This was originally sent to the linux-kernel and driver-devel mailing lists. Based on some of the feedback I got, I figured I should post it here as well.

Here's a summary of the state of the drivers/staging/ tree, basically what will be coming in the 2.6.32 merge, and what the status of the different drivers are so far.

First off, drivers/staging/ is NOT a dumping ground for dead code. If no one steps up to maintain and work to get the code merged into the main portion of the kernel, the drivers will be removed.

As proof of that, the epl (Ethernet Power Link) driver will be removed in the .32 kernel, as no one is working on it, the upstream developers never respond to my emails, and no one seems to care about it.

The pata_rdc driver is also going to be removed, as there is a "better" one being merged through the libata tree for this hardware.

So, taking the drivers in chunks, here's some that have had active development on for the .32 release:

• rt* wireless drivers. Bart has done amazing work merging all of these together into something much better than they originally were. And even better, they still work! Great job Bart!

• rtl* wireless drivers. Again, Bart has been doing great work here.

• wlan-ng driver: a bit of work here, but this seems to be dropping off, with the loss of a test platform for the driver. Hopefully someone has a device around and can help out here.

• comedi drivers had only a bit of work done, lots more is needed here, let's not loose the fact that this is getting closer to a mergable shape.

• android drivers have had a bit of work done, but upstream seems to not care at all about what is going on here, as they are working to forward port their code to the 2.6.29! kernel. {sigh}. If this keeps up, the drivers will be dropped in the 2.6.32 kernel release. Note, Pavel has been adding some of the Dream hardware drivers, which are separate from the core Android drivers. I have no objection to those, but they should work to get merged to their "correct" places in the tree in another release or so.

• w35und driver. It's slowly being worked on.

• echo driver. This one is now in good enough shape to merge into the main kernel tree. I'll send out review patches soon for this.

• eth131x driver. Alan Cox is working on fixing up the issues in this driver. Hopefully it will get into mergable shape soon.

New drivers that will show up in the .32 kernel release:

• vt66* wireless drivers. These VIA drivers are being actively worked on to get into a much better shape. Nice job.

• new rt3090, and rtl8192e wireless drivers have been added and worked on cleaning up issues involved in them.

• hv (Microsoft Hyper-V) drivers. Over 200 patches make up the massive cleanup effort needed to just get this code into a semi-sane kernel coding style (someone owes me a bit bottle of rum for that work!) Unfortunately the Microsoft developers seem to have disappeared, and no one is answering my emails. If they do not show back up to claim this driver soon, it will be removed in the 2.6.33 release. So sad...

• quatech_usb2 driver. I don't know if it quite works, but someone is developing it, so I'm not complaining :)

• VME bus drivers. Yeah! They are progressing nicely.

• SEP and RAR drivers. Alan Cox has been working on cleaning these up a lot.

• IIO (Industrial I/O), these are new drivers that are being actively worked on.

• pohmelfs and dst. It seems that DST is dead, so I think I will remove it in .33. pohmelfs is under active development outside of the tree, and hopefully patches start moving in here to help out with keeping it up to date.

• cowloop. Yes, another COW driver! :) Seriously, this does things that DM can't do, so it might be useful. The upstream developer is interested in getting this merged properly, and is working on cleaning it up.

Drivers not being actively worked on:

• otus This is sitting here until a "real" wireless driver will be merged through the wireless tree. Hopefully that happens soon.

• agnx wireless driver. No one seems to care about it. If no one steps up soon, it will be removed in .33.

• altpciechdma Upstream developers seem to have disappeared. Again, if no one steps up, it will be removed in .33

• asus_oled This only needs minor cleanups to get merged properly into the main tree. If someone wants an easy project, this would be it.

• at76_usb wireless driver. Again, no one working on it, it will be dropped in .33.

• b3dfg I really do not think anyone cares about this. again, will be dropped if this is true in .33.

• cpc-usb After the initial flurry of development, everyone seems to have run away. Was it the fact that I hadn't showered in a few days? Again, will be removed if no one comes back. And I am wearing deodorant now...

• frontier A nice driver, again, should not be hard to get merged into the main tree, if someone wants an easy project...

• go7007 Ugh. Unless someone steps up now to take this over, it's going to be removed in .33. There is no hardware made with this anymore, and no specs around that I know of, and the code isn't the nicest in the world.

• heci A wonderful example of a company throwing code over the wall, watching it get rejected, and then running away as fast as possible, all the while yelling over their shoulder, "it's required on all new systems, you will love it!" We don't, it sucks, either fix it up, or I am removing it.

• line6 Another nice driver that should be simple to get merged. Please, if you are looking for something to do, this is it.

• me4000 and meilhaus They work on the same hardware, and they duplicate the existing COMEDI drivers. Someone thinks that custom userspace interfaces are fun and required. Turns out that being special and unique is not what to do here, use the COMEDI drivers instead. These will be removed. Heck, I'll go remove them for .32, there is no reason these should still be around, except to watch the RT guys squirm as they try to figure out the byzantine locking and build logic here (which certainly does count for something, cheap entertainment is always good.)

• mimio Another driver that should be simple to get merged. Someone just step up to do this please, there are users of this hardware out there.

• p9auth While it seemed like a good idea, I don't think that anyone actually uses this. It will be removed in .33 unless someone comes forward.

• panel Another one that should be simple to merge. Anyone?

• phison What? I thought I asked for this to be merged a while ago, sorry about that, no reason it should still be in staging anymore, it's just so small it slipped through the cracks...

• poch A long-suffering company is enduring the slowest developers in the world here. Hopefully the code will be replaced with a UIO driver, but testing the userspace side seems to be difficult and slow. I have to give Redrapids major credit for being patient here, they are being amazing.

• rspiusb A weird, very expensive camera, from a company that does not want to release the specs, and wants custom userspace interfaces. The code hasn't built since the 2.6.20 days. I'll go delete it now from .32, it doesn't deserve to live as no one cares about it, least of all, the original authors of the code :(

• slicoss and sxg These are being developed by a consulting company for the main producer of the chips. Yet they seem to have disappeared half-way through the job. Odd. Hopefully they come back soon.

• stlc45xx Another wireless driver that no one seems to care about. So sad. I guess no one will miss it when it goes away in .33.

• udlfb Video over USB, it doesn't get anymore whacked than that. This is still being developed but the developer doesn't like to do incremental updates for some odd reason. Hopefully he pops up again with an update. But for now, it is quite workable for a number of developers.

• usbip USB over IP. I guess if you ran video over IP to your USB device, that would be more whacked than just video over USB. This did get one big update during the .32 development cycle, hopefully the developer can come back again when they get some free time to continue working on it. Rumor has it that some major distros are starting to rely on this code, so it would be nice to get their help to get it working better...

That should cover all of the 600+ patches in the staging tree for the .32 kernel merge, and the existing drivers/staging/ tree. If I missed anything, please let me know.

Yesterday, I finally found the bug which prevented neatx from working on my system (thanks upstream for the debugging), so in your next portage sync, you'll find net-misc/neatx-0.3.1_p43 ready for your testing! If you don't need vnc/sound/printer tunneling or load-balancing, neatx is easier to set up than freenx and works great out-of-the-box. Thanks again to Mike Auty (ikelos) for his work on the ebuild.

Another work-in-progress for me these days is a source ebuild for chromium (open-source version of Google Chrome). A binary version (chromium-bin) has been available in portage for some time now (with amd64 support added recently), but source version ebuild had some problems. Now my current version (available in my overlay for the curious) has fixed most of them, including use of system libraries, makefiles use instead of scons, --as-needed support, ... So why is it not yet in portage? Well, for now the tarballs from upstream are not yet available, so you won't go past the fetch phase These should be available soon, once available you can expect chromium to quickly land in a portage tree near you.

By the way, if chromium crashes at startup for you (either binary or source version), they finally found the cause: you are probably using nvidia-drivers and nvidia opengl (via eselect opengl). However the libGL.so from nvidia overrides dlsym/dlopen (dynamic linker functions) with broken replacements, breaking applications relying on these functions! Chromium devs implemented a workaround, available for -bin in versions >=4.0.208.0_p25708, but expect some breakage in time-related functions. All the gory details are here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16800

And now to change a bit from technical talks, I wanted to say a big "thank you" to all of you Gentoo users who spend time filing bugreports, fixing, writing or rewriting ebuilds, debugging and finding the cause for all sorts of bugs (finding that some dynamic linkers break with specific video cards for example...), in short to all of you who work to make your distro a better one! And recently, a special thanks to Bernd Lommerzheim, who helps me a lot in proftpd maintenance, up to providing an entirely new ebuild for latest version, with lots of fixes and new features.

Nach so vielen Jahren mit dem alten Desing, gibt es jetzt endlich ein schönes Layout, dass den modernen Zeiten besser steht. Dante ist die Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX und widmet sich der Förderung rund um das Textsatzsystem TeX

Originally texmfind has been written by a Gentoo user to find out which TeX file (LaTeX, too) is available in which package so you can emerge the correct one. Unfortunately it has not been updated for TeXLive 2008 and so looses some functionality, although some entries are still valid. Now I forked the project and updated it. The ebuild 2008.1 is already available in testing. Check it out, a stabilisation should happen soon.

