Lars Weiler

About a month ago, roger55 asked in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for Release Testers for the upcoming 2006.1 release. The response was… not so good for PowerPC. Four persons responded, but only two of them have supported hardware. Sorry, but RS/6000 isn't officially supported by Gentoo, as I couldn't manage to create a bootable CD. And all machines of this series are quite differently. And although the PowerMac 7200 is Apple's first machine with PCI instead of NuBus, so Gentoo might work, but you will not really want to use Gentoo on that machine.

So, what do I need then?

I want testers for

• iBook G3/G4
• PowerBook Pismo/TiBook/AlBook
• iMac G3/G4
• eMac
• MacMini G4
• PowerMac G3/G4/SMP

What should the testers do?

• Start the InstallCD
• Do a usual stage3 installation and verify the steps in the handbook
• Do a usual GRP installation with the bin-packages provided and verify the steps in the handbook

When you want to help out, please contact roger55(at)gentoo.org. He will provide you links to our current testing material.

At the upcoming saturday, July 29th, there will be a Gentoo User Meeting again in Cologne. This time not in the area around, but really in Cologne!

It will take place in the CCC's Clubroom in Köln-Ehrenfeld, as several members of the CCC are also Gentoo users. So we just open the doors for everyone else who is interested in Gentoo.

Have a look at this forums post for more information.

…that's the title of the upcoming Chaos Computer Club Cologne project U23 for the youth with an age under 23.

This is the fourth time we host this project, but it's the first time for me that I took over the organisation. I'm very excited how many young people are interested in this project, and I'm even more excited about the number who will stay in the CCC afterwards :-)

So, if you are under the age of 23, interested in learning something more about how hackers work, and you are from the area around Cologne, make sure you have time on our exercise evenings and come on board!

PS: Of course, half of the tutors are using Gentoo as their default OS.

With kernel 2.6.16 several things changed in PowerPC-land. The kernel-maintainers decided to merge the ppc32 and ppc64 architectures into powerpc. That gave us some headaches, because a lot of the Makefiles changed as well.

Since March I had problems to build a kernel with an included initramfs for the Pegasos (because an external initramfs could not be loaded). In the past I used the target make zImage.initrd, but this failed now with genkernel. Today I finally found some time to look into that problem again, as I need a proper genkernel for release-building. I though I had to touch Makefiles and rewrite a couple of the kernel-build system... But in the end I could fix this problem with a simple two-liner-patch in genkernel, as only two pathes needed to be changed.

I tested the patch in Bug 141153 with the Pegasos at home and added the 2006.0-splashimage into the initrd. Now I have a nice bootsplash during the rare reboots :-)

The other result was a working test-CD for the upcoming 2006.1 release. Unfortunately I can't test the Apple-part, as I don't own a working Apple any more. So I have to rely on other devs or release-testers (we need more of them!). And testing with qemu isn't possible. It dies shortly after the kernel has been loaded...

Tomorrow, the CIPHER2 contest takes place again. This is a Capture-the-Flag like Challenges in Informatics: Programming, Hosting and ExploRing, organised by the university RWTH Aachen.

Last year I visited the team in Aachen with the fellow devs dertobi123, pYrania and bonsaikitten. We got a nice introduction to the game and I thought, one day I will take part as well.

But things changed and since March I'm mentoring a group of students in the subject "Computer- and Networksecurity" at my university of applied sciences in Krefeld. I told them about CIPHER and they founded a group that will enter the contest. And I'm their “manager”… Funny thing, that I never played myself in the CTF, but now I have my own group and facility for being a part of the whole match.

Now there is only the hope that we will not score last…

PS: Last year we had the idea of a Gentoo team. Probably next time we can form a Gentoo-CTF-team?

As I upgraded my Desktop (the PowerPC G4 Pegasos) and my Laptop (a P4m-based HP) to the gcc-4.1.1/glibc-2.4-toolchain last weekend, I still had to do the complete emerge -e world, so that all installed packages can make use of the upgrade.

The Pegasos began at Tuesday – and compiled until Saturday. With five breaks due to problems with the new toolchain. But it seems that we upgraded nearly every package to a version which work with the new toolchain on ppc. The system seems to be a little bit faster now, and genlop confirms that.

The rebuild on the Laptop was really horrible. It broke quite often and took even longer than on the Pegasos, although I have quite the same packages installed. I had to run emerge --resume --skipfirst for about 20 times. Seems that the x86-stable-tree isn't ready for gcc-4.1.1/glibc-2.4 yet. The other drawback of that laptop is it's damn small fan, which is noisy like a hurricane. It is like with dogs: the smaller they are, the louder they are barking. I had to sleep with earplugs so that I don't have to listen to that evil sound.

Before I started the rebuild I switched off X, just to save some of my worthy 512MB of RAM. It was a funny experiment, if I can live without X. I recognised that I could do most of my work, as I use a lot of terminal-applications. This includes muttng for e-mail, irssi for IRC, vim as editor, mpd with ncmpc for music, and as framebuffer-applications mplayer and fbida for video and images. Even watching TV with mplayer on DVB was possible. Unfortunately I can't call framebuffer-applications from screen, which I usually use on terminals, as I configured it in a way that it shows me some important system-information.

But wherefore I need X? Well, mostly for a nice webbrowser like firefox. You can handle Bugzilla with lynx, but not Wikipedia or 90% of other websites. One might say, that there is links2 with framebuffer support, but it isn't that usable. I really miss tabbing (I got used to it six years back with Galeon...).

Then I use some KDE/QT-applications which make my life easier. I don't use a calendar that often, usually I store dates in brain. But korganizer is quite handy for an overview (although I forget to note down dates quite often). Then I have akregator running for my news-subscriptions. And with the newest version in KDE-3.5.3 it is finally usable, as it can show the author of each article! I recognise that I use amarok quite often during the last months, but that's mostly for podcasts and tranferring them onto my music-player. Finally I use psi as a graphical web-application as I don't like centericq...

The last application wherefore I really need X, is a proper PDF-viewer. In the past I used xpdf on ppc and Acrobat Reader on x86. But the first is ugly and the second one really slow. So I'm glad that there is kpdf which is really usable now and has quite all features I need (like fullscreen-mode for presentations). Also it is a really fast PDF-viewer.

Sometimes I wish I could live without X. As it is faster and I better like the “mouse” with 104 keys than the one with three and a scrollwheel. It's nice to see all those shiny graphical applications for e-mails, IRC or editing files. I don't need them. I like my terminal (preferred urxvt in X) with screen, my mutt, irssi and vim open. Like in the old DOS days I started my computer-life with. Am I too old?