Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 17 March 2008

1.  Introduction

This month in the GMN

Hello and welcome to the third issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter. We would like to thank our readers for their enthusiastic response, and hope that you will continue to write in. Although it may not be possible to respond to each and every one of you, we can assure you that every mail we receive is read and plays a role in shaping future editions of the GMN. Remember, the GMN is what its readers want it to be – please see the section on how you can get involved – at the end of the newsletter for more information.

Last month we ran graphical statistics on an experimental basis. While most of you think they're a good idea in general, there seemed to be general dislike for 3D pie-charts. We've replaced two pie-charts with bar-graphs, and made the remaining pie-chart two dimensional. We've also split the package addition and removal lists by week, in hopes of improving readability.

You can discuss any aspect of this issue of the GMN in the corresponding forum thread. We look forward to hearing from you.

Enjoy!

2.  Gentoo News

Gentoo Trustee Election Result

The Gentoo Trustee elections concluded on 28th February 2008. The Condorcet method revealed the ranked list of all elected Gentoo Foundation Trustees:

• Roy Bamford
• Ferris McCormick
• Joshua Jackson
• Tom Gall
• William Thomson

Out of 295 eligible voters, 107 ballots were submitted, bringing the voter turnout to 36%. The term for the elected trustees began on 1st March 2008. If you wish to contact the trustees or discuss a trustee-related issue, use the gentoo-nfp mailing list.

New operations lead for SPARC

The SPARC arch team is pleased to announce the appointment of Raúl Porcel as the new operations manager for SPARC. Ferris McCormick notes that this was no real change, since this was what he was doing most of the time anyway. If someone wishes to donate SPARC hardware, please get in touch with Raúl.

New Gentoo Book

After the publishing of 'Gentoo – Die Metadistribution' by Tobias Scherbaum last year, another Gentoo developer has written a book. Gunnar Wrobel's 'Gentoo Linux – Installation - Konfiguration - Administration' hit the stores at the end of February. Both books are written in German.

Council Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Council held its monthly meeting on 13 March, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:

• Summer of Code (Should Gentoo developers be allowed to participate?): Council members will become additional SoC admins, and will serve as tiebreaker votes if they aren't actively participating in project selection. The SoC admins will decide whether non-contributors should be favored over contributors.
• Package maintainers (Creation of a new post): The general agreement was that the current recruitment process serves its purpose very well. proxy-maintainers will be promoted more aggressively in order to attract new contributors.
• AMD64 arch team's big bug list: Mike Doty noted that it is hard to keep people interested in keywording. Anyone interested has had permission to keyword and stabilize non-system packages since 2007.1.
• Open floor: It was decided that having a list of attendees for every meeting would be useful. Donnie Berkholz will start creating the agenda along with the list in advance of the meeting. Diego Elio Pettenò will start working with the PR team on posting agenda and other items on a common Google calendar.

Some items were rolled over from the previous meeting:

• EAPI=0: Ciaran McCreesh has been contributing and has committed quite a few things. Mark Loeser hopes to work on it in the next couple of weeks. EAPI=0 is probably a week of solid work away from having a draft for review.
• GLEP 46 (Allow upstream tags in metadata.xml): No updates, as no authors were present.
• Document of being an active developer: No updates.
• Slacker arches: Mike Frysinger said he was going to work on Richard Freeman's suggestion this weekend, and repost it for discussion on the development mailing list.

Coming Up

• Bugday: Looking for a way to help out Gentoo without investing a lot of time? Join us on April 05 for our monthly bugday, and help us squash some bugs.
• Council Meeting: The Gentoo Council meets every month to discuss important technical issues that affect Gentoo as a whole. This month's meeting is scheduled to be held on April 10, and everyone is welcome to participate - #gentoo-council on irc.freenode.net at 2000UTC.

3.  Gentoo International

Australia: linux.conf.au

Towards the end of January, a first happened for Gentoo in Australia. Roughly thirty users, developers and other Gentoo enthusiasts gathered into a lecture theatre at the University of Melbourne during 'linux.conf.au' for a series of talks making up the first 'Gentoo Down Under Mini-Conf'.

The morning began with Sura Mendis's introduction to the Mini-Conf and - for those who had entered the wrong room - an introduction to exactly what Gentoo is. Unfortunately the talk focusing on the Gentoo Hardened project was cancelled, but that didn't seem to faze Ivan Miljenovic who stepped up to the mark and discussed many of the tools that can assist in everyday Gentoo administration. After morning tea, Patrick Ohearn gave his introduction to Paludis, followed by Mark Kowarsky with pkgcore. Interestingly, no-one in the auditorium had used either of these, with only a handful having heard of them before. The Mini-Conf ended with Andrew Cowie delivering a talk first given at Gentoo UK 2007 entitled "Looking back up the river". It suffices to say it was very well done, and the discussions of the topic proceeded right through lunch.

