Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 30 June 2008Welcome to the June issue of the Gentoo monthly newsletter! As usual, you can discuss any aspect of this issue of the GMN in the corresponding forum thread. We look forward to hearing from you! The Gentoo Trustees held a meeting on June 22, 2008. The trustees are currently working on proposed Foundation bylaws. The Gentoo Council held its monthly meeting on June 12, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:
Some items were rolled over from the previous meeting:
With more than 11,000 visitors, LinuxTag in Berlin is by far the most important Linux and Open Source Software show in Europe. As in earlier years, Gentoo was again present at the expo after we missed the last two LinuxTag expos taking place in Wiesbaden 2006 and Berlin 2007. This year about 10 developers and other Gentoo enthusiasts (including users from the German support channel, #gentoo-anfaenger) helped man the booth. Even some phpBB developers showed up.
This year the booth was set up to convey information to the audience, instead of showing hardware as in the years before. Nevertheless, the booth was populated with enough (Apple) laptop computers to open a little shop. One iBook was set up to display an automated installation process of Gentoo Linux. Some visitors even asked where we were hiding that guy who was entering the commands so fast. :) Powered by Larry the Cow (one tagged "OpenSSL") the team managed to survive through the days, with the help of the popular drink "Club Mate." Friendly meet-ups with Debian and Ubuntu people did not escalate at all, and there was even cooperation during the event. Sun engineers demoing OpenSolaris at their stand were happy to give hints how to resolve a compilation issue that popped up during the port of Gentoo Prefix to OpenSolaris. Gentoo participated in the Hacking Contest held at the event and was represented by genstef and two of our users, in an attempt to hold up Gentoo's reputation. The Gentoo team eventually won the second prize, a Nintendo DS.
On the last evening, the Ubuntu people organised a friendly barbecue party for everyone. The beer was free as in beer, and the meat "open source." The barbecue was held at C-base, Ubuntu's ~@Berlin, which from the inside is an exciting space station with many man-hours invested in weird decorations and programs like essential alien rootkit checkers. On Saturday April 26th, FLISoL 2008, Latin America's largest Free Software promotional and installfest ended, having taken place more or less simultaneously throughout Latin America. In Venezuela, it was hosted in the capital city Caracas and other cities such as Barquisimeto, Cumaná, Los Teques, Maracaibo, Mérida, San Cristóbal and Valencia. As well as being a free-for-all, catch-as-catch-can multiple distro installfest and promotion event, it also featured interesting talks on a wide variety of subjects, including clusters, web development frameworks, security, VOIP and the Gimp, among others. In Caracas, the event was hosted at the ISEIT, where a small group of enthusiastic Gentoo users and devs, amongst which were angvp, alberkmann, neurogeek, sebasmagri, Ricardo Mendoza and John Christian Stoddart, gathered to expound upon the multiple virtues of everyone's favourite meta-distro to all comers, live as well as on irc (#gentoo-ve on irc.freenode.net), while at the same time racing to complete installs on wide variety of machines, troubleshooting hardware, handing out Gentoo minimal install and LiveCDs right, left and centre and even having time to demonstrate Frets on Fire on Gentoo. A few Gentoo lappies sported highly tweaked e17 desktops, laden with eye candy that caught everyone's attention. In Mérida, Gentoo LiveCDs were hot items too, as was the demonstration of games running on Gentoo. Many Gentoo enthusiasts were also reported at the Maracaibo event.
