Distros
Gentoo Monthly Newsletter -- 30 September 2008
The September issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: EAPI-2 approved, Gentoo-Quebec training, learn to use iotop, and more!
New release strategy to provide more current install media
In future releases, Gentoo will focus on a more back-to-basics approach that will give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis and make much better use of our human resources. We're looking into automated weekly builds of the minimal CDs and stage tarballs as well as maybe an annual LiveCD release. We will keep you updated as we decide on the details of this new approach.
Consequently, we're canceling the 2008.1 release. The release engineering team has to reconsider its priorities—we overstretched our human resources during the prolonged 2008.0 release process. This caused too much stress for our release engineers and multiple postponements of the release.
You can help! The release engineering team is looking for new volunteers because it perpetually has a severe lack of manpower. We are particularly looking for people with a good grasp of ebuild development and the ability to debug/fix problems that crop up during building and testing of the stage tarballs and ISO images. We will update the staffing needs page with more details.
Ben de Groot contributed the draft for this announcement.
Get involved: Bugday coming up Saturday
What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs
Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs
When: Saturday, September 6, in a timezone near you
What do you need to bring?
- A Gentoo system, an Internet connection and an IRC client
- Your bug. If you don't have one, we will find you one to suit your area of interest and your skills
- Your favorite editor
- A way to test that your bug is fixed (asking people counts!)
- You don't need to know C, C++, or bash
What's a bug? Gentoo's way of tracking change requests. A change request can be anything from "I've found a typo in foo" to "I've built this really useful program called bar but there's no ebuild for it." Bugs have various levels of helpfulness, from identifying the existence of a problem to localizing the problem to providing the patch to fix it.
There are bugs in documentation such as man pages as well as ebuilds and the source code that Gentoo distributes. These bugs are problem reports. Bugs for things Gentoo doesn't do yet but you think should be done are feature requests. Bugday is more about fixing problems than adding features, but you won't be turned away if you want help with a new feature.
Want to know more about Bugday? It's held on the first Saturday of every month. It's an opportunity for everyone to contribute to making Gentoo better, and eventually you might even become a Gentoo developer. See the Bugday project page for more details.
Bugday is about community spirit. Gentoo is a community—there is no "me" and "them", there is only "we," so instead of lobbying for "them" to fix your particular bug, work together to fix it! Bugday is an opportunity to get help to help yourself.
If you've been wanting to get involved but weren't sure how, Bugday is a great way for you to see what goes on in making a distribution and get involved in Gentoo.
Roy Bamford contributed the draft for this announcement.
Gentoo Monthly Newsletter -- 31 August 2008
The August issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: PHP4 removal, GSOC interview, new Gentoo-based distributions, and more!
Gentoo Monthly Newsletter -- 28 July 2008
The July issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: 2008.0 release, Gentoo at Peel Fresco Music Lounge and more!
2008.0-r1 may help if you've had LiveCD problems
For those unfortunate souls who couldn't boot or burn the LiveCD, we've provided the 2008.0-r1 revision bump. It fixes these specific problems:
- Bug #230998: 2008.0 LiveCD for x86/amd64 messes up when copying kernel/initramfs into tmpfs
- Bug #231024: LiveCD AMD64 image does not fit on ordinary 700MB CD
We apologize if you encountered one of these problems. We fixed them as quickly as we could after hearing about them. Get the new 2008.0-r1 revision from our "Get Gentoo!" page.
Gentoo Linux 2008.0 released
The 2008.0 final release is out! Code-named "It's got what plants crave," this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD. LiveDVDs are not available for x86 or amd64, although they may become available in the future. The 2008.0 release also includes updated versions of many packages already available in your ebuild tree.
- Updated installer: The installer now only performs networkless installations using the packages and ebuild tree on the LiveCD. It also contains numerous fixes for extended and logical partitions.
- Improved hardware support: Moving to the 2.6.24 kernel added many new drivers for hardware released since the 2007.0 release.
- Complete rework of profiles: Restructuring profiles allowed significant cleanup of redundancies, reducing developer maintenance and confusion. The difference for you is that profiles now appear in /usr/portage/profiles/ under default/linux/ instead of default-linux/. See the upgrading guide for more details.
- Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD: To save space, the LiveCDs switched to the smaller Xfce environment. This means that a binary installation using the LiveCD will install Xfce, but you're still free to build GNOME or KDE from source.
- No LiveDVDs on x86 or amd64: In the interest of getting the release out, the release engineering team decided to postpone LiveDVDs because of problems in their generation. They may show up later—if so, we'll let you know.
- Updated packages: Highlights of the 2008.0 release include Portage 2.1.4.4, a 2.6.24 kernel, Xfce 4.4.2, gcc 4.1.2 and glibc 2.6.1.
A big thanks goes out to our release engineering team members for their hard work over many months to turn 2008.0 into reality.