Nokia switched their Qt git master to version 4.7 recently, creating a new branch for 4.6.

They also created two new branches, master-stable and 4.6-stable. Commits pushed to those branches are tested in Nokia’s testing farms, ensuring that they’ll always build.

The Gentoo Qt team provides various live Qt ebuilds in our official overlay, qting-edge [1]. These ebuilds now include x11-libs/qt-*-4.6.9999, building code from the 4.6 Qt branch, as well as a new USE flag called stable-branch, available (and enabled by default) in 4.6.9999 and 4.9999. This USE flag enables/disables the use of the stable branches, allowing you to choose between last-minute code VS tested, known to compile code.

Either way, its bleeding edge!

If you need help, leave a comment or visit us @ Freenode IRC, #gentoo-kde

[1] to install qting-edge, make sure you have layman installed and configured, then run layman -a qting-edge.

I wish...

the justice system would actually promote, foster, and protect virtue instead of corruption; that the systems and safeguards the nation has in place would function based on the spirit of the law instead of the bureaucratic letter of the law; that our lives were not governed by the myth of meritocracy, but rather that those most deserving would obtain, instead of being shunned by a modus operandi desperately trying to placate the proprietors of wealth and subsequent power that they do not readily deserve; that we would eradicate not only the lexeme of "toleration," but also the surrounding mentality, and instead replace it with a disposition of love and understanding; that we as members of humanity could unanimously realise the tyranny of the "compete and conquer" mindset, replacing it with a "collaborate and coalesce" worldview; that we would sustain Carpenter's "Bless the Beasts and Children" notion, helping those incapable of promoting their own eudaemonia, and that when doing so, we were not falsely accused of wicked, despicable, and self-serving motives, especially by the hypocrites engaging in such deploration;

I wish...

...that this dreadfully painful contention which I'm currently enduring would result in, if nothing else, this beautiful child's recognition that somebody loves him above all else.

|:| Zach |:|

I found this very interesting article about Best Buy's training program. The RetailAccess program (sponsored by Intel) and the ExpertZone training program (sponsored by Microsoft) provide readings about the newly-released and upcoming technologies. Every employee at the tech bench (now called the Geek Squad) had to read these articles and take quizzes over their content in order to keep their jobs. Interestingly, a new article in ExpertZone compared Windows with Linux. However, instead of an objective comparison, Microsoft continued their trend of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) in a desperate attempt to maintain their market share. Some of the flat-out lies that they mentioned were 1) that Linux doesn't support cameras, or portable media devices very well, 2) that we don't have any way to play Windows-based games, and 3) that video chat isn't possible. There were many more, including my personal favourite that Linux is too difficult to learn.

Don't take my word for it though, check out the full article by Steven Vaugh-Nichols of Computer World, complete with screenshots of the "quizzes."

|:| Zach |:|

Ravelry is a knit and crochet community. In an interview with Tim Bray of ongoing,  their site engineer Casey Forbes says: “We have 7 servers running Gentoo Linux and virtualized into a total of 13 virtual servers with Xen.” On these servers they use nginx, HAProxy, Apache, MySQL, and of course Ruby on Rails (with Passenger). And how they use it!

We’ve got 430,000 registered users, in a month we’ll see 200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in a day.
We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That’s registered users only (doesn’t include the very few pages that are Google accessible) and does not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX.
Actual requests that hit Rails per day is 10 million.
900 new users sign up per day.
The forums are very active with about 50,000 new posts being written each day.

Thanks for sharing the details, it’s what keeps us developers running. At least those as vain as me.

August was without doubt one of the craziest months in the last few years. It started off with the normal "getting used to being a new Dad" type of stuff. Then as we were thinking about our upcoming trip to find a new house our car started acting funny. Long story short it was not good, and we made the decision to get a new one. We should have probably done that in the first place, hindsight is always a great thing...

So we had some fun and games as we picked out a new car, checked our already stretched summer finances and finally took delivery of a shiny Subaru Forester on Wednesday 5 August. It immediately produced some awful, loud static noise as we drove it home from the showroom. By Friday they had given us a courtesy car while they figured out what was wrong. Friday night they had it back to us with a new audio system installed.

Then we figured it would be great to catch up with Adam in Washington DC, and to iron out any further car bugs before our house hunting trip. So 8-9 August we stayed with Adam and checked out the Air and Space Museum. We also took William to the White House, and a few other touristy spots. He won't remember it, but he got to see the capital, along with lots of rockets, planes and satellites.

On Monday I went back into work, left a little early and William was making some strange noises. When we got home I felt his head, and it was really hot. As Louise was getting the thermometer William was sick for the first time ever - all over me. When I checked his temperature it was up at 39.8C, in excess of 103F (checked with two thermometers). This scared us so we rushed him to the children's hospital, as any nervous first time parent would.

As they were looking at him we started to realise that it might be quite serious. They ran a battery of tests, including urine and blood tests, cultures, X-rays, spinal fluid and constant vitals. They found a bacterial infection, I have never been so scared and stressed before. I found out that I am a very protective father, and was disheartened as more and more tests came in and we were admitted for an extended stay.

All of our friends were out of town at the time too, which made things more difficult. It turned out he had an E. Coli infection in his blood. We were lucky in some senses, the antibiotic they started him on as we were admitted was one of the best for the strain of E. Coli he had been infected with. His blood only showed bacteria in the first culture they took. Still, they were talking about 14 days on IV antibiotics using a central line as an inpatient.

Thankfully after talking with them they found an alternative oral antibiotic therapy that recent studies showed were just as effective. So he could come home on the Thursday evening. It was great to be home again, although very stressful to have William get so ill so quickly. I had never imagined he could get so ill so quickly, it reminded me off the waiting for them to tell us he was OK after he was born.

After that we tried to get back to life as normal. Until the end of the month when we had our big trip up to Clifton Park, NY to look for houses. Friday went very badly, we saw one house which was terrible and everything else we had lined up had been rented before we got into town. Saturday we saw another house before leaving for Boston - it was OK, but not really what we were looking for.

Saturday afternoon we drove over to Boston, MA to go to Jeff's wedding. It was great to have a break from looking at houses. We had a great time looking around Cambridge and Boston, the wedding was really nice and William managed to get lots of attention. Thanks for inviting us Jeff - it was a really nice day. William's first formal event. Before leaving on Sunday we visited the Harpoon brewery to sample some of their beers.

We found several new places listed on Sunday before leaving Boston, so we set up appointments for Monday. Monday was something of a three bears type of day. The first house we saw was close to work, but too small. The second house we saw was about the right size, good state of repair but a little expensive and too far from work. The third place we saw advertised as we were thinking about how to compromise, saw it at 6:30pm and it was just right.

So in the end we didn't have to extend our stay, found a nice place that is close to where I will work and Louise really likes it. We just had a 500 mile drive back home. That was pretty much August, I did manage to squeeze some time in for hacking on code, taking care of the cluster at work, and general work stuff. September we just need to do our first 500 mile interstate move. It should be relatively simple after an intercontinental move surely

Okay, I'm no longer cautiously optimistic about the N900.  I've officially crossed it off my list, and any claims that Nokians make about the N900 being an actual open source platform are patently false.

This reminded me of bug #176  opened in 2005 (yes, 4 years and 4.5 hardware iterations ago): The N900 still does not have native ogg support.  This means to me that Nokia deliberately removed that support.  They must have; all the underlying software (gstreamer, etc) has it by default.

If the N900 was, in fact, an open source project, ogg support would have been added by the community.  Heck, I looked at adding it myself back in the day.  But it's not there, therefore the N900 is not open source.   Oh well.  There's always the N910, that's sure to come out in 6 months.  Maybe Nokia will have gotten their act together by then.

Now a live ebuild for g-CTAN has been added to the tree as I now want some real life testing: Please go and emerge app-portage/g-ctan. g-CTAN is similar to g-cpan which creates an ebuild for packages from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). The usage is easy, just call the --help option to learn more after you emerged it. There are two posts by me, that explain some more details about it. There are still rough edges, but please don't hesitate to report bugs either over Gentoo Bugzilla, Launchpad or email. The one thing I still would like to solve is to filter out all packages from the listing that have not been updated since the release of TeXLive.

Oh, man, I just solved a problem that has been horribly hounding me *for a year now*, and I just had to write about it.

At work, we use Microsoft Exchange for our email, which doesn't really bother me that much.  I'm not the calendaring / scheduling / whatever fool that cares about all the advanced crap, I just want to be able to send and receive email.  I don't get a lot here at work, and I send less, but when I do it's always a painful experience.  The reason is because I haven't been able to get anything on my Linux desktop (I've been using Gentoo as my workstation OS for about 6 years now, all at different jobs, nyah!) to actually send mail out on the Exchange server, and I've tried everything.  I can get mail just fine using POP3 or IMAP, but no SMTP love.