Interview: Google Summer of Code Student Nirbheek Chauhan In the second of the series of interviews with our Summer of Code students, we chat with Nirbheek Chauhan, who is working on "AutotuA". Find out more about him and the project by reading on! GMN: Give us a brief introduction of yourself. Where are you from? Where and what do you study? What's your homepage or other means for fans to stalk you? Nirbheek: Hello! I'm Nirbheek Chauhan (bheekling). I don't exactly "belong" to any single place (Dad's in the Army), although I was born in Chandigarh, India. I'm currently in my 3rd year of B.Tech doing Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur. Fans and freaks are welcome to my blog -- comments are open and free for all. ^_^ GMN: Were you already involved with Gentoo and/or open source in general before acceptance into SoC? If yes, briefly tell us how you got involved and why you like writing open source code. Nirbheek: I had been using Ubuntu as my full-time OS for a year before I shifted to Gentoo after Arun Raghavan (Ford_Prefect) nagged me to try it out for the N+1th time. The first Open Source project that I contributed code to was the Beagle Project where I hacked on the experimental Beagle Webinterface under the wonderful guidance of Debajyoti Bera (dBera). I love Open Source (and specifically Gentoo) because it allows me to fix whatever problems I face on my own. There is documentation for almost everything out there, and where it doesn't exist, the code is always there. Gentoo makes all this particularly easy since I just need to dump a patch in ${FILESDIR}, add a line to the ebuild, and voila! I can have the package cleanly installed on my system with the fixes. The flexibility I get from this far outweighs the compile time for everything (although I would really love it if a safe and working hybrid binary-source system were devised) GMN: How has your experience with the Gentoo community been so far? Nirbheek: I have found the developers, especially the GNOME Herd, the Mozilla Herd, Infra, Bug wranglers, and the previous Council Members, to be extremely helpful, active, responsive, and sometimes terrifyingly efficient. All the people whom I see actively working on Gentoo are simply a pleasure to talk and work with. However, as is with most projects of such a size, there are a few elements who seem to be spreading more chaos than actual contribution. GMN: Please tell our readers a little about the project you're working on, and why you think it will be helpful to Gentoo users. What was your inspiration for starting the project? What do you expect to achieve with it? Nirbheek: The project was originally called (for lack of imagination) "Automate it All" (*with* quotes). With the advent of further lack of imagination on Eric's part, it was christened AutotuA. The aim of the project is to reduce the workload of Gentoo developers, make it easier for users to help developers in testing, and increase the overall QA of the packages and ebuilds in the portage tree by making it easier for developers to test (and coordinate testing of) changes made to the tree. The basic design consists of a master-server and numerous slaves. The master does bookkeeping of jobs, hosts the various resources, preserves state, and manages distribution among the slaves. The slaves run jobs according to sets of instructions called "jobuilds" which are similar in spirit (and syntax) to ebuilds, but are used to describe the smallest "quantum of work". The (lengthy) details of how they all will work can be found in my first weekly report. My inspiration stemmed from frustration at having to do repetitive and easily automatable tasks while testing packages. The last straw was testing xulrunner-1.9 (a dependency of Firefox 3) for breakages with packages using xulrunner (bug 213296). The work was completely monotonous and time-consuming -- perfect grounds for automation. I could've scripted the work, but that would be a one-off thing and no one else would be able to make use of it anyway. I told Patrick Lauer (one of my mentors) about this and my proposed solution for it. He suggested that I apply for a SoC project for the same to make sure I actually finish it. ;) He then managed to get Stephen Klimaszewski interested and onboard for mentoring me, and voila! Here we are. :) <overzealous>I expect my project to cause a revolution in the way Gentoo works.</overzealous> GMN: What do you do when you're not coding? (hobbies, interests, favorite T.V. shows etc.) Nirbheek: Wait, what?! Coding *is* my hobby! But when I get tired of coding, I usually read books or (online) manga, do some photography (little experience however), watch Anime or Sci-Fi, write random stuff, or play the occasional computer game (Half-Life 2 ftw!). Of course, this is all usually done with Nine Inch Nails, Feist, toe, Pearl Jam, R.E.M or Radiohead playing in the background. =) GMN: Thanks for your time, and wish you all the best for the summer! Gentoo Linux Headed for Space! This article was written by Gentoo developer Joe Peterson, who works for the Southwest Research Institute. Joe already uses Gentoo Linux for projects such as the New Horizons space operations center. Now, he'll take Gentoo where no penguin has gone before . . . Gentoo is getting ready to fly into space aboard a rocket called the Rapid Acquisition Imaging Spectrograph Experiment (RAISE). The rocket is part of NASA's "sounding rocket program", and it is a relatively inexpensive way to gather information about the Sun from light that cannot penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. Southwest Research Institute, where RAISE is being designed, has a very active solar research group that is on the cutting edge of new discoveries about our closest star. One of the main mysteries that RAISE will help to solve involves the temperature of the solar corona. This outer atmosphere of the Sun is more than one million degrees centigrade, whereas the Sun's surface is a mere 6000 degrees. Because the data to be collected by RAISE will give insight into the mechanisms of energy conversion in the solar atmosphere, we hope to use this data to better understand this strange temperature inversion. RAISE will fly to an altitude of 350 km—well into space—and then return to Earth via parachute. The total flight time will be about 14 minutes, giving the rocket 6 minutes of "hang time" in space to collect data. Two ultraviolet detectors will collect stereo images and 3D spectral/spacial "cubes" of data. In the latter case, a mirror and slit will be used to scan across the Sun and collect a UV spectrum at each pixel.
