Josh Saddler

New revision of night-sources now available. It adds a few tiny patches I wrote to allow you to optionally select a nifty Gentoo bootup logo, instead of Tux the penguin. A bit of branding to brighten your boot. Thanks to phreak for helping me with a few variable and eclass questions, as well as jakub for the src_unpack mojo (rather than src_install).

In other news, I've started to work on two new documents. The first is a framebuffer/fbsplash howto, which I'll be coordinating with spock. He expressed interest to me in getting something like this done, and I reciprocated. It certainly is something Gentoo could use an official document on; we only have a few hints scattered around the handbooks and on spock's devspace for working with framebuffers and splashutils.

The second is a document for the GDP: a guide on how to go about updating the handbooks and related docs for release. I figure this will be handy if I'm ever not around to do the updates for the new Gentoo releases. We really do need a "process document" with guidelines on what to do and when to do it, along with task checklists and other stuff on putting out a complete, polished, perfect release.

The framebuffer/fbsplash doc is still just an outline, while the handbook release doc needs to be sensibly ordered before I GuideXMLify it. I'm excited about both documents, though I think the first will be much harder to write, even though I'm going to try to offload as many of the technical details as I can to spock. No ETA on that doc, but I hope to have the draft GDP doc sent to the gentoo-doc list within a week or so. Fun!

So we grabbed my wife's sister earlier tonight and I took us all out to see "Rush Hour 3", a very funny movie by the way.

When we got back, we just left our car parked out on the street, instead of taking back our assigned spot elsewhere once my sister-in-law left.

A few hours later, the police knocked on our door -- a drunk driver totaled our car and lightly damaged 3 others, including his own. He's in jail, our car is completely destroyed. No one was hurt, and we seem to have retrieved our important stuff from the car too, minus some of my wife's teaching supplies.

And this is after I got severe whiplash 1.5 weeks ago from riding the rollercoaster, followed by a viral + bacterial infection in my left eye which I think I finally recovered from yesterday.

My wife says bad things happen in threes, so the car being totaled was the third. But, shall we not accept the bad along with the good from the Lord? He gives, and He takes. It is not for me to close my hands tightly around any blessing He gives. If He wants us to have something for a time, then I need to hold out open hands. When that time is up, I need to stay faithful and see what He gives next. When something is taken, it's because He has something planned for me next. I'm thankful that He has given us this situation -- I'm waiting to see what He does next and what He wants us to do next. I think it's teaching me that I can rely on Him for any need. My relationship with Him should be active participation. I want to learn more of Him, grow more in Him.

Wait and see.

Anyway, dealing with all the stuff may or may not cut back on time for Gentoo. We'll see. At least I had a nice smooth Gnome 2.18 upgrade earlier today. Hint: as leio and dang said, be sure to run revdep-rebuild -X for the expat upgrade. You'll need to run dispatch-conf after the whole merge anyway, as well as another revdep-rebuild just to make sure.

Announcing night-sources, for all your uvesafb and fbsplash needs. Yet another(?) custom kernel source. This one's lightweight, with minimal patches. A refreshing blend of spices, uvesafb, and other natural flavors. Serve hot or well-chilled. More information, sources, and instructions available on its homepage.

As usual, it's not an officially supported package. Don't bug any Gentoo or Linux kernel developers about it. That being said, it runs just fine on my machines. It's quite low-risk, which is just as well, considering it's not much more than a vanilla kernel with framebuffer-related patches. It's endearingly unpretentious.

Should be nicely usable on non-Gentoo distros as well. Get it if y'want it.

Relevant forum threads: night-sources announcement and the main uvesafb thread.