Anyway, I won't go through what I tried to get working, because it didn't work, and who cares anyway.  What does work is using GMail to provide an external SMTP service.  Now, the problem I anticipated, and what it does, is it munges the From: email address to force it to your GMail account name.  I wanted it the email to look like me@workinghard.com though.  What I didn't know until today is you can set that up.

Just open up the GMail interface, click on the Settings link then the "Accounts and Import" tab.  There's a section labeled "Send mail as".  Just take it from there.  Add another account, and it will verify that you have access to the one you are wanting to send it from.  Then, when you setup your email client (Thunderbird, in my case) to send through gmail's SMTP server (smtp.gmail.com), and you send from me@workinghard.com, your From address will no longer be munged.  Success!

Oh man, I'm so glad I don't have to battle with Exchange any more.  Or the web interface.  Or my dedicated Windows box I use mostly for Outlook.  *wave of relief*

UPDATE: 4.3.1 is now unmasked for amd64/x86 and the masking issue has been fixed by jmbsvicetto, so we won’t have this issue again in the future! The post below is updated to reflect on it.

The first bugfix release for KDE 4.3, 4.3.1, is now available.

You can read about the improvements it brings here.

Ebuilds for KDE 4.3.1 are already available in gentoo for architectures amd64 and x86.

To upgrade from 4.3.0 you simply need to

emerge --sync
emerge -avDuN world

This should be a straightforward update for most people.

If you’re upgrading from an older KDE 4 version (or clean-installing KDE 4 on a stable system) you should keyword-unmask KDE 4.3 by following this post’s instructions. You’ll also find some troubleshooting hints there.

The ebuilds are hard.masked for all other architectures due to bug 280312.

As usual, if you have any issues, feel free to leave a comment or visit us @ IRC: freenode/#gentoo-kde

One thing I'm noticing a bit of confusion on in general online is what the docs or me mean when it says to install the ALSA sound card drivers as modules.  So, lemme clarify real quick.

There are two *places* to get the drivers from: either in the kernel, or from the alsa-driver package.  But, when using the kernel drivers, like many other drivers there, they can either be compiled in statically or loaded as modules as the computer is booting up.  So, there are actually two ways to install the drivers as modules, which could be a bit confusing.

So, a quick list:

1) In-kernel drivers (statically compiled)

2) In-kernel drivers (modules)

3) External drivers (alsa-driver package, modules)

The first two are the officially supported methods by the ALSA team, so I'll quickly focus on those two.  Now the, recommended way to do things is #2 -- select them as modules in the kernel and build them that way when you are setting up ALSA for the very first time.  Why?  Well, the answer is really that it gives you a lot more options.

Let's say, for instance, that you aren't sure which driver your card requires.  So, you flip on a few that look like it's the right one, and set them to be installed as modules.  Once they are there,  you can run alsaconf, which is a part of alsa-utils.  The alsaconf program will do the detective work for you by looking at the modules that are available on the system, and the cards that you have on your box, and then load the modules and update your module list so that they will load up the next time you boot your box as well.  Pretty simple, right?  It sure is a lot faster than compiling one driver in the kernel, rebooting, testing if that works, trying a separate one, rebooting, etc.

Another reason is that there may be some options you need to pass to your module.  This is rare, but it does happen.  If you are loading them as modules already, then it's just a simple tweak to do change the settings, again, without having to reboot and re-test everything.

So, that's the reason we recommend you load them as modules.  It's just gonna make life a bit easier the first time around, as you are trying to determine what you have.  Once you know what driver is required, you can always go back into the kernel and compile it in statically, and be done with it.  There's no reason to keep it as a module, unless you want to.

Finally, a quick note about the alsa-driver package.  It's often said that it is unmaintained, and the reason for that is because I, personally, am the only one who is keeping it on life support.  That is, I'm the maintainer, not the ALSA herd.  It's only in the tree as a convenience to people who need to use it for whatever reason.  Some of the reasons could be that you needed to see if the latest release from upstream is fixing some issues of yours, so you'd use the live ebuild.  Or, you may want to use an older kernel but still keep the newer version of ALSA.  Or whatever.  The problem, though, is that I don't have the technical skills to troubleshoot your issues if something goes wrong.  My solution every time is  pretty much going to shrug and say "Sorry, that sucks.  Try the live ebuild, or something else."  It's not that I don't want to help, it's that in this case, I can't.

Anyway, that's it ... I hope that clears up a few issues.  When I have time, I'll be revising the ALSA docs.  No idea when that'll be though.  Don't hold your breath.  In the meantime, if you have issues, my recommendation is to post on the Gentoo Forums in the Multimedia forum and ask for some help, or there's always bugzilla.  Chances are you'll get a response faster on the forums, though.  Good luck, and God speed.

I caught the news yesterday via Phoronix that a new version of ALSA libraries and utilties came out.  I went to go bump them in the portage tree, but Tony (chainsaw) already beat me to it.  Thanks, man!

Looking at the detailed changelog, there are a lot of updates for the *hda cards, which is just what the world needed.  I haven't ever had any problems with them myself, but they are the de facto chipset on desktop motherboards right now, and it's awesome to see support getting improved.  Hopefully it'll fix some of the countless issues Gentoo users are experiencing.

History

When I looked at the state of graphical IMAP e-mail clients several years ago, I was not really impressed. KMail from then-current KDE3 did not do a proper job for me (numerous IMAP bugs like its inability to work as about every other IMAP client when deleting messages, bug 26986 -- there were more issues than that, but years have left my memories washed out a bit), Thunderbird would crash for me every once a week, at least, and I just happened to like KDE applications more than Gnome stuff, so I did not spend much time looking at Evolution. Many MUAs looked like a classic generic e-mail clients designed with POP3 in mind with IMAP added late in the development cycle, while others supported wide range of IMAP features, yet lacked in the GUI part of the problem. In short, using none of these applications made me feel happy.

A programmer not feeling happy is a receipt for disaster. I was about to finish my high school, so I had plenty of time at hand. I was experimenting with Python, so that seemed like a natural implementation language, too. In the end, I started a project called trojita whose remnants could still be seen in an abandoned SVN repo.

Coding in Python was fun. I tried several different approaches to the design of my pet program, I was playing with technologies I had no experience with, I even showed my "IMAP library" at my final exam as an example of a project I made. It did not have much functionality, in fact, only the IMAP parser had been completed, but it was an educative experience nonetheless and I passed the exam.

After some time, however, I discovered Qt and C++ and felt in love. I joyfully returned to the realm of statically-typed languages and suddenly felt a lot better. I began porting my Python library to Qt/C++. It was not really a port, rather a first complete rewrite of my project. Anyway, it did not take long and the C++ version suddenly offered more functions than the old Python branch, with unit tests as a nice added bonus.

Qt's Interview architecture, the Model/View classes, seemed like a decent implementation of the MVC patter I was poking around to use. Several months have passed, and suddenly trojita was able to show a tree of mailboxes stored on a remote IMAP server, listing messages contained therein and showing message bodies. I choose to finish the program as a part of my bachelor's thesis, and ultimately, I succeeded.

The Code

So, in a few blogposts starting with this one I'm going to introduce a new Qt IMAP e-mail client to the world. I hope I will get some attention and folks looking at the code and trying to run the application. I'd love to get some feedback on program design, code quality and general usability as well.

The code is hosted at Gitorious, and a bachelor thesis about Trojitá (PDF) (mirror) which explains its design and compares it against several alternatives is available, too. Perhaps the most interesting part is Chapter 3 which describes the architecture of the application, and Chapter 4 in which I compare Trojitá to several other MUAs on the market. All information about Trojitá are also aggregated on Trojitá's homepage (any web designer listening? :) ). Here is the obligatory screenshot:

Trojitá's Features

Some highlights of Trojitá are:

• A pure Qt4 application with no additional dependencies
• Robust IMAP core implemented using Qt's Model-View framework
• Standards compliance is a design goal
• Support for bandwidth-saving mode aimed at mobile users with expensive connection
• IMAP over SSH -- instead of going over an SSL socket, the server could be accessed via SSH
• On-demand body part loading
• Offline IMAP support (you can access data you already have; there's no complete "offline mail access" yet, though)
• Safe dealing with HTML mail (actually more robust than Thunderbird's)

The thesis was completed several months ago. Since that time, I've removed the dependency on std::tr1::shared_ptr and switched to Qt's QSharedPointer which in turn requires Qt-4.5 or newer. There wasn't much more changes since then, as I enjoyed quite a long vacation, but I guess I can tell the development is getting faster again.

How to Use it

It's a fairly standard CMake setup:

git clone git://gitorious.org/trojita/trojita.git
cd trojita
mkdir _build
cd _build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
make -j4
./trojita

Please do join the #trojita channel on Freenode and tell me how you like this application. I'm open to any suggestions and would love to hear any feedback, too.

As you can see, this blog is a static HTML page, so you can't post any comments here. However, I'm eager to answer any questions sent to my mail, both via e-mail and in subsequent blog posts.

Oh, man.  Sucktitude.

From the PR, "This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters ... with Disney’s creative skills ..."  That's what worries me.

