Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 28 July 2008

1.  Introduction

This month in the GMN

Welcome to the July 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!

2.  Gentoo News

2008.0 Released!

Since our last issue, Gentoo Linux 2008.0 has been released. Remember, releases are mostly made to satisfy new users. Existing Gentoo users don't need to reinstall; your system can be kept up-to-date just by running emerge --sync && emerge -avtuD world.

Security Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Security Team held a meeting on July 14, 2008. The meeting included a short overview of the security project's status, what can be improved, how to handle delays in GLSA publication and bug resolution, and the supported status of games. The project is actively seeking help; if you have an interest, please contact the team.

• Agenda, summary, and complete log

Trustees Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Trustees held its monthly meeting on July 13.

• The meeting agenda
• The current Foundation bylaws draft

Council Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Council held its monthly meeting on July 10, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:

• GLEP 54: There were numerous questions that apparently were not brought up on the mailing list in advance or were not addressed.
• GLEP 55: On hold pending a concrete requirement for it. GLEP 54 may be, but that's unclear until it's been revised.
• GLEP 56: Approved. Cardoe will get repoman changes made, followed by a server-side script to generate use.local.desc from metadata.xml.

Coming Up

• Bugday: Looking for a way to help out Gentoo without investing a lot of time? Join us on August 02 for our monthly bugday, and help us squash some bugs.
• Council Meeting: The Gentoo Council meets twice every month to discuss important technical issues that affect Gentoo as a whole. The next meeting is scheduled to be held on August 14, and everyone is welcome to participate - #gentoo-council on irc.freenode.net at 2000UTC.
• Trustees Meeting: Scheduled for August 19 (agenda). Updated bylaws have also been posted, and public discussion is solicited on the gentoo-nfp mailing list.

3.  Heard in the Community

Gentoo at Peel Fresco Music Lounge

Peel Fresco Music Lounge is a bar in the heart of SoHo, Central, Hong Kong. This bar is different from others -- it uses lots of open source software, and Gentoo Linux lies at the heart of the software stack.

Peel Fresco has set up a page listing their OSS, and how they use Gentoo.

Planet Gentoo

Shared libraries: Anant Narayanan describes alternatives to shared libraries.

preserve-libs: Le Zhang explains one of the new FEATURES of Portage 2.2: preserve-libs.

paludis-utils: Ali Polatel announces paludis-utils, a replacement for portage-utils.

Bug hunter: The odyssey of Robin H. Johnson shows us how much time you sometimes need to find a bug.

The truth about ccache: Diego Elio Pettenò tells us what ccache can do for you and what it can't.

Still looking for alternatives: Still on the lookout for a distribution for his ancient laptop, Joshua Saddler presents some more small Linux distributions.

Code as artwork: Visualising source code can lead to nice pictures as Donnie Berkholz shows us.

Download statistics: Robin H. Johnson collects some download statistics on the new 2008.0 release media.

Gentoo on VirtualBox: Jeremy Olexa describes how he got Gentoo running as a virtual machine within VirtualBox.

Gentoo ebook: Gunnar Wrobel announces that his German Gentoo book is available as an ebook from the publisher.

Gentoo in the News

Gentoo has gained quite a bit of publicity following the 2008.0 release. Donnie Berkholz has compiled many reviews and announcements.

4.  Tips and Tricks

Recovering Deleted Files

Have you ever accidentally deleted a file or files and wanted to bring them back? If so, this guide will show you a method for trying to recover just about any deleted file.

First, we need to consider a number of factors:

1. Size of the partition where the file was deleted. If your partition is very large and you can't copy the entire thing to another partition, then you will have to risk losing data on the partition with the deleted file. If you decide to take this risk, then skip the second step that follows.
2. The type of file you deleted, e.g. a vital file needed to follow this guide or something on your thumb drive. If you deleted something like /usr/bin/dd or /usr/bin/cat as well as /bin/dd and /bin/cat, then you will probably need to boot from a LiveCD or another Gentoo installation. You can try to copy these vital files over (or you can just follow this guide), but manually install all of the programs Portage will want to install.
3. The filesystem of the partition. If your partition's filesystem is anything other than FAT, Ext2/3, NTFS, UFS, or ISO 9660, you will not be able to use the tool covered in this guide.

After considiring these factors, let's make a block-for-block copy the of the partition:

(Replace part with the partition from with you want to recover the file)
# dd if=/dev/part of=/var/tmp/recovery-img

Let's install sleuthkit:

# emerge sleuthkit

Next, create a small script, reconstruct.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# reconstruct.sh -- reconstruct lost but not overwritten FAT data

cat $1 |
  while read line; do
    filetype=`echo "$line" | awk {'print $1'}`
    filenode=`echo "$line" | awk {'print $3'}`
    filenode=${filenode%:}
    filename=`echo "$line" | cut -f 2`

  echo "$filename"

  if [ $filetype == "d/d" ]; then
    mkdir -p "$filename"
  else
    icat -f $2 -r -s $3 "$filenode" > "$filename"
  fi
  done

Now let's make sleuthkit give us a list of files that were deleted:

# fls -f ext -d -p -r /dev/part

You should get a list of files like this:

# fls -f ext -d -p -r /dev/part
r/r * 24590:    whoops_im_a_deleted_file

Assuming we want to recover whoops_im_a_deleted_file, we do the following:

# fls -f ext -d -p -r /dev/part | grep "whoops_im_a_deleted_file$" > recover_files_list
# sh reconstruct.sh recover_files_list ext /var/tmp/recovery-img

You may also do without the grep command and modify the files list yourself. Once again, replace ext with the filesystem that you are working with.

You don't have to use the script; you can also simply run the following:

# icat -f ext -r -s  /var/tmp/recovery_img 24590 > whoops_im_a_deleted_file_recovered

This edition of Tips and Tricks was inspired by this forum post by der bastler.

5.  Gentoo developer moves

Summary

Gentoo is made up of 251 active developers, of which 57 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 647 developers since its inception.

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:

• Jeffrey Forman (jforman)

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:

• Arun Raghavan (Ford_Prefect) joined the GNOME team

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:

• Ben de Groot (yngwin) joined the releng team
• Jeroen Roovers (jer) joined the netmon herd
• Michael Januszewski (spock) left the gcc-porting team

6.  Portage

Summary

This section summarizes the current state of the Portage tree.

Figure 6.1: 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:

7.  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 27 June 2008 and 27 July 2008.

Figure 7.1: Bug activity split-up

Of the 11946 currently open bugs: 14 are labeled blocker, 106 are labeled critical, and 422 are labeled major.

Closed bug ranking

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

Figure 7.2: Bug closed rankings

Assigned bug ranking

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

Figure 7.3: Bugs assigned rankings

8.  Getting Involved

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