Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: January 19, 2004
Gentoo Linux a finalist for LWE's "Best Open Source Project" We're very proud to announce that Gentoo Linux has been announced as a finalist for Linux World Expo's Product Excellence Award, under the "Best Open Source Project" category. The other nominees are KDE 3.2, Sun's JXTA technology, and RealNetworks' Helix Player project. The winners are scheduled to be announced on Wednesday, January 21 from 4:00-5:00pm at the Taste of Linux Booth at the 2004 New York LWE. If you register by today, January 19, you'll be able to enter the exhibition hall for free, so it's still not too late if you're undecided about attending. If you do come, make sure to drop by and wish us some luck! Gentoo Linux Desktop Project Co-leads chosen After a poll held on -core and discussions within the management teams and with these two developers, Donnie Berkholz and Brandon Hale have been chosen as the new co-leads for the Desktop Project. The two co-leads will immediately begin work on getting the Desktop Project organized; we'd like to wish them success with this endeavor. 2. Featured Developer of the Week Brandon Hale
Our featured developer this week is Brandon Hale (tseng), the lead for the Gentoo WM Project, and one of the newly appointed co-leads of the Gentoo Desktop Project. He maintains the x11-wm/*box ebuilds and helps to organize the Gentoo Desktop Project, as well as working with the Hardened Gentoo team on implementing a PaX enabled desktop for Gentoo. He also applies himself to improving developer relations, and is frequently seen on IRC helping users. Brandon lives in York, Pennsylvania. He is currently between employers, giving him ample time to work on Gentoo. He hopes to apply his skills at network security and Unix desktop support in his future career. He has been using Linux since 2000, with Red Hat and Debian. He moved to Gentoo in early 2002, after testing it on a server. After meeting Matt Keadle and Seemant Kulleen on IRC, he steadily became more involved with Gentoo, ultimately taking over significant responsibility for desktop and WM projects. He said that he was very proud of that accomplishment and the opportunity to "work side by side with some really great developers". Brandon claims he is afflicted with "an odd fascination with things that go way too fast" - which would explain his taste for hard-core metal music, as well as Gentoo. He is usually connected to IRC when he is on a computer, and the first thing he does on waking is check his awaylog in irssi. His favorite apps also include vim, gaim, and epiphany. He uses gnome-session with openbox3, and is a big fan of the openbox themes Brandon's friend, Merry made. They are available in portage as x11-themes/openbox-themes. He also likes the GTK2 themes made by Jimmac. Brandon concluded our interview by saying that he would "like to thank the entire community for making my experience with Gentoo a positive one." There were no security announcements posted this week. At the Sound of the Falling Hammer, It's - Project Support Wolvenwraith may have expected a lot of things, but quite possibly not what happened when he started looking around for some auction management software for Linux. Not finding anything to please his tastes, he decided to drop eBay a line about possible support for open source projects, and guess what: Much to his and everybody else's surprise, eBay's development section not only said "sure, anytime" - one of their lot actually subscribed to the Gentoo Forums right away, to offer hands-on support to potential open source developers for auction management software: Rsync Round-Robin Routing to Rocalhost Yet another example of the Gentoo web forums being a prime address for people in search of answers to severe technical problems, here are the threads that survived the weeding out of duplicates for the big question last week: Have the servers gone up in smoke?:
rsync.gentoo.org Problems The gentoo-user list had its share of panicky posts earlier this week as the primary rsync mirror had some hardware issues. As usual, the best policy is just to sit tight and watch the forum announcments. Qmail/Sendmail/Postfix Every once in a while, we need an MTA opinion thread! Well, here's this installment! /usr/portage to /var/portage. Gentoo is always trying to keep up with standards, and the FHS is no exception. So, should our favorite tree stay where it is, or make a move? Questions around portage's cache and architecture (in)dependant features are all discussed. Check it out. Spain: Zaurus Goes Gentoo! Sharp Corporation's bold attempt at marketing Linux-based PDAs both in- and outside their Japanese home market was successful enough to create an illustrous group of followers worldwide. Some of those tried early on to replace the stock ROM delivered by Sharp installed on their Zaurus models with an alternative, either at kernel level or window management or both. Now a Spanish company, or more precisely Fernando Monera Daroqui aka Lekter has done what many Gentooists have secretly hoped for: Gentoo for Zaurus v0.2 is out and about, giving people with any one of Sharp's model range an opportunity to run Portage on a handheld. Emerging on the Zaurus works a little differently from a desktop, of course. Downloading is done on the PDA, but distcc subsequently takes care of the actual compilation being executed on a remote workstation. A script then converts the binary package to the .ipk format that the Zaurus installer (and Familiar's Linucised iPaqs, by the way) understands. For anyone in similar awe as the first people to react to the announcement, don't hold back, go express your feelings at this Forum thread. Italy: Call for Participation in Webbit 2004 Still a few days left to think about possible topics: Contributions to Italy's Webbit conference have to be registered before 30 January. The GECHI lot has started rounding up the usual suspects, and they'll be present with one or more 50 minute talks, to be held at the first Webbit.con in 2004 (there are going to be three of these events in Italy this year), between 6 and 8 March, in Padova. There's a coordination thread in the Forums where you can volunteer for speaking engagements. The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 09 January 2004 and 15 January 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 4786 currently open bugs: 109 are labeled 'blocker', 191 are labeled 'critical', and 349 are labeled 'major'. The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:
The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:
Using nl to number lines This weeks tip shows you how to use nl to add line numbers to a file. One of the more common commands to add line numbers is simply cat -n. However, nl adds extra functionality (such as controlling for white space, zero padding, and column justification). To use nl with its default options, type nl filename. This will output the file with line numbers to standard out. Empty lines will be skipped by default.
For more information on using nl see man nl or info nl. The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo Linux project:
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