Makes sense, though.  I was actually surprised that Marvel wasn't bought out sooner by a big studio, considering that DC was purchased by Warner Bros. a while ago, who have, IMO, done a marvelous job of putting out really good content.

I would have expected them to go with Fox though (who produced the X-Men movies) instead of Disney.  Oh well.  Another interesting legacy is going to be flushed down the toilet.

Although, I wouldn't mind seeing a Mickey Mouse vs. Magneto game.

Markus Duft writes:

I'm preparing to conquer the world (again) . To achieve my goal, I have
prepared a new Gentoo Prefix on Windows Setup, and the according
documentation.

Video demonstrating the installation of Gentoo Prefix/Windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az1RR60s5n4

Grab the latest iso's from: http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/prefix/x86-interix/20090826/

Docs: http://dev.gentoo.org/~mduft/gpx-installation-20090820.pdf (also available on the DVD installer)

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I do enjoy my reading, even though it does come at a cost (which I do tend to complain about…). A number of my friends have suggested getting an eBook reader and getting my books in a digital format, which is quite often cheaper. There are a number of benefits to eBooks:

• Portability – Ever wanted to take your entire book collection on holiday with you? eBooks make it possible! (Okay, perhaps not quite depending on memory restrictions, but eBooks are definitely more portable than their paper counterparts).
• Searching – Obviously, with academic texts this can be a great boon, but I find it very rare that I attempt to search for a particular word or phrase in a novel of some form.
• Backlighting – To the best of my knowledge, modern e-Ink eBook readers do not have backlighting available, and so are only readable in the same conditions as regular paper. I could be wrong here, so please feel free to correct me!
• Price – If you’re going to quote monetary savings as a reason to get an eBook reader, I’m probably going to ignore you. eBooks are generally only £1-2 cheaper than their paper counterparts (in the UK, at least), and Amazon often offer bigger discounts on their real books.
• DRM – If you’re a publisher, this might be a good thing. But I think a lot of people would quite like to be able to lend books to their friends and family without having to worry about DRM restrictions and so on… Paper books are so easy to lend, you just hand the book on to someone else. How do you lend someone an eBook?

I can see why eBook readers would definitely be an ideal solution for reading and distributing academic texts, but I really can’t see the benefits (at this moment in time) over “real” books. I also quite like to be able to flick through books, jump back and forth, quickly refer to something on the previous page (without having to wait for the lengthy “refresh” on e-Ink eBook readers) and various other things like that…

Oh! One more thing! I love good cover art. I know I’m not supposed to, but I often do judge a book by its cover…

Amazon's Kindle is appropriately named, as to kindle means to "catch fire" or to "cause to start burning" (Wordnet 3.0, n.d.). The newest generation of Kindle products support the downloading of books without even having a computer connection, allowing the consumer to get a new book "anytime, anywhere" (Amazon.com: Kindle, 2009). At first glance, this type of technology seems to offer the consumer amazing freedom, flexibility, and opportunity. Coupled with this convenience, however, is the ability of Amazon to control what one reads, censor materials, violate a user's privacy, and even attempt to circumvent their own Terms of Service and renege on the customer's "non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use" (Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use, 2009).

In June and July of 2009, Amazon.com removed a few titles (including Rand's The Fountainhead, and Orwell's 1984) from their Kindle Store, citing a seemingly noble cause of attempting to protect the intellectual property of the publishers (Manjoo, 2009). Though this action may be a disappointment to consumers wishing to purchase the respective eBooks, the removal of these titles is not, in itself, unethical, illegal, or cause for any type of alarm. However, Amazon.com took their supposed pursuit of nobility a step further and wirelessly connected to their customers' Kindle devices and removed their already-purchased copies of said titles. Not only did this action break their Terms of Service mentioned above, but it also brought digital censorship to a daunting new level.

Before digital copies of books, physical copies could be sold without any method of recovery. To clarify, when one purchases a book from a store (assuming cash is used instead of a cheque or credit card), there is no method for the vendor to attain information about that individual's identity, including his or her whereabouts. This means that if the book is recalled, banned by a government, or goes out of print the publishers, vendors, and law enforcement authorities have no hope in retrieving previously-sold copies of the book without the individual's consent. Thus, the individual would have complete ownership of the copy, and could do with it what he or she wills. Further, this lack of circulation tracking means that it is very likely that a printed copy of a work will exist somewhere in the world, even after publication has ceased. With Amazon's ability to track, modify, and even remove titles from Kindle devices, this 'complete removal from circulation' security is no longer present. In theory, a book that is distributed solely in electronic form could be tracked and completely eradicated from existence! What seemed at first to be a lovely convenience can also be seen as a surveillance tactic and, worse yet, a totalitarian approach to censorship.

Fortunately, one has other choices than just Amazon's Kindle for an eReader, including the Sony PRS-600BC Touch Edition. This reader does not offer the user wireless downloads of books, and does require a computer to transfer the eBooks to the device. While at first this may seem like an inconvenience, it also promotes more security for the consumer's purchased property. To ensure that Sony cannot remove a purchased title requires a couple steps that might not be readily apparent. Firstly, one downloads the desired title from the internet, whether from Sony's official store, or from another vendor. Secondly, one disconnects the internet connection (either by putting the wired or wireless interface down, or by physically disconnecting the ethernet cable, router, or modem). Thirdly, one then transfers the title to the eBook reader device. In this fashion, the reader device is never connected to a medium (like the internet) which will allow for the manufacturer to modify or remove the previously-purchased content.

If one runs an operating system (e.g. Windows) on which the manufacturer can install proprietary software, then there is always the possibility that said software can run when the user connects the reader device to the computer. To circumvent such possibilities, one can either connect the reader device to a computer with an operating system that does not support the manufacturer's proprietary software (usually Linux will do the trick here), or better yet, one can boot into a live environment on CD, completely eliminating the chance of the software loading and subsequently running. Tutorials on using LiveCDs can be found all over the internet, and the process is quite simple.

Should Amazon be allowed to modify or delete a customer's content, or even have access to a listing of what one purchases? Is it their right as the distributor of the electronic titles, or are they violating the users' privacy, and encouraging a digital reenactment of the censorship that was book-burning in Hitler's Germany?

--N. Zachary

__________________
REFERENCES:

Amazon.com: Kindle: Amazon's Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation): Kindle Store (2009). Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Generation/dp/B00154JDAI/ref=amb_link_85181491_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1SRH81QG6XRTP3PPX092&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=489513211&pf_rd_i=507846.

Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use (2009). Retrieved August 30, 2009 from http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530.

Manjoo, F. (2009, July 20). Why 2024 will be like nineteen eighty-four: How Amazon's remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning's digital future. Slate. Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://www.slate.com/id/2223214/.

Wordnet 3.0 (n.d.). Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=kindle.

You may look at the title and wonder why I didn't post this topic under "Computers" or even the "Linux" subtopic. My reasoning is that this isn't really any type of discussion relating to computers, but rather just an image that I found to be priceless. Instead of just making their "server down for maintenance" page bland, they chose to use this image to sum it up. When I saw it, I thought that I was at Denny's getting ready to order by the "point-to-the-image" method.

Click for full size:


|:| Zach |:|

There's been a lot of chatter on the planets about the N900.  I have to admit, I've been very blah about Maemo for the past 6 months or so, despite having a 770 and a n810.   And it's related to why I'm not exceptionally exited about the n900.  I'll get to that.

You see, I was hugely excited about the 770.  It was a great little device, and I bought it as soon as it was available.  I skipped the n800, because it wasn't any improvement for my uses, and because I was pissed that Nokia had EOL'd my 770 after about a year.  But, I was seduced by the hardware keyboard, daylight-visible screen, and extreme prettiness of the n810 to ignore my misgiving about Nokia, and get one.  Again, early adopter.  And the n810 is a fabulous device: well made, very useful, etc.

However, I noticed trend.  Bugs for Maemo on the n810 got ignore, or closed "fixed in freemantle".   Features and development for the n810 (and n800) stopped. Everything added was not backwards compatible.  Barely a year into my n810 ownership, and Nokia was already quietly EOLing it.  Now, it sits in my car and acts as a GPS.

So, on to the n900.  The hardware looks awesome.  The software, ditto.  I'm extremely excited about it as a device.  But I can't bring myself to actually care about it, because twice now, Nokia has screwed me.  Come on guys:  for a $400 - $500 device, you have to support it longer than a year!  3-4 minimum!

So, I'm not excited about the n900.  I can't afford to be burned again.   I'll stick with my Android phones for now.

Hello all,

Yesterday (Thursday, 27 August 2009), David Abbott from LinuxCrazy, and Gentoo-PR interviewed me for his 62nd podcast. We discussed many aspects of Gentoo, including my involvement with the fora, documentation, project strengths, areas of concern, Openbox and LXDE, and more. This is a two-part podcast, and the first portion is an interview with Zachary (son of Gentoo user weirdedout) about one of his favourite Linux games, Warzone 2100. Thank you Zachary for your review of WZ2100!

If you would like to listen to the podcast, it is available in Ogg format (preferred), or in MP3. The Ogg format is available here on the Z-Issue, while the Ogg and MP3 versions are both available on LinuxCrazy.