Get the new release from our "Get Gentoo!" page.
New council elected
Elections just ended for the Gentoo council for the next year. Turnout was 57% with 145 developers voting, which is quite excellent. The council, created by GLEP 39 to replace Gentoo's previous hierarchy, decides on global issues and policies that affect multiple projects. To select council members, Gentoo uses the Condorcet voting method, which involves ranking them in order rather than just picking a single candidate. Here are your new council members, listed by ranking in the election results:
All of the previous council members who ran again were re-elected, and the two new members are Mark Loeser and Tobias Scherbaum. A full list of ranked candidates is also available. These graphs illustrate the results more clearly. They are histograms, where higher columns on the left side indicate high rankings, and higher columns on the right side indicate low rankings.
The new council members will get right to work—the new council's first meeting, scheduled for July 10, is approaching fast.
Get involved: Bugday coming up Saturday
What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs
Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs
When: Saturday, July 5, in a timezone near you
What do you need to bring?
- A Gentoo system, an Internet connection and an IRC client
- Your bug. If you don't have one, we will find you one to suit your area of interest and your skills
- Your favorite editor
- A way to test that your bug is fixed (asking people counts!)
- You don't need to know C, C++, or bash
What's a bug? Gentoo's way of tracking change requests. A change request can be anything from "I've found a typo in foo" to "I've built this really useful program called bar but there's no ebuild for it." Bugs have various levels of helpfulness, from identifying the existence of a problem to localizing the problem to providing the patch to fix it.
There are bugs in documentation such as man pages as well as ebuilds and the source code that Gentoo distributes. These bugs are problem reports. Bugs for things Gentoo doesn't do yet but you think should be done are feature requests. Bugday is more about fixing problems than adding features, but you won't be turned away if you want help with a new feature.
Want to know more about Bugday? It's held on the first Saturday of every month. It's an opportunity for everyone to contribute to making Gentoo better, and eventually you might even become a Gentoo developer. See the Bugday project page for more details.
Bugday is about community spirit. Gentoo is a community—there is no "me" and "them", there is only "we," so instead of lobbying for "them" to fix your particular bug, work together to fix it! Bugday is an opportunity to get help to help yourself.
If you've been wanting to get involved but weren't sure how, Bugday is a great way for you to see what goes on in making a distribution and get involved in Gentoo.
Roy Bamford contributed the draft for this announcement.
Gentoo Monthly Newsletter -- 30 June 2008
The June issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: LinuxTag and FliSoL, GSOC interview, Gentoo in space, and more!
Sankarshan: Singularity
The Law of Singularity states that the most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness. What is a brand? A singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect. It’s as simple or as difficult as that.
The wonderful folks at FOSS.IN have a promotional video out. And, as Shreyas puts it - this year it is about doing ‘big’ things. This year, and, possibly for the coming years, it is about developers and development and doing things that are used by an ever growing section of folks.
If you still haven’t registered for the event, you haven’t really taken a look at the schedule.
Daniel Berrange: libvirt User Mode Linux driver and other new features
It has been a while since I reported on libvirt development news, but that doesn't mean we've been idle. The big news is the introduction of another new hypervisor driver in libvirt, this time for User Mode Linux. While Xen / KVM get all the press these days, UML has been quietly providing virtualization for Linux users for many years - until very recently nearly all Linux virtual server providers were deploying User Mode Linux guests. libvirt aims to be the universal management API for all virtualization technologies, and UML has no formal API of its own, so it is only natural that we provide a UML driver in libvirt. It is still at a fairly basic level of functionality, only supporting disks & paravirt consoles, but it is enough to get a guest booted & interact locally. The next step is adding networking support at which point it'll be genuinely useful. To recap, libvirt now has drivers for Xen, QEMU, KVM, OpenVZ, LXC (LinuX native Containers) and UML, as well as a test driver & RPC support.
In other news, a couple of developers at VirtualIron have recently contributed some major new features to libvirt. The first set of APIs provides the ability to register for lifecycle events against domains, allowing an application to be notified whenever a domain stops, starts, migrates, etc, rather than having to continually poll for status changes. This is implemented for KVM and Xen so far. The second huge set of APIs provide a way to query a host for details of all the hardware devices it has. This is a key building block to allow remote management tools to assign PCI/USB devices directly to guest VMs, and to more intelligently configure networking and storage. Think of it as a remotely accessible version of HAL. In fact, we use HAL as one of the backend implementations for the API, or as an alternative, the new DeviceKit service.
Paul Nasrat: puppetdoc goodness
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation
Marek Mahut: Linux distros’ homepage uptime
Interesting report from pingdom about uptime of Linux ditros’ homepage (but also Apple and Microsoft). I’m more than happy to see Fedora and Red Hat taking leading positions in this benchmark.
