Figure 1.1: Yuji Kosugi
Primeiro aniversário do the Jornal Semanal Gentoo
Esta semana marca o primeiro aniversário do Jornal Semanal Gentoo, cuja edição inaugural foi publicada em 23 de Dezembro de 2002. Como o primeiro editor Kurt Lieber disse, "o Jornal Gentoo iniciou como uma forma de dar para a comunidade Gentoo uma fonte de informação sobre o projeto Gentoo Linux." Nós adicionamos, modificamos e retiramos seções e colaboradores e tradutores chegaram e foram, mas esperamos continuar a enviar a todos informaçoes sobre a sua distribuição Linux favorita.
Para celebrar o primeiro aniversário, esta semana estamos trazendo um conteudo especial. Primeiro, para aqueles que tentam imaginar quem somos, temos o perfil dos colaboradores e tradutores de quem pegamos algumas palavras e fotografias. Tanto no Desenvolvedor da Semana como no novo e semi-regular Entrevista com o Desenvolvedor, nós entrevistamos o arquiteto chefe Daniel Robbins. Nesta primeira entrevista você saberá sobre Daniel e suas funções no projeto, algumas novidades que estão sendo estudadas ou desenvolvidas e o futuro do projeto.
Nós gostariamos de agradecer a grande equipe de colaboradores e tradutores que fizeram o Jornal Semanal Gentoo possível. Como sempre, estamos procurando por voluntários para ajudar o Jornal Semanal ser melhor; veja ao final caso esteja interessado.
Figure 1.1: Yuji Kosugi |
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Yuji Kosugi trabalha no Jornal desde a sua inauguração no final de 2002, principalmente na seção Desenvolvedor da Semana, é o Editor desde Julho de 2003. Um novato em matemática na Universidade de Brown, Rhode Island, EUA. Ele passa o seu tempo jogando Cosmic Encounter, Magic:the Gathering, Dance Dance Revolution e outros jogos ao invés de assistir aulas. Yuji também pratica Aikido.
Colaboradors
Figure 1.2: AJ Armstrong |
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AJ Armstrong (aja) é o responsável pela seções Desenvolvedor da Semana e do Bugzilla. Ele é professor de Tecnologia da Engenharia de Computação no Instituto de Tecnologia de Northern Alberta. Ele é um ávido leitor que pratica Karate e gosta de mergulho autonômo. Ele mora em Edmonton, Canadá com sua esposa, que espera seu primeiro filho para Abril.
Figure 1.3: Brian Downey |
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Brian Downey lidera os resumos da lista de discussão gentoo-user. Acabou de casar-se este ano com 28 anos. Morando em Farmington, Michigan, EUA (ao lado de Detroit) Brian gosta de tocar música em bateria & guitarra ou trabalhar com consultoria de pequenos trabalhos de Linux que ele iniciou em 2002. Trabalha em tempo integral para uma grande companhia financeira de Detroit e esta orgulhoso com o progresso que fez com a transição de servidores para Gentoo Linux na organização. Ele admite ser um fã do Apple Mac, ele explica: "OS X é demais". Seu dito sobre a influência do Linux: "Se você vai fazê-lo, você deve fazer direito."
Figure 1.4: Luke Giuliani |
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Luke Giuliani (coldflame) is responsible for our -dev mailing list update section. He is a student at the University of Melbourne, studing Engineering (Mechatronics)/Computer Science. In his spare (and not so spare) time he enjoys consuming copious amounts of coffee, shooting pool, and arguing philosophy with friends. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Figure 1.5: David Narayan |
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David Narayan is responsible for our Tips & Tricks section. He works as a systems administrator for a university in Georgia (United States). When not at work he can usually be found playing pool or backpacking.