OGG format of the podcast (please right-click and hit "save as" to download a copy)

If you don't want to listen to the podcast, there is a transcription of most of it (not verbatim, but hits many of the key points) on the Gentoo Fora.

Thanks for the interview David!

|:| Zach |:|

Hello all,

A friend of mine sent me this really funny video yesterday. For all of us "computer nerds," this should put some things in perspective.

Monk Tech Support:


If for some reason the embedded player above doesn't work for you, here's a link to it on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z84F1fHABw

|:| Zach |:|

All,

Many of you have, no doubt, learned of the recent loss to the Gentoo community. Known fondly as fmccor, Mr. Ferris E. McCormick's death was tragic and unexpected. His many contributions to the greater open source community will always be remembered as well as his generous friendship. It is in due honor to his life and good name that the Gentoo Foundation has donated a sum of $500 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The board of trustees believe that our donation is reflective of his wishes, given fmccor's professional life as a lawyer, and that this gift will further the movements he cared a great deal about, open source software and protecting our freedom.

The board would like to take this opportunity to encourage any and all individuals that personally knew fmccor or were benefiting from his life long contributions to donate, in kind and to the best of your ability, either to the EFF, the Gentoo Foundation, or another organization that you feel expresses these ideas.

In this podcast we have the two Zach's. The first Zach is one of weirdedout's twin boys, Zachary, and he will tell us about one of his favorite games, Warzone2100. The second Zach is Nathan Zachary, Gentoo Developer. Zach talks about ways users can get involved and the steps to become a Gentoo Staff member, full Gentoo Developer, and much more.

If you would prefer to read the interview;
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-5948487.html#5948487

LINKS:
Warzone2100
About Warzone2100
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warzone_2100
Warzone 2100 Open Source Project
http://wz2100.net/

Nathan Zachary
Gentoo Forums
http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=158400
Gentoo Developer Web Space
http://dev.gentoo.org/~nathanzachary/
The OpenBox Configuration HOWTO
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openbox.xml
The LXDE Configuration HOWTO Beta
http://dev.gentoo.org/~nathanzachary/documentation/lxde_1.0.xml
Bugzilla
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230279

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

I just wanted to make a quick note (nothing urgent at all) that I have updated my random quotes database with about 20 new quotations. I hope you enjoy them, and come back to visit often to see new ones.

|:| Zach |:|

Nemesis, my main fileserver/webserver/dhcp/etc. just bit the big one.  Bad, too: no response to the power button.  The power supply is probably okay, because several LEDs on the motherboard light up, but no fan spin, no HD spin up.

Yay.

So, I get to try to replace it.  Temporarily, I'm going to try to put the drives in my desktop (thanatos), and re-purpose it.  But that's not a long term solution, since I need thanatos to be my desktop.

One possibility is to buy a new desktop.  I'm planning on getting a new gaming machine when Diablo 3 comes out anyway, so maybe I should buy it early.  However, with no ETA for Diablo 3, I can get much more machine by waiting.  Then, too, I'm not done with Fallout 3, and the DLC isn't even out yet for the PS3, and I have to go back and finish InFamous at some point, so I probably won't have time for Diablo 3 any time soon anyway.  So buying a new desktop is probably out.

Another possibility is to just replace nemesis with the cheapest setup I can find.   That's certainly quick, and easy.  Another possibility, which I've been considering for a while, is to get a NAS.  Some of them are quite nice, and I'm too old to enjoy administering a box anymore.  I've also read some good things about some of them.  I guess some serious pricing of options is in order...

Of course, my decision may be made for me if something happened to the drives in the crash of nemesis.  There may be no point in trying to build a quick-and-easy replacement.  Time to find out I guess.

So I'm reading through my RSS feeds and stumble across this gem:

Ciaranm quoting something from the funtoo.org FAQ about how funtoo.org only works with Internet Explorer or something

So, like, I look at the Funtoo FAQ that is linked from that blog.
Read it.
Don't find any mention of Firefox
Do a fulltext search just in case

So now I'm wondering, wtf is happening?
Is this a fast edit from the funtoo people in under 30 minutes? I find that unlikely. Or is Ciaran hallucinating badly (as seen with PMS and other works of fiction) and needs to have his medication adjusted?

I'd guess it's the usual FUD, and most likely ignoring it would be the "right" thing to do, but if you catch a kid urinating in the pool you usually spank it in the hope of teaching it not to do it again.

I started a thread on the Gentoo Forums the other week, trying to get users to post what are common issues that they run into collectively. I'm hoping to see if I can find some patterns and either update the documentation or write a FAQ. If you have anything to share, please do.

And for the record, here is my first line of defense that I will tell anyone when they have no sound / wrong driver issues:

- Use latest ALSA (and kernel) in the tree. In this case, it's 1.0.20, and we've cleaned up a lot of crap that was causing issues.

- Compile everything sound-related in the kernel as a module. Yes, everything. No, not just the stuff that you *think* you can statically compile in --- *ev-e-ry-thing.* Once you've done that, run alsaconf. If your card doesn't show up, it's either completely unsupported (unlikely) or you didn't pick the right drivers. Go back in and flip on more stuff. As modules.

- If the correct drivers are loaded (aplay -L works), and you have no sound, then your mixer levels are probably wrong.

Apologies for coming across so heavy-handed, but that's the approach that has always worked for me, and works for most everyone when I tell them to do that: latest kernel, latest ALSA, everything as modules, alsaconf, then mixer.

Edit: Just as a postscript, the reason for the bluntness is that I recently started taking a more active role in the ALSA herd. Normally, I would just do version bumps and leave it at that. But, I'm trying to get practical issues resolved, and the one common thread I see over and over and over again on the forums and IRC is people just going off on their own little path and stabbing in the dark to see if they can get their sound to work, and then acting surprised that some random configuration didn't work.

I want to very much find both the source of this disinformation and correct it, and make sure that setting up sound is a really simple process. The *problem* though, is that it's always been pretty extremely easy for me, and so I am having a really difficult time understanding *why* people are hitting these issues -- hence, the reason for the forum post asking people why they are running into problems, and what thoughts and conclusions lead to that direction. Once I figure that out, then I can go back and tweak the docs to clarify situations and attack the common confusion.

I keep getting the idea that we could use a really simplified version of the ALSA doc, one that is a quick basic howto get setup for people with one soundcard, and then include examples using the most popular hardware out there right now (intel-hda). Then, have a separate doc for more advanced issues, for people who need help and information on alsa plugins, or have multiple sound cards and things like that. I think that lumping them together into one, as it is now, makes it hard for people who just want to get up and running.

So, apologies if it feels like I'm browbeating here, but the reality is that I'm really motivated to streamline the process of getting sound in Linux. Nothing but love, yo.

I think I stumbled upon Linux Mint on DistroWatch, upon this screnshot:

Somehow I wanted to see that wallpaper on my desk. Finally I found the image and put it up my desk:

It didn’t take long to where I wanted a version without the mint logo on it. The logo is nice but I don’t like to look at logos all day long. So I contacted the wallpaper’s author Zwopper who sent me a no-logo version in both green and blue in no time also allowed me to share it with you under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license here. As far as I understand they have not been published like that elsewhere before. Here they are.

Click the thumbnails for PNG downloads with 2560×1600 pixels size.

I'm currently in Scottland on a trip through the UK. I'm trying to get some contacts to the much more active environmental movement here. For those who don't know, the UK has probably the most active climate movement in the world. I just came from a gathering in the Lake District and now I want to visit a protest site against open cast coal mining in Mainshill.

Afterwards I'll visit the Climate Camp.

It's quite interesting to see discussions here. The main topics at the moment are the third runway at the heathrow airport (see e. g. Plane Stupid) and the building of a new coal plant in Kingsnorth (done by the german company e-on). I heared quotes like »we shouldn't wait till they build the new plant, they're burning coal every day in the existing ones«, which is a large difference compared to the discussion in germany.

Well… I’ve been busy getting the boxes into shape ready for new stagebuilds and a heap of other activities.

I have Firefox 3.5 going on mipsel… albeit a little shakey. I’ve got 99% of KDE 4.3 going also, again, a few glitches. I have turned my attention for the time being to the SGI machines here, since the kernels on all of them are out of date… and the userland is in a bit of a mess. Particularly on the Indy… which hasn’t been touched in a couple of years (e2fsck complained the disk wasn’t checked in over 1000 days).

The Indy (R4600SC) needs a new kernel, as its current one is too unstable to do anything useful. I remember kernel 2.6 being a royal bitch on this machine, hopefully things have improved. The IP28 is up and running… old kernel and userland, but it’s not quite as bad as the Indy… at least it’s stable. The O2 is similarly suffering an old kernel, but at least parts of its userland are in reasonable shape.

The two Fulongs are also getting an overhaul which is badly needed. The Yeeloong too, is undergoing further work to get things running.

Tonight, I managed to figure out battery monitoring within KDE 4.3… the trick was to unmask the apm USE-flag and re-merge hal with this feature enabled. Now the system displays the battery status as it should… if only I could get NetworkManager working properly, then everything would be sweet there.