Steven Moix: NetBeans IDE 6.5
The final version of NetBeans 6.5 is out, you can grab it on http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html
It can be installed in your home directory on F9/10 without problems, it doesn’t taint your system in any way. You may wonder why I don’t use NetBeans 6.1 packaged in Fedora 10? I simply need the EE version with the GlassFish server.
MJ Ray: Social Enterprise Day: Online Discussion
I’m sceptical about Global Enterpreneurship Week after last year’s problems, but today is Social Enterprise Day, so I’ve tried to get involved with the WalesCoop Ethical Entrepreneurs Online Discussion from 1-2pm and 7-8pm today. Come join us!
Greg DeKoenigsberg: La Dolce Vita: chapter 3
"If you're writing a desktop app or desktop development platform of any sort, you should be reading Innovator's Dilemma and figuring out exactly what you're bringing to the table against web apps and the web app platform -- how are you going to stop yourself from being disrupted by them? If you can't answer that question, you might want to think twice before writing more desktop apps or another desktop platform.
That's an uncomfortable question for fans of Sugar. It should be.
I spent a lot of my time at Sugar Camp today asking people this question. "What is Sugar's defensible value add?" Invariably someone would say something about the excellent monitor or the battery life, and I would politely remind them that those were traits of the XO hardware, not of the Sugar software, and an awkward pause would ensue.
Ultimately, for most, it came down to three things: the journal, "kid-friendliness", and collaboration.
The journal is good. In the next release of Sugar, it will be even better. But it is not necessarily a game-changer, and GNOME is already exploring some of these ideas as well. The "kid-friendliness" is largely anecdotal; Sugar may be truly more "kid-friendly" than Windows, but it's not like there's a wealth of double-blind studies from which you can draw a rock-solid conclusion.
Which leaves collaboration. The White Whale.
When I was first telling the story of OLPC to anyone who would listen, long before the device even existed, the linchpin of the story was always the promise of "collaboration by default." The idea, in theory, was fantastic, and the talking points were compelling. "When a child wants to share a toy with another child," I would say, "does the child have to install a special toy module, or sign a license to play with the toy? Of course not. Activities should be as easy to share as a ball."
Easy to say. Hard to do.
Tuesday night was a late night of pointed disagreements. On Wednesday night, with a somewhat smaller crowd and a hell of a lot more beer, it feels like we made more progress. There a ton of barriers to doing collaboration well in the current OLPC networking model, and it has been devilishly difficult to simplify our assumptions to get to a handful of key use cases. But that's what I think we accomplished tonight.
To wit:
1. It would be great to guarantee collaboration between activities regardless of the network topology involved, but the simple fact is that such a guarantee is, if not impossible, at least impractical in any near-term timeframe. The mesh networking functionality of OLPC works, but it's fragile, and the demands placed on the mesh by collaborative activities are likely to impose too high a cost. (In other words: two kids play a collaborative game, take down the entire grid.) Therefore, we have determined that we will not worry about making activites collaborate over the mesh. (Best line of the night goes to Eben, relayed to me via Scott: "we could just give the kids cat-5 cables, paint them green, and call them "collaboration cables".)
2. "Collaboration" is a very loosely defined term. This is, frankly, to our advantage; it means that we can aim for fairly modest collaborations early on. For instance, "collaborating" in Firefox could, at first, be a simple as sharing URLs dynamically. See your friend running a browser, click on your friend's icon, and your browser launches with whatever URL your friend is viewing. To begin with, simple is best. Tomorrow we will work to identify the minimal set of activities that should have collaborative behaviors (like maybe the activities that were selected to ship with G1G1), and then we will attempt to identify some simple collaborative behaviors to implement for each of these activities. If we do things right, a usable collaboration API will fall out of this effort.
3. Effective collaboration is clearly on the critical path for Sugar. However, that doesn't mean that it's the most important work item for current OLPC deployments. There are hundreds of thousands of laptops in kids' hands, all around the world, and most of their problems are more pedestrian. It's OLPC's job to support those customers -- and for OLPC to be successful, they must put customer requirements first. Therefore, Sugar Labs now has the perfect opportunity to step up and take the lead in solving this problem. It's an ideal division of labor.
4. Many of the problems of XO mesh networking can be attributed to the immaturity of the 802.11s protocol that was chosen. It should be noted, however, that 802.11s is not the only mesh protocol in town. The OLSR project is doing some very interesting things. Giving up altogether on the idea of improving the mesh is probably premature, so we're going to try to get the OLSR folks in touch with the OLPC Developer Program folks, and see whether, in exchange for some laptops, the OLSR folks can work some magic.
Another 16-hour day, but a really productive one. I'll sleep well, I think.
Runa Sandvik: The IT Crowd season three
Yep, they are back. Starting tomorrow on Channel 4. Don’t miss it.