Gentoo Linux will be used on four processor boards in the flight electronics. One will be the central controller, and the other three will be dedicated to capturing data from the instruments. Spectral "image" data will be collected at 10Hz and stored on a solid-state PATA drive, which will be retrieved from the rocket after landing. A minimal Gentoo installation will be included on each board for flight. On the capture boards, we will add USB drivers for instrument I/O. In fact, we have our first capture board up and running already, and data is successfully coming in from our test camera in the lab. So stay tuned for further news about RAISE, and when it launches, remember that all of the Gentoo Project's hard work went into making this rocket's operating system flight-ready! Manage your configuration: Puppet is a tool to manage your configuration and is presented by Gunnar Wrobel. Small system distributions: Joshua Saddler needs a binary Linux distribution suitable for his old laptop, so he tests some distros that are explicitly labeled for weaker systems. Gentoo documentation: Finding information on how to develop for Gentoo can be hard as it is scattered around the place. Joshua Nichols has an overview for you. Release hold-up: Tobias Klausmann offers some commentary on why the next release has been held up for so long. Web 3.0? Revisited: Rob Cakebread writes the follow-up to his article on the semantic web already presented here. Accessing the Google Gentoo Calendar: Christian Faulhammer tells all people with the appropriate access level how to add/modifiy entries to the Google Gentoo Calendar via Sunbird/Lightning. What Gentoo gives back: Hanno Boeck is proud of his constributions to X.org, so see how much we give back to other projects. Two Ruby on Rails vendors partner together; one (Engine Yard) finds Gentoo to be a good fit. Engine Yard has been previously featured in the newsletter. Measuring and reducing power usage For those who want to reduce energy use, increase their laptop time on battery, and those who simply want to save money, this edition of Tips and Tricks is for you. Let's use PowerTop to reduce the amount of power your computer draws. The first step is to install PowerTop and run it:
PowerTop will likely tell you that you need a few options enabled in your kernel, if they aren't enabled already. To prepare your kernel for PowerTop you need to go into "Processor type and features". Set "Tickless System" to be built into the kernel. If you do not have this option you can continue without setting it. Next, go to the main menu and go into "Kernel hacking". Set "Kernel debugging" to be built in, then select "Collect kernel timer statistics". If you are doing this on a laptop, enable battery support in "Power management options" and "ACPI Support". Finally, enable "CPU frequency translation statistics" under "Power management options" and "CPU Frequency scaling". Reboot into your reconfigured kernel and run powertop again. You should see a list of applications are kernel components "waking the system up". All you need to know is that fewer wakeups means your system consumes less power. PowerTop gives you a few tips at the bottom. The first one is to tell the kernel to disable USB until you need it. This option is under "Device Drivers", in "USB Support". It is probably called "USB selective suspend/resume and wakeup". The second one is to increase the dirty write back interval to 15 seconds -- or an interval of your choosing). This will help reduce disk wakeups.
There are other things you can do to reduce you power usage. For example, if you happen to browse many CPU-intensive Flash sites, you can install the FlashBlock add-on for Firefox and choose to view Flash upon your request only. Visit LessWatts for more good ways to save power. Gentoo is made up of 251 active developers, of which 40 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 647 developers since its inception. The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:
This section summarizes the current state of the Portage tree.
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.
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 29 May 2008 and 28 June 2008.
Of the 11759 currently open bugs: 12 are labeled blocker, 106 are labeled critical, and 410 are labeled major. The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are as follows.
The developers and teams who have been assigned the most bugs during this period are as follows.
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. 10. GMN subscription information To subscribe to the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter, send a blank e-mail to gentoo-gmn+subscribe@gentoo.org. To unsubscribe to the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter, send a blank e-mail to gentoo-gmn+unsubscribe@gentoo.org from the e-mail address you are subscribed under. The Gentoo Monthly Newsletter is available in the following languages: |
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