I have a couple of tracker bugs relating to this work… bug 282264 is a tracking bug for KDE 4.x related tasks, and bug 282265 pertains to the changes needed for in-tree Lemote system support.

I intend to do a bit of work on both as I run between Brisbane and Laidley using the Yeeloong as a test platform, so hopefully we will have something for public release soon. In addition, I’ll be doing stagebuilds for the Gentoo/MIPS port generally, once my systems are back online.

Hi y'all,

If you're unsure what to do this (22. and 23. of August) weekend and you're accidentally near Bonn or Cologne in Germania ...

FROSCON is happening again. And Gentoo will have a presence there. So if you find the time, feel free to visit (and the 5Eur entrance fee are really worth it!) and meet us. This year we have a booth and a dev room where we can demonstrate out superior slacking skills (and, of course, the most awesome metadistribution ever!)

Experience from last years suggests a very nice, filled-with-fun, meeting of geeks, nerds and people that just like meeting other people. There's a nice program filled with interesting speeches and discussion rounds, lots 'o beer and quite likely some nice grilling or other kinds of food.
At the moment it looks like the weather will be good, so that'll make it even more fun. And if all that still doesn't convince you that you have to be there ... well ... then you don't deserve it anyway!

Hope to see y'all there,

Patrick the bonsaikitten

I'm still trying to decide where I wanna go with my media browser/frontend solution -- if I'm going to write my own or keep hacking on MythVideo. I only have one really nagging issue left now, and that is that the file structure presented is static once you enter the "Watch Videos" menu. I'd like it to be dynamic (that is, upon entering a new folder, check the contents again) so that I can add stuff like symlinks to series that I'm currently watching, or whatever. Doing that is pretty tricky.

I spent a few hours last night digging through the code, trying to find out exactly how the code is operating and what it's doing. What I learned was that, well Myth was doing exactly what I thought it was -- it builds a file list upon first entering, and then it doesn't examine it at all until you re-enter the video browser through the main myth menu. (I wish I had a decent screenshot about now, it's a bit confusing if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

There's a couple of problems with this approach, in my mind. First of all, the time it takes to actually load the mythvideo plugin grows in relation to how much media you have that it needs to parse. That is, it iterates over *every* single file that is in your media storage, and adds it to one variable. It's essentially like running find on your filesystem, saving it into one variable, and then when browsing, just using that snapshot that you took.

The simpler way, in my opinion, would be to just refresh the directory structure and metadata for the directory you are in. While I was poking at it, one thing I tried was to get the directory scan to not go more than one level deep. That reduced the startup time from about 8 seconds to less than one. Nice.

Ideally, I'd like to change it so it just updates the directory scan as it enters a new one, progressively growing the variable as you jump around the directory tree, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in the code (and if someone wants to help, that'd be awesome). MythVideo calls fetchVideos() only when first entering, and not anytime after that. The real problem is that it in turn calls about eight other levels of functions that eventually get to scanning the directory tree. I could probably hack it together to pass the current directory I'm in and update the directory scan from there, but again, I'm so limited in my C++ skills, at this point it's just code and guess. So, I can find and explain the problem, but not fix it myself.

Fortunately, it's a minor wish list item of mine, and so it's not a show stopper. I can live with not being able to do it, and it's probably just a matter of me learning how to code a bit more that I could figure it out. On the plus side, I'm learning more about the internals of the code, and each time I go in there, I find a few small inefficiencies that I can cleanup myself, which is fun. Making progress, I suppose.

Just a short comparison after the initial report: The shipped Debian takes 60 seconds till the Gnome desktop appears, while the LXDE of my Gentoo installation needs 40 seconds. Of course less features (or cruft) is available with the latter, so no real benchmark. Also Ubuntu has formed a team to do a port to the Loongson CPU.

The kernel provided by Lemote is 2.6.31-rc5 and I used the attached configuration to succcessfully built and run the kernel on my Loongson 2F-based Yeeloong netbook.

