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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!
Donnie Berkholz speaks with LinuxCrazy
Developer Donnie Berkholz, who is a council member, the X maintainer and PR team lead, spoke with David Abbott of LinuxCrazy. Download the podcast.
He described how he became a developer as well as his work on X, the council, the public relations team and the Summer of Code project he's mentoring for. Donnie also recommended the best video cards if you support open source. He saw the Linux desktop's future as increasing integration and security. Here's how Donnie described how Gentoo makes progress and where to go from here:
"The more time I spend in Gentoo, the more I realize that it's the individual developers who really drive most of our innovations. They don't happen because the council makes a decision. They happen because the developer, or a few of them, think that it sounds like a cool idea, and make it happen. ..."
"Making Gentoo great is my biggest goal right now, and greatness is a process. It's not a place. So you can't get somewhere and say you're great. You always have to keep striving for it. For a while we've been content to stick with the status quo instead of striving for greatness, but we have to change that and to always improve Gentoo."
If you would rather read it, forums user dch24 created a transcript of the interview.
Gentoo Monthly Newsletter -- 26 May 2008
The May issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: Gentoo Foundation status, Summer of Code interview, network monitoring, and more!
Martin Michlmayr: Visiting Marvell in Yoqne'am
Since I'm spending the summer in Israel, I used the opportunity yesterday to visit the Marvell site in Yoqne'am where the majority of the NAS software engineering team is located. They first gave me a tour through the hardware labs which I found incredibly interesting. It's amazing what equipment those folks use to perform QA tests of new chips, how they can reverse engineer chips and even make some modifications to test their theories about hardware bugs. I found it really amazing and at the same time felt glad that changing things in software is so easy.
Later they showed me the software lab where they had an exhibition of various devices based on the Orion chip, including NAS devices, but also printers, wifi APs and game machines. They also told me some details of their product roadmap but unfortunately I cannot share that information. The only thing I can say is that we'll see a lot of new devices to which it would be cool to port Debian.
Remote Shell On Windows From Linux
Bill and Jerry, Chrome and the Next Linux Generation
Wizard Boot Camp, Part Nine: (More) Utilities You Should Know
Max Spevack: cleared for take-off, thank you for your hospitality brno
* Hotel rooms were fully paid for out-of-town attendees. We had a bunch of mini-suites, in which 4 people shared two double rooms, with a small common room and bathroom. Greg and I roomed with Jonathan Roberts and Fabian Affolter.
* Free wireless in the hotel's lobby, which had more than enough room for everyone to spread out. Free breakfast included with the rooms.
* Tram from the hotel to the university, making transportation very simple. Space at the university was free, due to Red Hat's pre-existing relationship with the school in Brno, which was incredibly helpful. The number one factor in determining a FUDCon's location is the ability to get space for free. The university's facilities were very nice, though I'm pretty sure that we pressed the limit of its wireless network. New motto: Fedora, crashing wireless networks worldwide since 2003.
* Coffee, tea, juice, water, and soda all day, every day, in the lobby area of FUDCon. Furthermore, we had plates of deli meat, cheeses, fruits, veggies, and bread each day that served pretty much everyone in attendance.
* About 100 people at FUDPub, with a dinner and drink paid for by the Fedora Project.
* A free t-shirt for everyone in attendance.
All of this, plus a few travel sponsorships for community members, and it looks like we are going to come in comfortably under our budget for the event, leaving the Community Architecture team some flexibility for the remainder of Q3 (which runs from September - November).
All in all, a fantastic 3 days and 4 nights in Brno. My thanks again to everyone who attended, and everyone who helped to organize.
Max Spevack: fudcon brno, day 3
On Sunday night, we again took over a restaurant in downtown Brno, though this time it was every-contributor-for-himself in terms of dinner and drink. Greg and I walked around the city a bit and saw some cool sights -- I forgot my camera, of course, but Greg has a bunch of cool pictures. I tried valiantly to find a postcard to send my girlfriend, but they weren't selling any that I could find.
Sunday was also the first day of the NFL season in America. I commented to Greg a few days ago: "I want to find a sports bar in Brno showing football, walk into it, sit down, and see Tom Brady suffer a season-ending leg injury". We found a bar called Rodeo Drive, which amusingly had a Texas cowboy theme, and persuaded the bartender to change the channel from Eurosport to the National Armed Services Network. It was showing the Miami Dolphins against the New York Jets, and not 30 seconds after we put the game on, scolling across the screen we saw the following: "Tom Brady (New England) left the game in the first quarter with a knee injury and will not return". Come to find out his ACL is torn and his season is over. Maybe this injury will give him some extra time to participate in the upbringing of his one year old son.
After watching some football, we made our way back to the casino, where we played blackjack with a guy who bellowed like Jabba the Hutt every time the dealer busted and the table won. He also broke every single rule of blackjack etiquitte in the book (from a strategy perspective, and also from an interacting-with-the-dealer and interacting-with-your-fellow-players perspective), but it was a truly memorable experience. I was exactly even through about 5 or 6 shoes, and then on the way out I put half my money (equivalent to about $50 USD) on one spin of the roulette wheel (always bet on black), and won. How lucky!