Figure 1.6: Ulrich Plate |
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Ulrich Plate, responsible for the weekly Forum fallout and the International news section, has just turned 40 last month. When he joined the GWN team at its inauguration one year ago, he was still on post in Tokyo, representing a number of European IT companies in Japan and Asia. Since his repatriation to Germany in May, he is Managing Director of a small technology consultancy in the Taunus mountain range just outside of Frankfurt am Main, focussing on open source migration strategies and IT security. As a former journalist he's delighted to get to write stuff at least once a week for the GWN, and could definitely use some more pressure to fulfill his duties as a Forum moderator and press relations officer for Gentoo Linux. His motto is borrowed from Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
German Translators
Marc Herren aka dj-submerge is 26 years old and lives in Bern (Switzerland). He's using Linux since 1998 and Gentoo for about 2 years. Currently he's working as a project leader in a networking company mainly dealing with HP-UX and Linux. Besides computers he plays volleyball a lot and spins the turntables.
Tobias Scherbaum aka dertobi123 is 22 and lives in Oberhausen (Germany). He is using Gentoo for something about one and a half year. Since december he's reponsible for german translations within the Gentoo Documentation Project.
Steffen aka MadEagle ist 32, lives in Hamburg (Germany) and is an IT Consultant when he is not translating the GWN. He uses Linux on and off since 1998 but for the last two years consistently Gentoo.
Tobias aka SirSeoman is 23 and lives in Trier (Germany). Besides being a translator for the GWN, he is a student of applied computer science at the Trier University of Applied Sciences. He is using linux and Gentoo permanently for 6 months and learns more daily.
Daniel aka Sputnik1969 lives in Berlin (Germany), is 34 years young and uses Linux since 1998 and Gentoo since Spring 2002. If he doesn't translates parts of the GWN he's looking for a new job as a Software Developer or System Administrator.
Italian Translators
Figure 1.7: Marco Mascherpa |
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Marco Mascherpa, italian lead translator, is 24 years old and he lives with his family in Milan, Italy. After the last exam left to pass, he's going to get a degree in Information Engineering and now he's quite busy studying and writing his thesis about Open Source software in the enterprise. His interests include playing with Gentoo, watching movies, reading books and playing strategy games.
Figure 1.8: Claudio Merloni |
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Claudio Merloni aka paper is 25 years old, born and living in Milan, Italy. He is currently fighting against the last exam left to obtain a degree in Computer Engineering at the Politecnico of Milan, while working on his thesis on Natural Language Processing. When not trying to break his Gentoo, he enjoys playing on his piano or listening to music, from jazz to progressive rock.
Christian Apolloni aka bsolar lives in Lugano, Switzerland and is studying Computer Science at the Swiss-Italian University of Applied Science. He likes to go to the cinema, go-karting and reading.
Figure 1.9: Stefano Lucidi |
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Stefano Lucidi is 23 years old and at the moment lives in Rome (italy). He studies computer science. He loves power and progressive metal (stratovarius, dream theater etc etc). During waste time he likes to play the guitar, read, code in his favourite languages (C, python and java), test open source software or update his Gentoo portal Gentoo Italia.
Tradução Russo
Sergey Galkin aka Zlodey is 26 and lives in Saratov (Russia). He uses Linux since 2001 and Gentoo for the last year. Currently he's working as a network administrator managing Ciscos' devices and servers running Gentoo, Solaris and FreeBSD
Sergey Kuleshov aka svyatogor is 18 years old and lives in Cyprus. He's been using Linux for the last 3 years and switched to Gentoo around a year ago. Apart from being a GWN translator he's also a follow-up translator for the Russian team and lead of the Gentoo Documentation Internationalisation Subproject. In real life he's a student doing his B.Sc. in "Maths Computing and Statistic"
Aleksandr Martyncev aka Aleks is 17 years old. He lives in Bryansk (Russia) and works as a programmer for one of the enterprises. He began using Linux in 2003 and seems to really like it When Aleksandr joined our team he didn't use Gentoo, but now he's got strong interest in this distro.