CONFIG_MIPS=y
CONFIG_MACH_LOONGSON=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SPARSEMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_LEMOTE_YEELOONG2F=y
CONFIG_CS5536=y
CONFIG_SYS_HAS_MACH_PROM_INIT_CMDLINE=y
CONFIG_CS5536_MFGPT=y
CONFIG_UCA_SIZE=0x400000
CONFIG_RWSEM_GENERIC_SPINLOCK=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_OPROFILE=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_FIND_NEXT_BIT=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_HWEIGHT=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CALIBRATE_DELAY=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_TIME=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CMOS_UPDATE=y
CONFIG_SCHED_OMIT_FRAME_POINTER=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_HARDIRQS_NO__DO_IRQ=y
CONFIG_DMA_NONCOHERENT=y
CONFIG_DMA_NEED_PCI_MAP_STATE=y
CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_SYS_HAS_EARLY_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_HOTPLUG_CPU=y
CONFIG_I8259=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_ISA_DMA=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_ISA_DMA_SUPPORT_BROKEN=y
CONFIG_CPU_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
CONFIG_IRQ_CPU=y
CONFIG_BOOT_ELF32=y
CONFIG_MIPS_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=5
CONFIG_CPU_LOONGSON2F=y
CONFIG_CPU_LOONGSON2=y
CONFIG_SYS_HAS_CPU_LOONGSON2F=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_32BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_64BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_CPU_SUPPORTS_32BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_CPU_SUPPORTS_64BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_64BIT=y
CONFIG_PAGE_SIZE_16KB=y
CONFIG_BOARD_SCACHE=y
CONFIG_MIPS_MT_DISABLED=y
CONFIG_CPU_HAS_WB=y
CONFIG_CPU_HAS_SYNC=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_HARDIRQS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_IRQ_PROBE=y
CONFIG_CPU_SUPPORTS_HIGHMEM=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_HIGHMEM=y
CONFIG_ARCH_FLATMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_ARCH_POPULATES_NODE_MAP=y
CONFIG_SELECT_MEMORY_MODEL=y
CONFIG_FLATMEM_MANUAL=y
CONFIG_FLATMEM=y
CONFIG_FLAT_NODE_MEM_MAP=y
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_STATIC=y
CONFIG_PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED=y
CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS=4
CONFIG_PHYS_ADDR_T_64BIT=y
CONFIG_ZONE_DMA_FLAG=0
CONFIG_VIRT_TO_BUS=y
CONFIG_HAVE_MLOCK=y
CONFIG_HAVE_MLOCKED_PAGE_BIT=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_MMAP_MIN_ADDR=4096
CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y
CONFIG_NO_HZ=y
CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS_BUILD=y
CONFIG_HZ_1024=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_ARBIT_HZ=y
CONFIG_HZ=1024
CONFIG_PREEMPT=y
CONFIG_SECCOMP=y
CONFIG_LOCKDEP_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_STACKTRACE_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_DEFCONFIG_LIST="/lib/modules/$UNAME_RELEASE/.config"
CONFIG_CONSTRUCTORS=y
CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL=y
CONFIG_BROKEN_ON_SMP=y
CONFIG_LOCK_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_INIT_ENV_ARG_LIMIT=32
CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="-fauli"
CONFIG_HAVE_KERNEL_GZIP=y
CONFIG_HAVE_KERNEL_BZIP2=y
CONFIG_HAVE_KERNEL_LZMA=y
CONFIG_KERNEL_LZMA=y
CONFIG_SWAP=y
CONFIG_SYSVIPC=y
CONFIG_SYSVIPC_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_POSIX_MQUEUE=y
CONFIG_POSIX_MQUEUE_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_BSD_PROCESS_ACCT=y
CONFIG_BSD_PROCESS_ACCT_V3=y
CONFIG_TREE_RCU=y
CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT=64
CONFIG_IKCONFIG=y
CONFIG_IKCONFIG_PROC=y
CONFIG_LOG_BUF_SHIFT=15
CONFIG_GROUP_SCHED=y
CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED=y
CONFIG_RT_GROUP_SCHED=y
CONFIG_USER_SCHED=y
CONFIG_CGROUPS=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_DEBUG=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_NS=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_FREEZER=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_DEVICE=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_CPUACCT=y
CONFIG_RESOURCE_COUNTERS=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP=y
CONFIG_MM_OWNER=y
CONFIG_RELAY=y
CONFIG_NAMESPACES=y
CONFIG_UTS_NS=y
CONFIG_IPC_NS=y
CONFIG_USER_NS=y
CONFIG_PID_NS=y
CONFIG_NET_NS=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE=""
CONFIG_RD_GZIP=y
CONFIG_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_ANON_INODES=y
CONFIG_EMBEDDED=y
CONFIG_SYSCTL_SYSCALL=y
CONFIG_KALLSYMS=y
CONFIG_HOTPLUG=y
CONFIG_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_BUG=y
CONFIG_ELF_CORE=y
CONFIG_PCSPKR_PLATFORM=y
CONFIG_BASE_FULL=y
CONFIG_FUTEX=y
CONFIG_EPOLL=y
CONFIG_SIGNALFD=y
CONFIG_TIMERFD=y
CONFIG_EVENTFD=y
CONFIG_SHMEM=y
CONFIG_AIO=y
CONFIG_VM_EVENT_COUNTERS=y
CONFIG_PCI_QUIRKS=y
CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK=y
CONFIG_SLUB=y
CONFIG_HAVE_OPROFILE=y
CONFIG_HAVE_SYSCALL_WRAPPERS=y
CONFIG_RT_MUTEXES=y
CONFIG_BASE_SMALL=0
CONFIG_MODULES=y
CONFIG_MODULE_FORCE_LOAD=y
CONFIG_MODULE_UNLOAD=y
CONFIG_MODULE_FORCE_UNLOAD=y
CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y
CONFIG_BLOCK=y
CONFIG_BLOCK_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_NOOP=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_CFQ=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_CFQ=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_IOSCHED="cfq"
CONFIG_FREEZER=y
CONFIG_HW_HAS_PCI=y
CONFIG_PCI=y
CONFIG_PCI_DOMAINS=y
CONFIG_ISA=y
CONFIG_MMU=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_ELF=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC=y
CONFIG_MIPS32_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_SYSVIPC_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_MIPS32_O32=y
CONFIG_MIPS32_N32=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_ELF32=y
CONFIG_ARCH_HIBERNATION_POSSIBLE=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SUSPEND_POSSIBLE=y
CONFIG_PM=y
CONFIG_PM_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_SUSPEND=y
CONFIG_SUSPEND_FREEZER=y
CONFIG_HIBERNATION_NVS=y
CONFIG_HIBERNATION=y
CONFIG_PM_STD_PARTITION="/dev/sda2"
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_TABLE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_ONDEMAND=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_POWERSAVE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND=y
CONFIG_LOONGSON2F_CPU_FREQ=y
CONFIG_NET=y
CONFIG_PACKET=y
CONFIG_PACKET_MMAP=y
CONFIG_UNIX=y
CONFIG_XFRM=y
CONFIG_XFRM_USER=y
CONFIG_XFRM_IPCOMP=y
CONFIG_NET_KEY=y
CONFIG_INET=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTICAST=y
CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER=y
CONFIG_ASK_IP_FIB_HASH=y
CONFIG_IP_FIB_HASH=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTIPLE_TABLES=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_INET_AH=y
CONFIG_INET_ESP=y
CONFIG_INET_IPCOMP=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_TUNNEL=y
CONFIG_INET_TUNNEL=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_MODE_TRANSPORT=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_MODE_TUNNEL=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_MODE_BEET=y
CONFIG_INET_LRO=y
CONFIG_INET_DIAG=y
CONFIG_INET_TCP_DIAG=y
CONFIG_TCP_CONG_CUBIC=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_TCP_CONG="cubic"
CONFIG_FIB_RULES=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS=y
CONFIG_CFG80211=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS_OLD_REGULATORY=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT_SYSFS=y
CONFIG_LIB80211=y
CONFIG_MAC80211=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_DEFAULT_PS=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_DEFAULT_PS_VALUE=1
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_PID=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_MINSTREL=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_DEFAULT_PID=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_DEFAULT="pid"
CONFIG_MAC80211_LEDS=y
CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH="/sbin/hotplug"
CONFIG_STANDALONE=y
CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD=y
CONFIG_FW_LOADER=m
CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE=""
CONFIG_CONNECTOR=y
CONFIG_PROC_EVENTS=y
CONFIG_PNP=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LOOP=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CRYPTOLOOP=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_COUNT=16
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_SIZE=8192
CONFIG_EEPROM_93CX6=y
CONFIG_HAVE_IDE=y
CONFIG_SCSI=y
CONFIG_SCSI_DMA=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=y
CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG=y
CONFIG_SCSI_WAIT_SCAN=m
CONFIG_ATA=y
CONFIG_ATA_SFF=y
CONFIG_PATA_AMD=y
CONFIG_NETDEVICES=y
CONFIG_NET_ETHERNET=y
CONFIG_MII=y
CONFIG_NET_PCI=y
CONFIG_8139TOO=y
CONFIG_8139TOO_PIO=y
CONFIG_8139TOO_TUNE_TWISTER=y
CONFIG_WLAN_80211=y
CONFIG_RTL8187B=y
CONFIG_INPUT=y
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV=y
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_SCREEN_X=1024
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_SCREEN_Y=768
CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV=y
CONFIG_INPUT_KEYBOARD=y
CONFIG_KEYBOARD_ATKBD=y
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSE=y
CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2=y
CONFIG_SERIO=y
CONFIG_SERIO_I8042=y
CONFIG_SERIO_LIBPS2=y
CONFIG_VT=y
CONFIG_CONSOLE_TRANSLATIONS=y
CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_HW_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_DEVKMEM=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_NONSTANDARD=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_PCI=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_PNP=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_NR_UARTS=16
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_RUNTIME_UARTS=4
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_EXTENDED=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_MANY_PORTS=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_FOURPORT=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_ACCENT=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_BOCA=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_EXAR_ST16C554=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_HUB6=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_SHARE_IRQ=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_RSA=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CORE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CORE_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTY_COUNT=16
CONFIG_HW_RANDOM=y
CONFIG_RTC=y
CONFIG_RAW_DRIVER=m
CONFIG_MAX_RAW_DEVS=256
CONFIG_DEVPORT=y
CONFIG_I2C=y
CONFIG_I2C_BOARDINFO=y
CONFIG_I2C_CHARDEV=y
CONFIG_I2C_HELPER_AUTO=y
CONFIG_HWMON=y
CONFIG_SENSORS_PCF8591=y
CONFIG_THERMAL=y
CONFIG_THERMAL_HWMON=y
CONFIG_SSB_POSSIBLE=y
CONFIG_FB=y
CONFIG_FIRMWARE_EDID=y
CONFIG_FB_CFB_FILLRECT=y
CONFIG_FB_CFB_COPYAREA=y
CONFIG_FB_CFB_IMAGEBLIT=y
CONFIG_FB_MODE_HELPERS=y
CONFIG_FB_SM7XX=y
CONFIG_FB_SM7XX_ACCEL=y
CONFIG_FB_SM7XX_DUALHEAD=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_LCD_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_GENERIC=y
CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE_ROTATION=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x8=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x16=y
CONFIG_LOGO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_CLUT224=y
CONFIG_SOUND=y
CONFIG_SND=y
CONFIG_SND_TIMER=y
CONFIG_SND_PCM=y
CONFIG_SND_HRTIMER=y
CONFIG_SND_VERBOSE_PROCFS=y
CONFIG_SND_VMASTER=y
CONFIG_SND_AC97_CODEC=y
CONFIG_SND_DRIVERS=y
CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE=y
CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE_DEFAULT=10
CONFIG_SND_PCI=y
CONFIG_SND_CS5535AUDIO=y
CONFIG_AC97_BUS=y
CONFIG_HID_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_HID=y
CONFIG_USB_HID=y
CONFIG_USB_HIDDEV=y
CONFIG_USB_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_HCD=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_OHCI=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_EHCI=y
CONFIG_USB=y
CONFIG_USB_ANNOUNCE_NEW_DEVICES=y
CONFIG_USB_DEVICEFS=y
CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND=y
CONFIG_USB_EHCI_HCD=y
CONFIG_USB_EHCI_ROOT_HUB_TT=y
CONFIG_USB_OHCI_HCD=m
CONFIG_USB_OHCI_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
CONFIG_USB_UHCI_HCD=m
CONFIG_USB_STORAGE=y
CONFIG_MMC=m
CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK=m
CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK_BOUNCE=y
CONFIG_NEW_LEDS=y
CONFIG_LEDS_TRIGGERS=y
CONFIG_LOONGSON_PLATFORM_DEVICES=y
CONFIG_EC_KB3310B=y
CONFIG_EXT2_FS=m
CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT3_DEFAULTS_TO_ORDERED=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_SECURITY=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_JBD=y
CONFIG_JBD2=y
CONFIG_FS_MBCACHE=y
CONFIG_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_FILE_LOCKING=y
CONFIG_FSNOTIFY=y
CONFIG_DNOTIFY=y
CONFIG_INOTIFY=y
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y
CONFIG_FAT_FS=m
CONFIG_VFAT_FS=m
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_CODEPAGE=437
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_IOCHARSET="utf8"
CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NTFS_RW=y
CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
CONFIG_PROC_KCORE=y
CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_PROC_PAGE_MONITOR=y
CONFIG_SYSFS=y
CONFIG_TMPFS=y
CONFIG_CONFIGFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NETWORK_FILESYSTEMS=y
CONFIG_CIFS=m
CONFIG_CIFS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_CIFS_POSIX=y
CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION=y
CONFIG_NLS=y
CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT="iso8859-1"
CONFIG_NLS_CODEPAGE_437=y
CONFIG_NLS_CODEPAGE_850=y
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_1=y
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_15=y
CONFIG_NLS_UTF8=y
CONFIG_TRACE_IRQFLAGS_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_FRAME_WARN=1024
CONFIG_TRACING_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_KGDB=y
CONFIG_CMDLINE=""
CONFIG_CRYPTO=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ALGAPI=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ALGAPI2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AEAD=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AEAD2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_BLKCIPHER=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_BLKCIPHER2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HASH=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HASH2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_RNG2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_PCOMP=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_MANAGER=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_MANAGER2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_WORKQUEUE=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AUTHENC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_CBC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ECB=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HMAC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_CRC32C=m
CONFIG_CRYPTO_MD5=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA1=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ARC4=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_DES=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_DEFLATE=y
CONFIG_BITREVERSE=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_FIND_LAST_BIT=y
CONFIG_CRC_CCITT=m
CONFIG_CRC16=y
CONFIG_CRC_ITU_T=m
CONFIG_CRC32=y
CONFIG_LIBCRC32C=m
CONFIG_ZLIB_INFLATE=y
CONFIG_ZLIB_DEFLATE=y
CONFIG_DECOMPRESS_GZIP=y
CONFIG_HAS_IOMEM=y
CONFIG_HAS_IOPORT=y
CONFIG_HAS_DMA=y
CONFIG_NLATTR=y

Every one of us dumb workhorses called architecture developers has its own way of scripting all the commands necessary to stabilise/test a package on its architecture, but I would like to describe how I do it, for the curious. The bug list of the architecture (x86 in my case) with all keywording and stabilisation requests is the starting point here.

