Josh Saddler

All right, so Gentoo Linux 2006.1 has been released. Man, I thought it was crazy when I came on board just in time to get plunged into writing handbooks and stuff for the last release....no, this was crazier!

Still, I assembled all the docs, wrote a bunch more stuff, and was assisted by the last efforts of the arch teams, releng guys, and of course some docs guys (rock!) among a few others, before they turned their stuff over to me.

So I got it all committed and pushed out. If you find any documentation problems, well, go ahead and blame me.

In the mean time, let the errata hunt begin. Of personal priority to me is to get the nvidia guide updates finished; I think I'll handle that tomorrow. I've been working for almost 14 straight hours on this stuff. (That's what happens when you get 1 hour and 15 minutes' notice that your docs are due...and why we need to have magic psychic powers of communication between the GDP and releng for knowing release times ). Though in fairness, releng's head had no way of knowing that the usual doc liaison wouldn't be available for this release.

Again, big thanks to everyone who helped out with the docs.

Now, go forth and have fun with them!

Today's Gentoo Quote of the Day goes to the man of the hour himself, Sven aka SwifT:

<@SwifT> nano's simple, vim's perfect

Followed immediately by:

<@nightmorph> it's very zen
<@SwifT> how about "you can suck my positive energy"
<@nightmorph> i think *that* should have been our release codename

As you may remember, awhile back I rightly blasted DistroWatch Weekly for failing to do proper investigative journalism. Well, they're sorta at it again; picking and choosing. This time, they picked Donnie's post, which, like tsunam's, is intelligently written. He's right when he points out that multi-week flame wars on the mailing lists are getting much more frequent, a fact I've alluded to in my own posts -- agreement here. (And, as I said then, it seems that devs in some projects are willing to be much more vocal and uncourteous in their dealings with others in the wake of ciaranm's retirement, which I still hold was one of the key things to kick off all the departures, fights, etc.)

Anyway, I should point out that most of the negative remarks seem to come from the strained relations between various ebuild teams and projects, as well as ongoing negative sentiment toward devrel and, increasingly, the council.

This is not so much the case in other projects, for example: GDP, infra, userrel, QA to a lesser degree, and a few others. Granted, much of Gentoo's concerns and efforts focus on maintaining the Portage tree, so of course there will naturally be more unease when someone else has the power to remove, modify, or otherwise play with software you use and like. (A recent example is the sound team's desire to kick out XMMS.)

Ebuild-related development has always seemed to be a prickly place, but it's important to remember that one area of Gentoo, even so prominent an area as the tree, does not necessarily reflect the health of the rest of the development community. There are several other projects whose members are pretty tightly integrated, work well together, and get things done in a reasonably stress-free environment. My own project, GDP, is a good example. It's smaller, though, and aside from releases, when we really have to work especially closely with releng and other projects, we don't often have to get mixed up in the affairs of the ebuild devs. Ebuild guys, the package maintainers, well, it's the nature of their work that they share elbow room with other projects. No wonder it can feel cramped, when you have to account for dependencies that belong to another herd, and so on.

Regardless of which project we're from, it seems to me that most of the developers prefer some sort of representation or voice -- some of us certainly have no compunctions about loudly and rudely raising objects. Still, I think that there is some place for democracy within Gentoo, especially to give voice and self-determination for non-ebuild/tree projects. Those kinds of projects really do tend to operate quite differently than package-focused teams, and hence need their own kind of government model.

Postscript: based on SeJo's comment, I thought I should add that I believe it's pretty easy to see the things that aren't right within Gentoo. However, I also believe it's equally easy to read about all the good things the projects and individual devs are accomplishing. Therefore, I think DistroWatch should include the positive things accomplished within the Gentoo community by devs and users alike. That's part of proper journalism -- report all sides of the story. Include good with the bad.

Last night's cooking experiment went handsomely. I finally got to make a recipe I created several months ago, and boy, is it good:

Southwest Chicken Casserole
Chicken breasts
4 oz. mild green chiles, diced
1 can condensed chicken soup
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 cup (at least) shredded cheese blend
3 8-inch tortillas, cut into 1-inch strips

Turned out to be a real treat, though it would have been easier if I'd cooked the chicken separately in a skillet before mixing everything and baking. Still, it was scrumptious. Definitely New Mexican-syle, since that's where my wife grew up. In NM, "real" cooking must be done with green chiles. Go ask drobbins about the workings of good New Mexican cooking.

* * *

In other news, I went back to using WPA on my laptop for the first time in about a year. I'm feeling quite comfortably secure now. It's really amazing. Back in the day, using WPA was really a pain, since it froze my computer on every shutdown, sometimes on startup too. Not so anymore; it worked out of the box on the first try. I haven't forgotten how to do a proper /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -- and now the drivers actually work with it. Hats off to brix, the old wireless dev who put in a lot of good work. And to UberLord, the new maintainer of all things wireless.

PS: Why is it that when I was using WEP, I didn't find any networks besides my own with iwlist, but now that I'm on WPA, I found an open network operating nearby? Just coincidence that the other one was never running? The plot thickens.

Okay, all you Linux (and Gentoo!) users. DesktopLinux.com has launched its annual survey, so head over there and answer a few questions about your distribution of choice, window manager, and a few common apps.

****it, ****it, ****it!!

My 5+ year-old laptop, an old Pentium3 Toshiba 2805-S603, is finally on its very last legs. We've been trying to watch Inside Man all evening, having received it for free from a Blockbuster raincheck. Unfortunately, my CD/DVD drive (the replacement drive from a coupla years ago) is dying.

Things are just too hot inside there. We're not even an hour into the movie, but we have to keep turning off the laptop and letting it cool for awhile just to watch a few more minutes.

Looks like I'll need to expedite my price shopping on NewEgg and other sites to get my computer here before this one dies entirely. At least the HDD should be good, though I'll have to figure out how to get data off it and onto the new box.

My new build will be Athlon 64 X2-based (I want no part of Core2Duo or Intel, thanks). I'd like it to be socket AM2 as well, but I'm having a terrible time finding microATX nForce500-series boards, and I'd prefer something small like the mATX formfactor, I may just have to go with socket 939. Last things to find are the monitor and an acceptable case. SPCR, and The Tech Report, Ars Technica, and AnandTech have been excellent information sources for the past few years; I've come to really rely on them for good product evaluations and recommendations.

So off to NewEgg & other online retailers I go. Actually, I may give in to my long-term secret PowerPC lust and find a used G5 off eBay somewhere. Yeah, yeah, I know, Athlon 64 X2 can top it in so many different ways, but . . . I admit it, I have Maclust. So there. I'd dual-boot OS X and Gentoo if I could. Problem is, even a used Mac of comparable power to an Athlon X2 4400-ish machine is more expensive, so budget constraints will probably force me to go with building the PC.

Oh, well. It's win-win for me; I'd be happy with a nifty bigendian arch, or something terrifically speedy like AMD64. Except for my trusty ol' Toshiba. A dead laptop is kinda lose-lose from its point of view.

In case you haven't heard, Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins has recently set up his own weblog. It's pretty. It's informative. Go read!

http://www.funtoo.org

** Official nightmorph stamp of approval **