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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: September 1, 2003

Content:

1.  Gentoo News

Summary

Portage tarballs available for OpenBSD and FreeBSD

Grant Goodyear has put together tarballs that can be used to install Portage on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. While there's still a long way before you'll be able to install a Gentoo/BSD system from stage-1, as Grant said in his announcement to gentoo-dev, this is the first step on the road to generating one, and we encourage users to test these tarballs, as well as to experiment with constructing a true Gentoo *BSD stage-1 tarball. For more information, read the above announcement, or check out Grant's page on Gentoo + *BSD.

Second Gentoo BugDay to be held on September 6

Since last month's Gentoo BugDay was such a success, we're going to have another one next Saturday, on September 6, and on the first Saturday of each month from now on. Come on down to the #gentoo-bugs channel on irc.freenode.net, and help us squash bugs and maintain the high quality of our distribution - it's also a great opportunity for devs and users to get to know each other.

Gentoo Documentation team looking for new French lead translator

The Gentoo Documentation team is looking for a new French lead translator. Responsibilities would include coordinating the translations, verifying the translated version, and committing it to CVS so it can be viewed on the website. A solid reading knowledge of both written French and written English is a requirement; familiarity with XML and CVS would be helpful but can be acquired after taking the position if necessary. Interested parties should send an email to Sergey Kuleshov.

2.  Gentoo Security

Summary

GLSA: vmware-workstation

Quote from advisory:

"By manipulating the VMware GSX Server and VMware Workstation environment variables, a program such as a shell session with root privileges could be started when a virtual machine is launched. The user would then have full access to the host."

  • Severity: High - local full host access.
  • Packages Affected: <vmware-workstation-4.0.1-5289 <vmware-workstation-3.2.1-2242
  • Rectification: emerge sync; emerge vmware-workstation-(insert the version you want here); emerge clean
  • GLSA Announcement

New Security Bug Reports

The following new security bugs were posted in the past week:

3.  User stories

User stories is on hiatus this week. Remember to send us your bizarre, hilarious, or incredible Gentoo stories so they can be featured here!

4.  Featured Developer of the Week

Lars Weiler


Figure 4.1: Lars Weiler

Fig. 1: Lars Weiler

We are pleased to present Lars Weiler (pylon) as this week's featured developer. Lars works on Gentoo's PPC development team as well as taking lead responsibilities for German Translation on the International Document Subproject of the Gentoo Documentation Project. He is also involved with the Infrastructure Team in dealing with CVS and viewcvs issues and configuration. Gentoo is his first major OSS project, which he has compensated for with involvement in so many disparate aspects of the work.

Lars first heard of Gentoo in mid-2002 and first installed it on his iBook in November of that year, needing a few months to get everything working the way he wanted. He became a developer on the PPC project in March of 2003 and completed the migration of his x86 box to Gentoo in May. He enjoys working within the Gentoo community, and frequently travels around Europe to meet other developers. As a PPC user, he appreciates the ebuild system, as it makes it easy for him to fine-tune applications to suit his needs - the "compile everything you need" functionality serves him well.

In addition to his Gentoo work, Lars is an active member of the Chaos Computer Club, a German "white-hat" hacker group. He provides some of the organization activities and much of the press relations for the organization. He has been a student at the German University of Applied Sciences in Krefeld as well as attending courses at the Fontys Hoogeschool in Venlo, the Netherlands. His coursework has focused on a diploma in the somewhat esoteric field of Mechatronics (a mixture of Mechanics, Electronics and Informatics).

Lars has two Gentoo boxen: a 600 MHz Apple iBook that is his primary development and testing platform (not to mention providing a DVD movie player for train rides), as well as a 5 year old PIII-700 that provides backup services as well as some multi-media features. Lars multimedia requirements are further serviced by a Fuji FinePix7400 digital camera that is always to hand. He prefers the more streamlined fluxbox desktop environment to KDE or Gnome. He generally uses a highly-customized mutt client for mail, LaTeX for word-processing. In addition, he frequently uses gnome-terminal, irssi, gkrellm, xpad, psi and MozillaFirebird.

