Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: March 1st, 2004Gentoo devs Pylon (Lars Weiler), Tuxus (Jan Seidel) and dertobi123 (Tobias Scherbaum), plus Mr.Big (Jens Blaesche) from the German forum - four activists manning the Gentoo booth, four architectures (x86, Mac, Sparc and MIPS) on display! The Chemnitzer Linuxtag on Saturday and Sunday 3 & 4 March was quite successful, with scores of fresh x86 and PPC LiveCDs being handed out to visitors. The devs had prepared a shiny new flyer with information about 2004.0 and new features in Portage, but the indisputable main attraction at the Gentoo booth was a veritable Silicon Graphics O2 ("visual workstation"), the first O2 ever to be displayed running Linux to begin with, and this one even sporting a 2.6.1 kernel and a working framebuffer, thanks to Tuxus.
2. Featured Developer of the Week
This week's featured developer is Damien Krotkine (dams), the lead for the Gentoo Desktop Research Project. He is also working on improving Gentoo's configuration tools, specifically by promoting the libconf abstraction layer, a project he also contributes to. He claims these tasks are largely administrative, and that he doesn't get much time to code for Gentoo. dams (as he prefers to be called), began using Linux in 1998, with Red Hat. He progressed through Mandrake before hearing about Gentoo just prior to the release of 1.2. After Gentoo's 1.2 LiveCD was released, dams began using the new distro. Around the same time, dams had a conversation with Daniel Robbins about libconf and the fact that Gentoo didn't really have any higher-level configuration tools. The end result was dams role in researching improvements and modifications to Gentoo's desktop features and tools. dams works as a Technical Project Leader on multi-platform applications using the Mozilla engine - a job he describes as "having fun with cool guys doing cool stuff on mozilla and other multi-platform open technologies". He is a Mandrakesoft alumnus, having coded the early versions of the Mandrake Control Center front-end and the Mandrake Network Configuration tool. He went to school in Frankfurt, Germany and later in Paris, France, where he studied Computer Science. Our subject numbers perl, emacs, screen, zsh and firefox amongst his favorite tools. He is a vanilla icewm user and reads his mail in console gnus. He has a number of ix86-based workstations and servers, as well as a "nifty iBook G4 with Gentoo PPC". dams claims he is a "typical geek", but does enjoy volleyball, rollerskating and climbing as well as African percussion music. He lives in Paris and spends most of his off-work time with his girlfriend. When asked for a favorite quote, he offered "All your base are belong to us.", which we think wasn't serious, and "perl rules", which probably was. Libxml2 URI Parsing Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities A buffer overflow has been discovered in libxml2 versions prior to 2.6.6 which may be exploited by an attacker allowing the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Linux kernel do_mremap local privilege escalation vulnerability A critical security vulnerability has been found in recent Linux kernels by Paul Starzetz of iSEC Security Research which allows for local privilege escalations. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Buggy Gentoo? As one observant gentoo-user list member pointed out this week, there have been more bugs reported than closed every week for quite some time. Does this mean Gentoo win drown in bugs? Read and find out. Grading Portage updates. We all love portage for the ease with which it means we can all keep up-to-date systems, but have you just wanted to do critical updates, without having to recompile {X, KDE, GNOME} in the process? Well that was the suggestion made here. Japanese Input Methods Gentooists in Japan have started a Wiki trying to get a grip on both the general availability of input methods for Japanese text in a Linux environment, and on how to install and use them in Gentoo Linux. The thing is: there are so many competing, or overlapping, or incompatible, or just redundant methods that even the pros are forgetting half of them all the time. The collection at gentoo.gr.jp is already impressive and includes even some of the more obscure methods, but lacks the popular im-ja, for example. Work in progress. The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 27 February 2004 and 04 March 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 5168 currently open bugs: 140 are labeled 'blocker', 213 are labeled 'critical', and 405 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:
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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