Josh Saddler

As mentioned in the GWN and the release information page, Gentoo Linux 2006.0 has been released.

fox2mike did a spectacular job coordinating the handbooks and integrating/adding loads o' code.

If you haven't seen releng's fancy new installer, go check it out. It's the future of Gentoo, doncha know. ;)

Lots of traffic on the mailing lists today. A new GWN, a new release announcement, lots of docs commits -- what a good way to start the day at 2PM. :D

I think I'll go hunt down some more docs bugs.

In the past couple of days I finally managed to kick my system into upgrading to Gnome 2.12 (x86).

The problem is that I'd been using an old out-of-tree version of wpa_supplicant (0.3.9!) and an old kernel, gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r9. These were the only recent working versions I could use. Unfortunately, the new gnome-vfs and gnome-volume-manager wanted updates to hal and dbus, which in tern required a kernel >2.6.13, which meant madwifi and wpa_supplicant updates as well. Phew! That's a lot to take in.

Needless to say, none of that happened. Gnome 2.12 has been marked stable for x86 since Jan. 22. That's a long time to be unable to upgrade, and quite frustrating.

I avoided updating my ~unstable madwifi-driver (sorry Brix; I know I promised to test the latest, and I still will), and fixed the WiFi security problem by unmerging wpa_supplicant and just using wireless-tools. Thank goodness my new apartment only uses WEP. I initially tried gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r1, but this would not work with anything else I had installed, basically.

The next problem was the update to stable nvidia and udev. As referenced elsewhere on the forums, udev and nvidia-kernel have some serious issues compounded by a change in the way the kernel handles them in >2.6.12-r9. Udev no longer creates the proper /dev/nvidia* entries when using the new kernels, so of course X can't start on boot. Despite playing with all the masked versions of nvidia, I ended up using the latest stable nvidia (1.0.6629) and the latest ~x86 udev (083 right now). The above forum thread looked promising, but I ended up solving it on my own. After all the updating, all I had to do was change RC_DEVICE_TARBALL to "yes" in /etc/conf.d/rc.

Does the update to Gnome 2.12 mean that I'm no longer running a "pure" udev system? I dunno, but I'm sure glad that keeping the /dev tarballs works. It's a pain to have run /sbin/NVmakedevices.sh after every boot just to use X. I do miss wpa_supplicant, but I don't really need it for a WEP network; wireless-tools works just as well (and a little faster.)

Oh, and the update to dbus brought its share of troubles, as all dbus updates do. The ebuild ought to print out some einfo message like "Remember to run revdep-rebuild -p after emerging". Never once has a dbus update not needed that! Yes, I know it's mentioned in the Gnome 2.12 upgrade guide, but it really should be elsewhere too.

BTW, it's taken a solid half hour (!!) to type this entry and post it, because recompiling k3b (courtesy revdep-rebuild) on this machine is a b**** and slows down keyboard input. It takes 1-3 minutes to see a paragraph finally appear after typing it. Sigh.

Oh, and in non-Gentoo-related news, this morning I went with my fiancee to pick out my wedding band. She'll pick it up on Friday, but of course I won't get to see it until the end of July. :)

We're (at least I'm) going crazy trying to finish things up for the release. I was working a little too fast; accidentally committed the MIPS networked handbooks to /draft/2006.0/. Fortunately, this mistake was noticed and fox2mike fixed it. >_<. So I've slowed down a bit and made sure I'm triple-checking things a little slower, so I don't repeat the same error.

Other than that, I did a complete rewrite of the existing x86 networkless handbook. My intent is that it will be arch-neutral for future releases, so it can be used by as many other arches as possible without needing to alter much, if any of the content. This was actually faster to do than chopping out and piecing together large chunks of the existing handbook.

It still needs to be fleshed out in places, but the help screens on the x86 media itself are quite comprehensive, so I had to avoid duplicating that info. The end result (so far) is a ~450 line, 14-section document. I'll have to see how this turns out. In the mean time, back to work!

On February 10th, I was accepted as a Gentoo developer. Look for me doing lots of helpful things for the GDP.

Many thanks to kloeri for patience and setting me up behind the scenes, and for fielding a lot of newbie questions about being a dev, and all that. And to dsd for creating this awesome planet.g.o space for me. And, of course, to fox2mike, my highly esteemed mentor. :)

Thanks to ALL the devs on #gentoo-doc for helping me get here; every one of you has been a mentor to me in some way. It's been quite a journey since May 2005 when I first discovered this realm called "IRC" and signed on to #-doc to see what interesting things were happening.

It'll be a fun time, especially with 2006.0 approaching. I'm already extremely busy patching docs, fixing bugs, and so on. Did I mention I love being able to do my own bugfixes and commits? I really enjoy rapid problem solving.

Here's to many more patches, fixes, and commits in the future. It's great to be aboard!