Alex Spirin aka asp13 (don't mix with a dozen of others :) is 26 years old and lives in Saratov city (Russia, Volga-river). He's doing his best in order not waste any time on his way to work/home. Alex works as a network administrator maintaining Ciscos' devices and other "damned stuff" and certainly uses Gentoo, especially the _very_ powerful Gentoo LiveCD. He hopes it was him who invented (or probably stolen?) the best Gentoo's motto - "Emerge YOUR world".
Daniel Robbins
Figure 2.1: Daniel Robbins with daughter Tzippoprah |
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In honour of our anniversary edition, we are featuring an interview with Daniel Robbins (drobbins), the founder of Gentoo. The interview is in a question-and-answer format rather than our usual summary format, to give Daniel a chance to speak directly about the distro, it's origins and where it's going.
GWN: Tell us a bit about yourself.
I was born in Montreal, Canada, and lived there until I was eight. Then I moved with my mom to Brookline, MA (Boston area) where I stayed until I finished high school. I spent most of a year at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) before dropping out near the end of my freshman year. I then started working, including a stint at Sony Electronic Publishing. After that, I moved out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I met and married my wife, and where we now live with our two young daughters, Hadassah and Tzippoprah.
In Albuquerque, I've had various computer-related jobs such as serving as a syadmin at the University of New Mexico. This is where I first started using GNU/Linux. For the last 3 or 4 years, I've done a lot of writing for IBM developerWorks, SAMS and Intel Developer Services, which became a close to a full-time thing. For most of 2003, a sponsor in Germany has been generously supporting me financially so that I can work on Gentoo full-time. So now I'm now devoting all of my work-related efforts to moving Gentoo forward.
GWN: Could you tell us about how Gentoo started?
I became involved in the development of Stampede Linux, but wasn't enjoying the experience. So I decided to create my own distribution to learn about Linux. Because I was working by myself, I had to make sure that everything was as automated as possible, and that's when the development of Portage began. At that time, Gentoo was called Enoch.
GWN: Gentoo has seen a remarkable burst of success over the last year or so. To what do you attribute it? What challenges has it raised?
Gentoo had its initial burst of popularity due to a pro-growth strategy I developed -- attract intelligent people to the project by making a distro that they would like to use, and then get them involved. After we reached a critical mass of developers, which caused Gentoo to improve rapidly due to their efforts, our user community began to thrive.
Our community continued to grow because we were responsive to the needs of our users, and genuinely helpful when users asked us for help. That tradition continues to this day in the #gentoo irc channel on freenode, which is where the Gentoo community originally began.
GWN: What do you see on the horizon for Gentoo in the near term? In the long term?
For 2004, you'll see us move to a quarterly release schedule, and transition to a new naming scheme -- the next release of Gentoo will be called "Gentoo Linux 2004." Under the hood, you'll see the fruits of several efforts to improve quality, organization and efficiency within our thriving and rapidly-growing community project.
Organizationally, we will be moving to a not-for-profit organizational model some time in 2004, and will continue to improve our ability to develop and deliver innovative technologies to the public. You'll also see portage-ng ("portage -- next generation") development begin, as we work on a full community-driven redesign of our package manager/ports system. Overall, you'll see Gentoo continue to grow and flourish.
Beyond this? We'll continue to have fun and focus on delivering powerful free solutions to the public.
GWN: What role do you think Gentoo plays (or will play) in the broader Linux and Open Source communities as they gain more market share and media attention?
I think there is a tendency for Linux-related technologies to become commercialized and "less free" due to the involvement of for-profit companies, some of which tend to be more pragmatic than idealistic in their day-to-day behavior. Their actions often end up working against the "hacker ethos." In contrast, our efforts are focused on advancing the hacker ethos, because we're all hackers. That's why people tend to become quite devoted to Gentoo -- because they can see we're doing and are excited about that vision. Having a thriving free software community is more than just choosing the right license.
GWN: Is there anything you'd like to say to the Gentoo community?
Thank you for using Gentoo Linux and please be sure to let us know how we can make Gentoo better for you. Gentoo is what it is today because of community involvement.