Normally I install the packages in a chroot and I follow the never-uninstall-a-package policy to catch file collisions, while others keep the system lean to find missing dependencies (they probably use the buildpkg feature of Portage to keep compile times for dependencies down). To put all needed packages in the package.keywords file, I use the Gentoo Arch Testing Tool (app-portage/gatt) which does that automatically. Compile test includes up to three runs: With all USE flags enabled, then all disabled and then finally what make.conf and the profile defines. The last iteration is then tested, either by starting the program and using it for some time (games usually get a longer testing period) or by building packages that depend upon the package to be stabilised. I have a little script that extracts that information from the tinderbox' rindex and determines which package is in stable and needs to be rebuilt. Manual work includes a short glance if USE flags are needed to activate the support for that package. Installing as most depending packages as possible makes sure all reverse dependencies still build, this sometimes leads to other stabilisation requests or bug reports blocking the stabilisation of the initial package.

After everything went successfully I tell Gatt to create a script in the /tmp/ directory which is shared with my main system. From there I call that script which is quite capable and there is an extensive manual for it.

That's how your package hits stable on x86 usually. Big things like KDE or Gnome are handled differently, the script is shorter:

• Install it with the package list provided by the team (normally that's the case)
• Test it
• Keyword all packages and add ChangeLog entries (without commit)
• Run QA checks with repoman over the whole category
• Run commit with --force to disable QA checks to speed up process (it still takes hours for KDE)

My friend the reporter (who still has a job this week...) was visiting today, and we were talking about the newspaper industry, and how reporters everywhere are getting laid off.  In fact, my "home town" newspaper (the Ann Arbor News)  recently folded, fired their reporters, and became some kind of online monstrosity (named after my city with "dot com" on the end; I won't give them Google Juice by listing the name) that does nothing interesting with news, and dumps printed ads (not news or content, mind you, just ads) on my lawn all the time.  They're basically paper spammers... Anyway, we were talking, and it occurred to me that there is probably a fairly large set of out-of-work writers at the moment.  People with lots of skill, and love of writing.  What we need is a business model to take advantage of that to make everyone involved a bit of money.  What model should this be,  I wonder?Here's my idea: iTunes for ebooks, but done right.

See, ebook readers are becoming good right about now, and Kindle has shown that they can even become popular.  And people are buying iPhone and Android apps for a buck or two right and left.  What if we could come up with a way to get these writers to be able to write good content, and get that content to consumers, all at low enough overhead that you could charge a buck?  What I want is two things:  A community and a ratings system.  It works like this.

There's a community for writers, where they can collaborate on, edit, comment on, rate, and so on each other's work.  The community provides appropriate licenses (in collaboration with Creative Commons, probably), and hosting, and forums, and mailing lists, and all the snazzy web 2.0 things that fan-fic sites have.   The community also provides, and here's the important part, a store.

The store would support Kindle, Sony's reader, Plastic Logic's reader, at least one decent iPhone app, at least one decent Android app, at least one decent Pre app, and at least one decent blackberry app.  Probably a Windows Mobile app too, but that's a pain.  Buyers would be able to rate things, tag things, and link things.  Each book would link to the authors community page, so that people could follow and interact with their favorite authors.  Authors, subjects, tags, and so on, should have feeds that you can follow: blog-like, twitter like, and so on.  Integration with other services (such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and so on) would be a plus.Prices should be low; $.50 - $1.

The idea is to encourage people to buy.  Overhead should be low: 5-10%, maybe.  Some works could (and probably would) be given away, as teasers or other incentives.  There should be no DRM; it wouldn't help, and isn't really necessary.The point of the store/community should be convenience: get things for your device easily and cheaply, support people providing your content, and get good content our the deal.

The point of this whole thing is to make an opportunity out of the failure of the newspaper industry: we have a surplus of talented, professional, skilled writers, who need money.  We also have the beginnings of devices that make reading ebooks a good experience.  Let's put them together, and allow the fans to help pay for the works of the writers.

So I recently have been trying out the various different terminal based emails clients to see if any of them were suitable to my needs. Sadly I have to report that I have yet to find one that does everything I need of it.

The first client I tried was alpine. I have to say setting up the program and using it was really easy. Adding accounts was a snap and it was decently performing. Sorting into threads was a bit slow but I suspect that was gmails fault. However, alpine falls short in showing me if I have new emails in folders other than the main Inbox or the folder I have open. I didn’t find a quick at a glance type view listing all the folders and an unread count next to them. Bummer, I really need this. I can’t simply open every folder to check if there’s new mail as some of them are very large and take a long time to open. Alpine gets brownie points for being able to use vim as an editor by default, but looks like I need to keep looking.

The next client I tried was cone. Cone seemed very familiar to alpine and was slightly easier to set up and get going, but lacked as many configuration options that alpine had. I also have to say the colorscheme it chose on my urxvt terminal wasn’t exactly pleasing to the eye, but bearable. I was extremely pleased that cone’s folder list did list unread message counts and did almost everything I asked of it. I could even use vim in the place of leaf if I wanted. The wall I hit, however, is deal breaking. It’s not even particularly cone’s fault but from google’s refusal to follow IMAP standards. As such, I cannot mark emails as read when using cone on my gmail IMAP account. Shame, this is all that I found on the net about it. I figured if I could just get cone to fire off \Send when it should have been marked read by gmail anyway would work but I just can’t quite grasp the internals of cone. Sigh. I tried to hack cone’s sourcecode to implement sending UID STORE +FLAGS \Seen but couldn’t get it working. The functions weren’t documented and my knowledge of C was lacking so I was just clobbering things together. I gave up after it would open a message and simply segfault.

Next I attempted to try mutt. Mutt seems overly complicated for my needs and I don’t think it would play very nice with over 5 IMAP accounts. It’s configuration is a nightmare and I gave up after barely just getting one account functioning.

So for now I’m still using Claws-Mail which is the best graphical client I’ve tried so far. There are times when I don’t have access to a graphical display , however, and wanted a nice email client in a terminal which is why I started this search. Would also be handy as I could ssh in from anywhere and read email with a terminal email client.

Now that I’ve wasted half a day stabbing email clients I suppose I should start reading my unread email :/

Before the netbook-boom called 'mini notebook', Lemote now promotes it as netbook (what it really is). The specialty of that little thing is the hardware: Not an Intel Atom or some AMD CPU, but a 900Mhz Mips chip. Honestly, after my disaster with something ARM-based (NSLU2, it still is bricked and will never be revived I think), I wanted something more end-user friendly and the Lemote is just that. Equipped with a full-fledged desktop installation (the Debian mipsel variant) it allows installing Gentoo with few problems. Chrooting and installing the stage tarball from Zhang Le gets you off quite fast. The provided kernel did not boot, but Le gave me a newer one, which worked just fine after creating some missing device files (console, tty* and pty*, see man mknod). Meanwhile I have compiled my own kernel and the system just runs with LXDE...so finally a possibility to have the third Gtk-based destop installed. Gnome on sol (the big iron desktop), Xfce on the main lappy (called terra) and LXDE now on mars. Performance is good, for surfing and mailing it is more than sufficient, compile times are ok (even GNU Emacs runs), but the battery is way too small (1.5 hours only, but a peak of 14W consumption, while having 12W during normal surf sessions).

The Loongson processor seems to me as the future of the Gentoo Mips port. Supporting the old SGI machines is nice but they will eventually die out, while Lemote actively works on new machines and supports Linux as its main platform (they don't have any other choice apart from the BSDs anyway). Ordering is really simple: Either use Lemote directly (and handle all customs yourself), use KD85 (what I did, really pleasing experience, shipped from Belgium) or Tekmote from the Netherlands.

Zhang Le (r0bertz) and Stuart Longland (redhatter) wrote enough about the Loongson processor and the Gentoo support in various entries on their blogs, so I won't go into more details.