Lars speaks four languages: German, English, French and Dutch. Buffer overflow has apparently caused him to lose much of his Latin. He lives in the German state of Northrhine-Westfalia, in the city of Krefeld on the banks of the Rhine. He frequently travels to the nearby cities of Dusseldorf and Cologne. Lars reminded us of the motto of the 18th Chaos Communication Congress: "Hacking is not a crime."

5.  Heard in the Community

Web Forums

Kitchen Metaphore

Non-Gentooists mock the seemingly complicated, indisputably lengthy procedure of downloading tarballs of source code, compiling them with the help of an ebuild, only to end up with a binary application like everybody else. So how does one explain the Gentoo way to the uninitiated? Difficult? Enter TGL, who has got it all in a remarkably simple one-liner. It probably takes a French to come up with the beautiful analogy to cooking: Tarballs are the ingredients, ebuilds are the recipe, and you get to be your own chef around the kitchen. Haute cuisine, so much tastier than pre-cooked RPMs...

The Mobile Gentooist Buyer's Guide

Wondering about the right laptop configuration? Want to get that WiFi thing to work? The Forum users are discussing all kinds of things, including which hardware to get, and how to tweak things so they work well. This is a frequently recurring issue, check some of the more recent threads about portable computers and wireless cards for penultimate Gentoo pleasure:

gentoo-user

Testing GCC with Python

User Adam Dunstan was curious whether using -march=pentium4 on his GCC 3.2.3 Gentoo box was safe yet. List member Gabor replied with a cool Python trick that allows a user to quickly tell if his GCC compiler was affected by the -pentium4 bug.

Backing Up Gentoo

Backups are often ignored until it's too late. List member Pupeno asked for some suggestions on backing up his entire Gentoo installation to a separate hard disk. Read on for some tips, as well as some user-contributed backup scripts.

gentoo-dev

Gentoo Calender.

With such a huge project, and so many different aspects, it can often become difficult to organise things. One thing suggested this week to help ease the trouble was the implementation of a Gentoo Calender Where important dates could be recorded and remembered.

Desktops desktops and more desktops

One of those parts that most of us would never live without in our Gentoo system is our desktop. This thread raises the interesting discussion of what elements of our system are actually part of the desktop, and how much interaction and control the Gentoo base should have over it.

6.  Gentoo International

Europe: Protest Against Software Patents

KDE closed its website, Apache.org was down, GNOME out of business? What happened? Well: The question should be "What will happen?" On Monday, 1 September, the European Parliament (EP) in Brussels will vote on proposed legislation to install software patents (pretty much following the example of the US, setting out to override existing patentability laws in force around Europe). Activists around Europe and their friends across the planet decided to do something about it. In a display of what could happen if some of the patents on copying and pasting, hyperlinks and whatnot were actually enforced, some major websites, mostly those of Open Source software developers, closed shop for a day or more, hoping that their protest will have an impact on the outcome of Monday's decisive meeting of the EP plenary. Many Gentooists have actively supported last week's happenings around Europe, the Gentoo website sported a brief editorial note encouraging "our European friends to make up their minds". For further information on the background of the debate, last week's events and the outcome of the vote, check the FFII website, the pivotal information hub of the anti-patent movement.

7.  Portage Watch

The following stable packages were updated or added to portage in the last two weeks:

Total categories: 96

Total packages: 6417

8.  Bugzilla

Summary

Statistics

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 22 August 2003 and 28 August 2003, activity on the site has resulted in:

  • 364 new bugs during this period
  • 202 bugs closed or resolved during this period
  • 4 previously closed bugs were reopened this period

Of the 3709 currently open bugs: 88 are labeled 'blocker', 192 are labeled 'critical', and 277 are labeled 'major'.

Closed Bug Rankings

The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:

New Bug Rankings

The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:

9.  Tips and Tricks

Editing USE flags with ufed and euse

This week's tip introduces two USE flag editors; ufed (an ncurses based utility) and euse (a command line utility). Between these two programs the days of opening /etc/make.conf and editing USE manually can be over.

While euse is available in Portage, ufed is a separate package and will need to be emerged.

Code Listing 9.1: Getting ufed

# emerge app-portage/ufed

Using ufed is very simple. Make sure you're root and simply type ufed. An ncurses based interface to all USE flags should start and you can select them as you like. After you're done, just select Save and you're done.