Figure 3.1: Left to right: Mark Kowarsky (mark_alec), Andrew Cowie (AfC), Ivan Miljenovic (ivanm), Shyam Mani (fox2mike), Sura Mendis, Aaron Carroll (Flathead), Patrick Ohearn (patoh)

The picture is licensed under Creative Commons (attributed to Shyam Mani). More such pictures of the event can be found here.

Germany: Chemnitzer Linuxtage

This year Gentoo was present at the Chemnitzer Linuxtage in Germany for the fifth time in a row, and it was indeed a massive success. As usual, there was a booth showing Gentoo on common architectures like x86 and amd64, but visitors could also see Gentoo running on an Efika PPC system, a Geode based media center built into a wooden box, and on a PPC featuring KDE 4.0.1 and in a prefixed Mac OS X.

Tobias Scherbaum held a talk about building custom Live-CDs with catalyst and genkernel, but that wasn't all. The whole of saturday afternoon was dedicated to a developer meeting in the seminar room, which the team from the Chemnitzer Linuxtage provided (as well as a nice buffet). Short talks were given about interesting topics such as a review of supported architectures, Gentoo on OS X, Gentoo Vservers, the arch testing tool gatt, Overlays, Status of Kolab2 and general discussion about many more topics. Approximately 15 developers and users took the chance to have a both an interesting and amusing time.

Figure 3.2: Left to right: Mario, Jens Bläsche (Mr. Big), Jonas, Lars Weiler (Pylon), Wernfried Haas (amne), Michael Hammer (mueli), Robert Buchholz (rbu), Tobias Scherbaum (dertobi123), Leonie, Lars Hartmann (psychoschlumpf), Sebastian Dyroff, Tobias Kral (Inte), Benedikt Böhm (Hollow)

Not in the picture but also attending the event were Markus Ullmann, Michael Haubenwallner and Hanno Boeck.

4.  Heard in the Community

Planet Gentoo

Time-sync external devices: Hanno Boeck describes how one can time-sync external devices, for example cameras or mobile phones. This way you get proper time and date metadata in your media files.

Help from users: The Emacs team is looking for help which is easily doable by any user. Christian Faulhammer asks for test plans for packages from the app-emacs category.

Working on PAM: Diego Elio Pettenò has started a re-organization of PAM in Gentoo and describes how one can drop the use of setuid binaries with the help of PAM and libcap. Also available are several progress reports.

A plea for ZFS on Linux: We need ZFS on Linux badly, says Joe Peterson and also tells us why.

Developer poll: Donnie Berkholz did a little internal survey and got 50 developer responses, which he summarizes.

How to write a proper announcement: To give the front page announcements some overall scheme, Joshua Nichols gives us an overview on how to write announcements.

The electronic eye: If you want to let a camera take photos and display it on the screen, Grant Goodyear tells you how.

Native Linux mapping: For Open Street Map, you either can use a Java or a Flash based editor. Both have drawbacks, so Hanno Boeck added Merkaartor to Portage.

TeX overview: Current stable TeX implementation teTeX is a small base package with dozens of separate styles and classes in the dev-tex category. The successor TeX Live (currently in testing) is broken up into smaller packages, but deriving the concrete contents is harder. Alexis Ballier introduces texmfind, which is an index tool for all style and class files that helps you find the package you need to emerge.

Web 3.0?: Some people claim that the semantic web will be the next big thing. Rob Cakebread reports about his project on how those new ideas can be linked and used for Gentoo.

Gentoo Forums

Package sets added to 'world' by default: Marius Mauch, one of the Portage developers, has opened a poll on the behavior of package sets in this thread. He wants to know whether users would like package sets, a new feature of portage, to be added to the 'world' file by default. You can learn more about this feature and discuss on the forum thread.

Gentoo Brainstorming: One of our forums user, erik258, proposes that we create a Gentoo Brainstorming site. What do you think of his idea? Would you like to join him in his quest? Express your opinions at the forum thread.

5.  Tips and Tricks

Encrypted USB Swap

Large, high speed USB flash drives are now more affordable than ever. At sizes of 2GB and 4GB, these drives are an interesting alternative to swapping on disk. When machines are thrashing to and from swap, a relatively huge amount of time is spent seeking. Swapping on flash makes the seek time relatively negligible.

Market Speak for Speed: Affordable drives boast sustained speeds of 20 MBps for writing and 30 MBps for reading. When purchasing flash drives, speeds are measured by factors such as 133X and 200X. The X factor is the same as for CD ROM drives: 150 KBps.

Measuring the Speed: You can use the dd command to measure the speed of your drive for reading:

# dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000 iflag=direct
# Or: (THIS COMMAND WILL OVERWRITE DATA ON YOUR DEVICE)
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=1000 oflag=direct

Flash devices have an internal block size of 4K so it is important to specify a block size of at least this amount to accurately measure the device's optimal speed.