Max Spevack: fudcon brno, day 2
The day began at 10:00 AM (I am not as early a riser in the mornings as Mr. Frields, so my FUDCons start later), and I gave a short speech, thanking the organizers, pointing out the importance of global FUDCons, and highlighting some of the contributions that various audience members have made to Fedora. Greg (as always) led the session-pitching portion of the day. It went very well -- most of the audience had never done a Bar Camp style conference before, but we filled up the grid with talks, and FUDCon was fully underway.
The first talk that I attended was Jeroen van Meeuwen's session on custom spins. It was a workshop-style session, in which people who were trying different customization projects talked about the problems that they were running in to. About 20 people attended the session. I took a few notes, and the primary takeaway is that there is still a huge amount of confusion about the Spins Bureaucracy in general -- technical approval, trademark approval, what is needed when, etc. I think the work that Paul Frields is currently doing on revamping our trademark guidelines will help to clarify these questions, but the sooner that is rolled out, the better.
There were also a variety of questions about how to get spins hosted, mirrored, etc. We discussed the purpose and use of the generic-logos package, which several people were curious about.
Following this session, I wandered back to the main room and listened in on the Sugar/OLPC presentation. Christoph gave an excellent talk, and about 50 people were in the audience. The session focused on the vision of OLPC, and the manner in which Fedora community members can contribute to Sugar. One of the easiest ways is by becoming a packager for various sugar activities, which (I am told) ought to be one of the easiest sorts of packages to maintain, as it is all pretty much just python.
After lunch, I kept a slightly lower profile in the afternoon, trying to get a handle on some of the email that I'd missed over the past few days, some blogging, and some budget calculations for FUDCon. However, I did sit on the Spacewalk talk. As someone who spent 18 months in the Red Hat Network group, it was great to listen to the discussion about the open source Satellite. I learned that Spacewalk consists of about 185 packages, which are getting into Fedora at the rate of about 1-2 per week, and an implementation using PostgreSQL is on the way, which will finally rid the codebase of its dependencies on Oracle.
I attended Francesco Ugolini's talk on Fedora Ambassadors, and I was very impressed with the passionate, thoughtful speech that he gave. I led a brief session about FUDCon Europe 2009 planning, but it didn't draw as much conversation as I had hoped it would. I guess people just don't care that much about an event that is a year in the making!
The final session of the day was a hilarious "learn enough Czech to survive the evening" session, in which David Cantrell stated various phrases in English ("I would like another beer please") and we learned how to repeat them in Czech. Once the audience questions transitioned from useful to bawdy, we put an end to the session and closed down FUDCon.
FUDPub was a great success. Radek Vokal rented out an entire restaurant for us, and we had 96 people in attendance. Everyone got an excellent dinner (pork or chicken, salad, and french fries) and a free beverage of choice. After that, they were on their own for anything else that they wanted. I had a nice chat with David Cantrell, and another with Radek Vokal. Eventually I ended up at a bar with a number of other Fedora contributors, and then we made a brief stop in a casino, where I proceeded to win approximately $25 USD playing blackjack, betting about $5 USD per hand for 2 or 3 shoes.
America's Army Returning To Linux?
Port-Forwarding With rinetd On Debian Etch
Jeremy Katz: Classes begin, great weekend follows
The class that I'm likely going to be a listener for is the trial run of Software Systems Engineering. One of the required classes in the SDM program has been a Systems Engineering course and there continues to be a (pretty significant) struggle in how to make that work for software people. And in fact, I was not a big fan of the class at all over the summer (perhaps and understatement). As part of the curriculum revamp currently in progress, the option of a Software Systems Engineering class instead of the "normal" one is being provided and it's being run for the first time this fall. Since I don't really need the credit but still think that feedback on the course is important, I'm thinking about being a listener for it. But, TBD for real after the class meets for the first time tomorrow.
Then, ended up having a great weekend. Friday after class, I met up with Kara so that we could look for her a new bike. She has a hybrid, which, while nice enough, is difficult to go longer distances on and she's been getting out on the weekends and riding. So, we looked and ended up finding a nice bike at a nice price at Quad. Then, we ended up having dinner at home, watching some tv and generally relaxing.
Saturday morning, woke up to go riding and the weather looked less than ideal. So, got some more sleep and woke up to the sun shining. But so it goes. Ended up taking an easy day with some more errand running. Then, headed over to Yoav's birthday party at which a fun time was had. Lots of cool people, interesting conversation, good food and everything else that makes for a good party. Thanks to Yoav and his wife for having us.
Sunday morning, woke up and the sun was shining and so headed out on a ride. Ended up going to the Hills of Haavvaahhhddd, which was actually a very nice ride. Ended up with about 60 miles at a little over 19 which seemed pretty good given both the wind and the hills. I do want to try to get in another time at Wells Ave before Jamestown, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. Then, it was over to spot and pam's place for games, food and fun.
So, all in all, a good week and weekend.
