Josh Saddler

Hey DistroWatch Weekly, why don't you get your facts straight before coming up with "articles" that don't even deserve the name. It's a shame, too; I've never really seen DW spread such FUD before.

Scroll down to comment #70 on the above link for my measured response. Also, I see that solar and antarus have posted comments too, #20 & #67.

But can it run Linux?

First, the good news:

Awhile back I ranted about the shortcomings of my iRiver T30 mp3 player. Today, I fixed it. I did a nice bit of firmware hacking and whipped a borrowed laptop with Windows into submission (who knew that merely upgrading to WMP 10 would change the way hardware detection works? madness, I tell you!)

I now possess an mp3 player that works perfectly in linux, though transfer rates are abominable. I suspect that's more due to USB 1.1 speeds than lack of DMA. The player itself sports a rather cumbersome interface, but with time it will be more familiar. I'm somewhat disappointed that playlists don't work yet, but I can at least drag'n'drop files en masse and listen to them sequentially.

* * *

On to the weightier matter:

Gentoo Linux is bleeding. In the last two to three months, many good, hardworking devs who've been with us quite a while have retired. ferringb, cshields, halc0n, chriswhite, just to name a few. People whom I greatly respect and have thoroughly enjoyed talking with and working with.

Seems there's a new retiree every other day, if not every day.

This has got to stop. It's already really apparent that there's something wrong. I don't doubt that all the threads on -dev and -core show that we're aware of it, but we seriously need to get down to business and do something about our work environment and culture. We can't afford to lose any more leads, or guys who pull a substantial load. I commented on chriswhite's retirement announcement that it seems like Gentoo is bleeding out -- rapidly.

What can we do to fix our developer community? How can we communicate better? It's no secret that there are still hurt feelings, bitterness, and frustration on all sides. It's pretty plain that this has happened in the wake of the first major shakeup slash departure, ciaranm. Since then things have gone downhill, though it seemed such an event should have been a chance to regroup and move forward. Proposals regarding portage, alternative package managers, GLEPs, new projects, etc. don't really seem to be stemming the tide. I'm worried for the rest of the devs and for the users.

Most of the devs have acknowledged the problems, but now we have to keep working. Pull together. Stop working at cross-purposes, and focus solely on the existing tree/infrastructure/ebuilds/relations. Focus on what really matters -- whatever that may be. Sure, we all have lots of things on our plate, outside projects, internal projects, lots of things that need attention, and not enough time nor hands to deal with them. But somehow we've got to try, and we've got to improve our relationships with each other. Reputations of projects and of individual devs have suffered enough; maybe we should start over, look at each other and our capabilities in a new light.

Yeah, very hippyish, I know. I'm grasping at anything that might be a solution. I don't want to see our users and developers suffer any longer. Gentoo as a whole is in jeopardy (as alarmist as that might sound), so it's time to prevent the situation from deteriorating any further. I hope that not too long from now, I'll be able to look back on these words and see that I'm overreacting, that my thoughts are more negative than the situation warrants. I truly hope so. I know we still have many fine members of the team cranking out quality contributions daily.

There's something good that can be said about every single active dev (no, really, even if you have to look for it ), so I'm not extremely worried yet. Anyone who watches the commits and actions of devs like flameeyes, brix, tsunam, antarus, jakub, kloeri, josejx, the translation teams, and many more can see that good things are happening in Gentoo all the time. Those are just a few of the guys making Gentoo better now and in the future, spend more time on IRC to see what I mean.

Thanks to all the devs so far, both current and retired. Gentoo is still here so far, and I'd like to see us continue far into the future. Fight the good fight.

I don't care how much it costs, I have to get me one of these! I have a love/hate relationship with Shuttle, mostly because once you buy the system, you can never upgrade the motherboard or psu, and you're stuck with the given chassis, so overall you have a computer that's much less flexible than a true micro-ATX box.

But . . . this looks like everything I've wanted in my next system. Small. Powerful. Aesthetically pleasing. Just keep it quiet (and cool) and give me wireless capability. Amazingly enough, it jumps the usual 2GB RAM limit in all other Shuttles and goes straight to 8GB, making it competitive with any other full ATX system on the market. And you can stuff it with three internal drives. Yowza. That's a lot of compiling space for Gentoo.

Speaking of which, I ran into an article on enabling suspend & hibernation in your laptop on linux.com. Now, I've owned my laptop for 5 years, and in all that time, there's only two things I haven't tried to make it do under linux. One is getting TV-out working on the built-in nVidia GeForce2Go, but that's it's own well-known issue. Haven't had a need for hooking it up to an external display in a few years.

Second, I've never tried out suspend or hibernation. I suppose those would result in faster boot times, but again, I've no need. I always turn off the laptop unless it's doing some serious overnight compiling. This laptop isn't mobile any longer, as battery life is about 4-5 minutes. ACPI works intermittently. Even with automatic CPU scaling enabled in my kernel, sometimes Gentoo spins down the fan, sometimes uses SpeedStep to conserve power, sometimes it doesn't. When it does work, it often takes an hour or so of idling before anything happens. Too bad. Back when I first installed with 2004.3, ACPI/APM worked just great, somehow Linux was able to detect when I wasn't putting any sort of workload on the machine and turned down the fan, turned off the screen, etc.

Not so much the case now. I can get a screensaver to turn on, but the only way the screen is powered off entirely is if I'm on a console and not in an X window. But if I have hibernation totally working, I wouldn't need to fiddle with screensaver settings to save power & idling time. I just might give that article a try. The author created his script for a Gentoo system, so it should theoretically work for me, too, right?

Then again, maybe I should just make sure ACPI works reliably first.