Encypted USB Swap: Encrypting your swap prevents unencrypted sensitive data, such as passwords, from being stored on the flash drive. To enable encryption, your kernel must have the BLOCK_DEV_LOOP, BLOCK_DEV_CRYPTO_LOOP and CRYPTO_AES or CRYPTO_AES_X86_64 options enabled.

Partitioning: While not strictly necessary, partitioning your drives makes the data easier to identify with the fdisk command. Partition your drive with fdisk and specify a partition type of 82. Find the unique name of your flash drive swap partition with:

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/usb-*-part1
# Example output:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Feb 6 23:40 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-PNY_USB_2.0_FD_AA7B020900000644-0:0-part1 -> ../../sdc1

Modifying fstab: Add your partition to /etc/fstab to have the swap automatically enabled on boot:

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-PNY_USB_2.0_FD_AA7B020900000644-0:0-part1   none    swap    sw,loop=/dev/loop7,encryption=AES128  0 0

You can specify any loop device that you know will not be used at boot.

Going Live: To turn on your swap immediately:

# swapon -a

Use either of these commands to see the status of your swaps:

# swapon -s
# Or:
$ cat /proc/swaps

A word of Caution! Flash drives have a limited life span. For personal use, a flash drive can easily last years. For heavy duty use, using a hard drive may be a more appropriate alternative than occasionally replacing the flash drive. A typical flash drive will allow 10,000 or 100,000 writes per block. Decent flash drives use wear leveling techniques so that all the blocks wear out evenly. Considering the worst case, a 4GB drive which is written to constantly at 20MB/sec, a drive in such a situation would only last 23.7 to 237 days.

tmpwatch never sleeps

A cluttered /tmp is annoying. There are two possibilities to automatically prevent that. The first possibility is to use a feature of baselayout-2, simply set WIPE_TMP to "yes" in /etc/conf.d/bootmisc. The second possibility is to use tmpwatch:

# emerge tmpwatch

It will install a cron entry: /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch. Uncomment one or all of the examples in the file. You can also write your own, such as:

# Delete everything except what is owned by one user
if [[ -d /tmp ]]; then
  ${TMPWATCH} --exclude-user andrey --atime 168 /tmp
fi

For more options, run:

$ tmpwatch --help

6.  Gentoo developer moves

Summary

Gentoo is made up of 254 active developers, of which 43 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 633 developers since its inception.

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:

• Chris Bainbridge (chrb)
• Damian Florczyk (thunder)
• Marcin Kryczek (mkay)
• Jason Shoemaker (kutsuya)
• Peter Johanson (latexer)
• Robert Clark (hyakuhei)
• Christel Dahlskjaer (christel)
• Kevin F. Quinn (kevquinn)
• Marien Zwart (marienz)
• Charlie Shepherd (masterdriverz)
• Andrea Barisani (lcars)
• Harlan Lieberman-Berg (hlieberman)
• Andres Loeh (kosmikus)
• Josh Glover (jmglov)
• Christian Andreetta (satya)
• Karol Wojtaszek (sekretarz)
• Alin Dobre (alin)
• Przemyslaw Maciag (troll)
• Michael Hanselmann (hansmi)
• Peter Bienstman (pbienst)
• Eldad Zack (eldad)
• Stefan Cornelius (dercorny)
• Kyle England (kengland)
• Masatomo Nakano (nakano)
• Eric Edgar (rocket)
• Karol Pasternak (reb)

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:

• Bo Ørsted Andresen (zlin) - kde
• Ricardo Mendoza (ricmm) - mips
• Tobias Klausmann (klausman) - alpha

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:

• Ingmar Vanhassel (ingmar) joined the Qt herd
• Wulf Krueger (philantrop) joined the kerberos herd
• Luis Francisco Araujo (araujo) joined the Scheme herd

7.  Portage

Summary

This section summarizes the current state of the Portage tree.

Figure 7.1: Package distribution by keyword

The following section lists packages that have either been moved or added to the tree. The package removals come from many locations, including the Treecleaners and various developers.

Removals:

Additions:

8.  Bugzilla

Statistics

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. The following chart summarizes activity on Bugzilla between 17 February 2008 and 16 March 2008.

Figure 8.1: Bug activity split-up

Of the 10273 currently open bugs: 16 are labeled blocker, 88 are labeled critical, and 353 are labeled major.

Closed bug ranking

The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are as follows.

Figure 8.2: Bug closed rankings

Assigned bug ranking

The developers and teams who have been assigned the most bugs during this period are as follows.

Figure 8.3: Bugs assigned rankings

9.  Getting Involved

The GMN relies on volunteers and members of the community for content every month. If you are interested in writing for the GMN, do write in to gmn-writers@gentoo.org with your articles in plaintext or GuideXML format.

We solicit feedback from all our readers on the newsletter. If you have any ideas for articles, sections, or have anything to say about the GMN, don't hesitate to email us at gmn-feedback@gentoo.org.

You can also give us your feedback and comment on this particular issue of the GMN on the forum thread.

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