posts. Everything is slightly out of joint and weird; disconnected. I had to hold onto the walls.

Such is the state I am in. While thinking about my results go through phases of:

• depression
• denial
• apathy
• anger
• acceptance
• contempt

Well, I will try to look on the bright side of life, and take each day as it comes. Luckily, I should have plenty to distract me with over the summer holidays. That and the prospects of next year should keep me somewhat happy.

I would like to announce that gentoo.org.au is now up, and functioning as intended. Currently the pages are a little scarce on text, but that should change as time goes by and events are organised.

We decided in the end to go for a MediaWiki based site, but switched the default skin for a slightly modified version that the Beagle Project kindly provided the tarball for.

Any Australians reading this, if you could register on the wiki and add yourself to the locations page so that we can get estimates of numbers.

There is a special person I would like to thank for hosting the site, and doing various tidbits with it to get it working - David Shakaryan (aka omp.) Thanks also goes to Redhatter, who helped modify various parts of the website.

In other news, I managed to 'find' a new computer: 2.66GHz Celeron (P4 Generation), 13GB hard-disk, inbuilt ethernet, video and sound. I will blog about it more later...

The gentoo.org.au website has finally seen some progress. Currently it is just index page with no content, but over the next few days I plan to: setup a wiki back-end, design a theme for it, add some template pages and fill in the basic content.

Last time I blogged about the site, I was almost certain about using Drupal. I have since decided that a CMS is more complex than the needs of the site. The pages will mostly be static, and discussions will happen mainly in #gentoo-au or possibly on a mailing list. Thus, a wiki seemed like the logical conclusion, as it allows easy on-the-go editing.

The image that I have as the logo is just something I hacked up in Inkscape quickly. As you can probably notice it is just a default Gentoo 'G' with an Orange/Burnt colour scheme. Other ideas are welcome, and if anybody wants to make a logo, send it through and I will see if I can work with it.

I have also registered for linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney. The programme looks really interesting, and I hope that I can find a way to squeeze into as many talks and tutorials in the four days I plan on being there. It will be the first computer related conference I attend, and I hope to meet up with some people I currently only know from the Internet. A page to organise an informal meet-up of Gentoo users there will soon be made on the new site.

A few days ago I purchased gentoo.org.au (no, don't bother looking, it doesn't point anywhere yet ).

I have been investigating various programs to help manage the webspace. Started off looking at various CMS programs:

• Joomla - can't say it grabbed me at all. The default setup is way too messy, and even after fidling with the seconds for 5 minutes couldn't improve it.
• Drupal - much cleaner interface, and default, this actually creates reasonably sexy pages without much effort.
• Geeklog - looked, moved on quickly.

However people in #gentoo-au have recommended that a CMS may be overkill and to try out a wiki. So it looks like I will be experimenting with phpwiki and mediawiki over the next few days.

Last week I was interviewed for Open Source On The Air, an online radio show made by James Purser.

You can download the whole show in either mp3 or ogg formats. Additionally, my good friend Jorge has made an edited version available: Ogg Vorbis, mp3: high quality and low quality.

Read below if you want a transcript of the show.

Read more!

Seems that a little bit of advertising goes a long way online. We have expanded from a channel of less than dozen to a channel of less than thirty, almost overnight.

This couldn't have happened without the help of people getting the word out on IRC and on their blogs. So I would like to thank them for helping to start establish our community down-under.

• A new Aussie Distro Channel - James Purser's blog
• Gentoo-AU is (Re)Born! - rob's blog and GLUG's ML
• Anyone else that mentioned it

I have also been interviewed for Open Source On The Air and mention a few things about Gentoo in general, and Gentoo-Au. I will blog about this more later, after the interview is broadcast (at 9:30pm AEST for those who are interested.)

While reading Australian Personal Computer magazine I came across an interview with one of the members of the Ubuntu Australian Team.

This together with events such as the Gentoo UK 2006 Conference have pursuaded me that I would like to create a similar community in Australia.

So, 4 weeks 5 days (16h 56m 15s) ago I decided to revive the #gentoo-au channel on Freenode. Currently there are a few less than a dozen different people in it, but the community seems to slowly be growing thanks to word of mouth, and the forum thread I made some ago.

Plans still need to be written up for a website, that will contain all the information necessary to organise conferences down under. My goal is to aim for a mini-conf at linux.conf.au 2008. Hopefully before then we can even organise a meetup of some kind to try to spread the word about Gentoo on a grass-roots level.

Any readers of this from Australia, please join #gentoo-au, and we will see what community we can build.

A little delayed, but I would like to introduce the following people as the Gentoo User Representatives:

• cheater1034
• kopp
• CoffeeBuzz
• nephros
• Richard Fish
• loki99
• Q-collective
• lxnay
• toskala
• cokehabit
• likewhoa

They can be contacted via the email alias userreps@gentoo.org, or found in the #gentoo-userreps channel on freenode.

Currently no projects have been started by them (that I know of), but that will soon change as we (userrel) are having an IRC meeting with them this weekend. I look forward to seeing what we can achieve in the coming year

The elections for userreps have been over for a few days now. There were 477 votes, which isn't as many as I would have liked, but doesn't matter so much as the nominees were all so wonderful .

User Relations will soon be contacting the N-number of elected userreps, so keep watching Gentoo Universe for updates.

In other news, I have added larrythecow.net and Planet Larry to my favourite gtk+ RSS reader, liferea. I am really liking reading a bunch of users' and ex-developers' blogs, as it provides a perspective on Gentoo that you don't get to see on Gentoo Universe. My only issue is, that with the increased content, the amount of time spent reading has increased, luckily it isn't stopping me from doing things in Real Life^tm (yet).