This week we're inaugurating a semiregular Developer Interview section. Like in Desenvolvedor da Semana, this section will be based on an interview of a developer, but here we'll focus more on what these developers can tell us about Gentoo Linux and its future. As it turns out this week we're interviewing Daniel Robbins again; here's what he had to tell us:
GWN: Thanks for taking the time to talk a bit with us here at the GWN.
You're welcome :)
GWN: Your title is "Chief architect", but what do you actually do within the Gentoo Linux Project?
My efforts are generally focused on "stretching" or elevating Gentoo as a project in certain critical areas, usually technical. With a project as large and dynamic as Gentoo, there is often a lack of focus. My job these days is to get certain things on the agenda -- things that are important goals, and may not otherwise happen if someone isn't pushing for them.
Because of my position on the project, I can push things forward that others may not be able to move forward by themselves. A lot of my efforts have to do with helping others to get their important efforts moving forward and bearing fruit
GWN: With Gentoo currently storming on, and gaining popularity (Distrowatch.com labels Gentoo 4th most popular distro within the last 12 months), what do you think has made Gentoo such a succes.
A lot of things. From its inception, I made a very concerted effort to make Gentoo the ideal distribution for true Linux power users and developers. This allowed us to attract a lot of talented people rather quickly. We had a very liberal developer recruitment policy, which allowed us to grow rapidly.
When we had a lot of skilled developers who were making Gentoo better, a user community started to form. Our development team did a lot of good things to nourish this user community and be responsive to its needs. Because we took care of Gentoo users, a lot of Gentoo users seemed to get rather excited and started helping out newcomers to Gentoo as well.
Then we had another level of growth, where things like the forums really flourished. Users were helping other users, and this created a really healthy ecosystem for Gentoo, and this is something that we continue to enjoy today.
GWN: Speaking of the current succes, you recently announced the start of Portage-ng development (http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/manager/meetings/summaries/2003/20031103.xml). You outlined as a goal that portage-ng should be "beyond peoples' wildest expectations. Would you care to elaborate a bit on what we can expect.
You can expect all planning, goal-setting and development to be done publicly, with full accountability and involvement of our user and developer community. This is the only way we can approach a project as significant as portage-ng.
By making the community the key part of this process, and collecting their ideas and requirements for portage-ng, the result will indeed be beyond what any of us could have thought up all by ourselves.
GWN: Gentoo 1.4 was released a while ago, what can we expect from the upcoming Gentoo release?
We're moving to a new year-based versioning scheme, so the next release of Gentoo will be called Gentoo Linux 2004. We're also moving to a quarterly release schedule, and all our releases will be built with the new catalyst build tool. Users will be able to rebuild the entire release using a stage1 and a portage snapshot. Our LiveCDs will be user-rebuildable and tweakable, thanks to catalyst. You can learn more about our plans at the release engineering project page.
GWN: When can we expect the change to kernel 2.6?
Kernel 2.6 will be supported as an option in Gentoo Linux 2004. We will continue to support 2.4 for as long as people need it. When the driver support in 2.6 begins to surpass 2.4 in breadth and quality, then we'll look into making a 2.6 kernel the "default" kernel. This may happen sooner rather than later, because the 2.6 kernel series seems to be off to a fine start.
GWN: Could we expect a GUI installer to be developed for an upcoming Gentoo release?
I think this is likely to happen in late 2004. In the past, we've had several developer-led installer projects start, fizzle, and then die. Generally, this was because these installer efforts were pet projects of one or two developers and never really got support or interest from the rest of the project. People who work on installers have historically tended to be "lone ranger"-style developers, and a fair number of our developers don't really care about having a graphical installer.
Before we start another installer project, we really need to create some consensus about what our goals for the installer should be. Once we have a clear and inspiring vision for how the Gentoo installer should operate, it can be accepted project-wide. Then we can get a project organized and finally get a cutting-edge installer done for Gentoo that everyone can be proud of.