While ufed provides a full menu for editing USE flags, euse is handy when you need to quickly add or remove a USE flag. To add a USE flag, use euse -E flag. To remove a flag, use euse -D flag. To list your USE flags, use euse -i.

Code Listing 9.2: Using euse

(Example: Adding mozilla as a USE flag)
# euse -E mozilla

(Example: Removing mozilla as a USE flag)
# euse -D mozilla

For more information on using these two programs, see man 1 euse and man 8 ufed.

10.  Featured Quote/Signature of the Week

This week we give you forum moderator ebrostig's signature, which is worth a chuckle even if you've heard it before:

"Linux is like living in a teepee. No Windows, no Gates and an Apache in house."

11.  Moves, Adds and Changes

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:

  • none this week

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:

  • none this week

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo Linux project.

  • none this week

12.  Contribute to GWN

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13.  GWN Feedback

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14.  GWN Subscription Information

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15.  Other Languages

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Print

Updated 1 September 2003

Summary: This is the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 1st, 2003.

Yuji Carlos Kosugi
Editor

AJ Armstrong
Contributor

Brian Downey
Contributor

Cal Evans
Contributor

Chris Gavin
Contributor

Luke Giuliani
Contributor

Shawn Jonnet
Contributor

Michael Kohl
Contributor

Kurt Lieber
Contributor

Rafael Cordones Marcos
Contributor

David Narayan
Contributor

Gerald J Normandin Jr.
Contributor

Ulrich Plate
Contributor

Mathy Vanvoorden
Dutch Translation

Hendrik Eeckhaut
Dutch Translation

Jorn Eilander
Dutch Translation

Bernard Kerckenaere
Dutch Translation

Peter ter Borg
Dutch Translation

Jochen Maes
Dutch Translation

Roderick Goessen
Dutch Translation

Gerard van den Berg
Dutch Translation

Matthieu Montaudouin
French Translation

Martin Prieto
French Translation

Antoine Raillon
French Translation

Sebastien Cevey
French Translation

Jean-Christophe Choisy
French Translation

Steffen Lassahn
German Translation

Matthias F. Brandstetter
German Translation

Thomas Raschbacher
German Translation

Klaus-J. Wolf
German Translation

Marco Mascherpa
Italian Translation

Claudio Merloni
Italian Translation

Christian Apolloni
Italian Translation

Stefano Lucidi
Italian Translation

Yoshiaki Hagihara
Japanese Translation

Katsuyuki Konno
Japanese Translation

Yuji Carlos Kosugi
Japanese Translation

Yasunori Fukudome
Japanese Translation

Takashi Ota
Japanese Translation

Radoslaw Janeczko
Polish Translation

Lukasz Strzygowski
Polish Translation

Michal Drobek
Polish Translation

Adam Lyjak
Polish Translation

Krzysztof Klimonda
Polish Translation

Atila "Jedi" Bohlke Vasconcelos
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Eduardo Belloti
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

João Rafael Moraes Nicola
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Marcelo Gonçalves de Azambuja
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Otavio Rodolfo Piske
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Pablo N. Hess -- NatuNobilis
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Pedro de Medeiros
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Ventura Barbeiro
Portuguese (Brazil) Translation

Bruno Ferreira
Portuguese (Portugal) Translation

Gustavo Felisberto
Portuguese (Portugal) Translation

José Costa
Portuguese (Portugal) Translation

Luis Medina
Portuguese (Portugal) Translation

Ricardo Loureiro
Portuguese (Portugal) Translation

Sergey Galkin
Russian Translator

Sergey Kuleshov
Russian Translator

Alex Spirin
Russian Translator

Dmitry Suzdalev
Russian Translator

Anton Vorovatov
Russian Translator

Denis Zaletov
Russian Translator

Lanark
Spanish Translation

Fernando J. Pereda
Spanish Translation

Lluis Peinado Cifuentes
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Zephryn Xirdal T
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Guillermo Juarez
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Jesús García Crespo
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Carlos Castillo
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Julio Castillo
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Sergio Gómez
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Aycan Irican
Turkish Translation

Bugra Cakir
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Cagil Seker
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Emre Kazdagli
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Evrim Ulu
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Gursel Kaynak
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