Lars Weiler

This evening I attended the meeting of the Linux User Group Oberhausen/Rheinland dertobi123 proposed in his blog two days ago in the already well known “Gasthof Harlos”, where we had a lot of Gentoo User Meetings during the last 3½ years. The topic for this meeting was “Introduction to Gentoo“.

I thought that somebody prepared some slides and give a talk about it, but it seems that there was some mis-communication Good that I downloaded amne's slides from his talk at the Chemnitzer Linuxtage some days ago (thanks for the link in the GWN!), which is based on a presentation by Sebastian, and later extended by dertobi123 and me. So I roughly knew the concept of the slides and could hold a quite spontaneous one-hour presentation about Gentoo. Yes, I like PowerPoint-Karaoke! (okay, I was cheating, as I already knew the topic ).

Beside one visitor (out of 13), everybody already uses Gentoo on at least one machine (this does not sound like a dying distribution). We discussed a bit about use-flags, the upcoming release, tweaking the system etc.

All in all it was a nice evening with meeting some of my Gentoo pals in the Ruhr area, especially nine-architecture-dev dertobi123 and our lovely forums admin ian.

EDIT: Blah, stupid blogengine for planet-gentoo. The link to dertobi's blog entry is an “Invalid URL”. Somebody should finetune the Antispam-filter!

Time passes so fast… Today is my fourth anniversary as a Gentoo developer. I'm using Gentoo on the PowerPC-platform since the 1.4-days in 2002, when I first heard about it. And as the PowerPC-installation was a big pain at that time, I helped out making it better and sent in some patches for ebuilds. After a very short time, Gerk made me a developer, so that I could commit the patches myself.

I think, it's time to sum up my activities within Gentoo:

• PowerPC

  • Starting with patches for Mac-on-Linux (which is now more or less in Gentoo's hand, as JoseJX adopted this project after more than one year of just laying around), I stabilised a lot of packages and worked on the installation instructions for the PowerPC documentation.

  • Later I helped out pvdabeel with the release, as he was short in time during his thesis-period; now I'm still the one who works on the release, but unfortunately with less time for the 2007.0-release.
  • I'm still the so-called Strategical Lead for Gentoo/PPC, but only as nobody else wants to do that job and that a Gentoo project needs such a position to fulfill the requirements for being an official project. This team really does not need both an operational and strategical lead. One position would be enough.
  • Genesi sponsored a Pegasos and an EFIKA. The Pegasos just built again the G4-release and I use it quite daily for testing PowerPC-packages, as this is my only strong PowerPC-machine left. I will spend more time with the EFIKA once I finished my diploma-thesis…

• Documentation/GWN

  • I helped out in the documentation team with translating into my native tongue. Some time later I became the leader of the German translation team and could bring the documentation into a good shape, but handed over this job to dertobi123 (who gave it to grahl last year).

  • Then I worked on some English documents and the XML/XSLT for the website generation. Mostly small tweaks for a better layout, but I added an XML-checker into CVS as some devs committed broken files and broke the whole webpage…
  • I made some contributions to the GWN and even assembled it completely for a couple of times in 2005 and 2006 when the GWN-editor plate was not available. But I did not want to do that job weekly and so I'm happy that wolf31o2 does it now.

  
  
• CVS and SVN server

  • Somehow our infrastructure-team learned in 2003 that I was working on a quite large CVS implementation during my part-time-job. And as there was no CVS maintainer for Gentoo I received access to the server and took care for it from then on. This is a job I still do, as it does not require much attention. It just works

  • In 2005 we added SubVersion for Gentoo own projects to this server. This was a quite hard job for me, as I was neither an SVN admin nor user, so I had to read quite a lot of the documentation. But trapni helped me a lot and in the end this is a service which also just runs and does not need much attention (beside the big server move we made two weeks ago).

  
  
• Förderverein Gentoo e.V. and Gentoo Foundation

  • In October 2003 I founded with six other (not yet) developers the German „Förderverein Gentoo e.V.“ (“Friends of Gentoo e.V.” ) which will be a juristic institution for Gentoo events in Germany, mostly for fairs. So not a single person has to sign a contract for a booth, but the “Verein” does it. I was the leader on the managing committee for two years, but gave up due to a lack of time. By the way, it was a hard fight with drobbins that he accepts the Verein as a kind of non-profit Gentoo event management organisation for Europe. It took us hours to explain him what a Verein is (there does not seem to be something comparable in the United States) and that we don't want to make money with it, or if, we will put it back into Gentoo either by sponsoring infrastructure or by donating money to the later founded Gentoo Foundation. It was that time, when seemant named us the “German Conspiracy”, a term which has been used quite often afterwards. Unfortunately there are not many activities by the Verein any more. But I'm willing to change that after my study and put the Verein back into a better shape then!

  • In May 2005 I have also been elected into the board of trustees of the Gentoo Foundation. My aim was to create a contract between the Foundation and the Verein for being the European subsidiary. But the Foundation was, although it was already one year old, still in a bad shape and even no 503(c) papers has been filled out nor a bank account has been created yet. And that did not happen during the year I was in the board. I must admit, it would be a little bit hard for me to create a bank account in the US So I was more or less inactive during my trustee time.

  
  
• Events

  • I manned or organised the Gentoo booth at a couple of events. Let me try to remember:

  • LinuxTag (Karlsruhe) June 2003, June 2004 and June 2005
  • Meeting at the Chaos Communication Camp (near Berlin) August 2003
  • A couple of Gentoo User Meetings in the Ruhr area (Oberhausen) and the Cologne area since autumn 2003
  • FOSDEM (Brussels) 2004, 2005 and 2007
  • Chemnitzer LinuxTage March 2004 and March 2005
  • Real-life PowerPC meeting in October 2004 (near Frankfurt/Main)
  • LinuxWorldExpo Germany October 2005 (Frankfurt/Main) and November 2006 (Cologne)
  • come2linux in Essen December 2005 and September 2006
  • Meeting and a part-time devroom at the 22C3 (Berlin, December 2005)

Four years of being a developer also means, that I'm with this distribution for more than half of its existence. Some younger devs already name me “Senior Dev” There are only about 30 other developers left from that time in 2003… During those years I already met about 80 former and still active devs personally during a couple of events and I still don't know eleven from our 37 German devs yet (carlo, frilled, kosmikus, opfer, phosphan, rbu (we missed at the 23C3), sirseoman, thoand, trapni, vorlon, zzam).

A couple of times I already thought about retiring, almost every time when the meta-discussions about Gentoo were too hot. But where should I have gone to? I like the community and there is only one other real community-distribution out there, but it has the same problems like Gentoo So I stayed and I will still stay even during hard times we currently have (see the other postings on Planet Gentoo). In the past I even tried to change something in Gentoo, but I'm tired of it now. I do my job with the ebuilds I maintain, help the PPC-team and being part of the infrastructure-team. This is what I can give back to the community.

Oh, and while seemant spoke about misusing powers in Gentoo, I must admit, I did it once which with adding a banner against the software patents in Europe on top of the Gentoo website after a discussion on our private mailing-list. klieber reverted that shortly after (with using his powers to the infrastructure). But it's with the hot oven and burning your fingers on it: you won't do it a second time. I know, that I can kill Gentoo completely with a simple command on our CVS-server, but why should I do something that evil to the operating system I like the most?