GWN: Everyone cares about security these days, many distros now ship with a firewall enabled per default, Microsoft even started to compile their software with a compiler with stack protective measures (like ProPolice). What can we expect Gentoo to do in terms of encouraging safe computing in the near future?
The fundamentals include more use of GPG in critical areas of Gentoo and Portage and more organization and focus in regard to our GLSAs (Gentoo Linux Security Advisories.) But the key work in this area is happening thanks to several ambitious efforts being pursued by our hardened project, led by Joshua Brindle (Method)
There seems to be some indication that there will be a "hardened" version of Gentoo available some time in 2004, thanks to the efforts of this project.
GWN: What current development in the Linux community are you most looking forward to?
My focus is unbashedly on Gentoo. Technically, I am most looking forward to Gentoo Linux 2004, catalyst and especially portage-ng. From a larger perspective, I'm looking forward to seeing our development team and user community continue to create, innovate and inspire. As a project manager, I'm most looking forward to watching Gentoo become more "professional" by adopting software development practices that allow us to drastically improve quality and user involvement throughout the entire project.
Organizationally, I'm looking forward to seeing Gentoo transition to a not-for-profit entity or entities some time in 2004, which will mark a new level of maturity for Gentoo as an organization.
There were no new security announcements or bugs this week.
Flash For PPC
Slow week for most of the Forums (except for a particularly untimely flurry of gratuitious flamemongering in the Off the Wall section). Among the more useful things to be posted was g-rem's howto for getting Macromedia's flash player to work in Linux on Macintosh - so useful, in fact, that it got replicated into the Italian forum right away:
Downtime and Upstream
With people cheering wildly at the reinstatement of the gentoo-user mailing list after four days of downtime, they seem to have encountered mostly non-Gentoo-specific development problems further up the stream, specifically concerning the odd Christmas install of a freshly minted 2.6 kernel:
A move of development sources.
As some people may be aware, the linux kernel recently reached version 2.6.0. As this is technically a stable release, the question was asked whether vanilla-sources in the portage tree should now point to these sources. Have a look here for the full discussion, including arguments for and against.
Italy: Major Revamp of GECHI Website Under Way
Two stickies in the Italian Gentoo forum talk about the redistribution of tasks for the GECHI (GEntoo CHannel Italia) website. If you feel like helping out with the technical administration workload or with content creation, kindly respond to these two threads.
7. Bugzilla - Annual Closed Bug Rankings
The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Over the year following the first publication of the GWN, the developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:
Linux Magic System Request Key Hacks
This week's tip is about the 'magic' SysRq key that can be used to send events to the kernel in Linux.
To enable the SysRq key, compile CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ into the kernel. To disable it during runtime, use echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq.
To use the SysRq key, use ALT-SysRq-<commmand key>. This allows you to send commands straight to the kernel that will be executed immediately unless the machine is completely locked up.
Some of the many uses of SysRq are:
For more detailed information on using SysRq see the kernel documentation at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt
9. Saídas, Acréscimos e Alterações
Nenhum desenvolvedor saiu recentemente da equipe Gentoo.
Nenhum desenvolvedor entrou na equipe Gentoo.
Nenhum desenvolvedor trocou recentemente de papel na equipe do projeto Gentoo Linux.
Interessado em contribuir com o Jornal Semanal Gentoo? Nos envie um email.
Por favor envie um email (em inglês) para feedback com sua opinião e ajude a fazer este JORNAL melhor.
12. Informações sobre Inscrição
Para assinar o Jornal Semanal Gentoo, versão em inglês somente, envie um email em branco para Gentoo-gwn-subscribe@Gentoo.org.
Para cancelar a assinatura do Jornal Semanal Gentoo, envie um email em branco para Gentoo-gwn-unsubscribe@Gentoo.org a partir do endereço de email em que está inscrito.
O Jornal Semanal Gentoo também está disponível nas seguintes línguas: