Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: June 20th, 2005Taking over from Daniel Robbins -- whose sole remaining activity at the Gentoo project had been the Gentoo merchandising shop operations -- the new Gentoo store under new management by the Gentoo Foundation is now up and running. Set up at Cafepress, the store's catalog of 2005.0 CDs, branded clothing and "schwag" including coffee mugs and other merchandising items is now ready for online ordering, with prices in USD and delivery worldwide. 5 USD of each item sold goes as a direct contribution to the Gentoo project, to be made available to development by the Foundation. The store's address hasn't changed, it's at http://store.gentoo.org. Gentoo at the German LinuxTag 2005 in Karlsruhe "Linux everywhere" is the motto of this year's LinuxTag, the largest European Linux fair, which again takes place in Karlsruhe this week, 22 to 25 June. "Gentoo on everything slightly faster than a washing machine" could very well be the slogan of the Gentoo booth at the event. Representing Gentoo Linux for the third year in a row, this year seesa nice collection of Gentoo-supported platforms on display, including MIPS machines (an SGI O2), a Sun Blade 100 (SPARC) and several PowerPC hosts (two PegasosPPC ODWs and several iBook's), complemented by the usual assorted x86 hardware. You will have plenty of opportunity to meet many of the German Gentoo developers and discuss recent activities and upcoming changes with them. A handful of developers from other countries also announced their attendance, of which Robin H. Johnson flying in from Canada will undoubtedly be the one earning the most bonus-miles. Gentoo booths organized by the German NFP "Friends of Gentoo e.V." traditionally include a remastered XLiveCD distributed under the nickname "Fizzlewizzle". Thanks to Joseph Jezak's brand-new version of Xorgautoconfig this event's Fizzlewizzle Edition is also available for PowerPCs. The XLiveCD is fully localized into German, ships with the current KDE release 3.4.1 and features top-notch translated installation documents. Gentoo merchandise and lots of free give-a-ways are available at the booth, too, and visitors can also become a member of "Friends of Gentoo" (official German title of the NFP: Förderverein Gentoo e.V.) on the spot, for an annual membership fee of 20 EUR (10 for students). Gentoo Forum admin and moderators to become official staff members After years in the twilight zone, the Gentoo Forums are becoming an official Gentoo project. Christian Hartmann and Wernfried Haas submitted a GLEP that has already been discussed with Gentoo's developer relations department, as it directly impacts in their area, and has now been taken to the gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list for open discussion. This means that all administrators and the so-called global moderators will now be official Gentoo staff members. This will give the Forum team better access to developers and resources helping them ensure the quality of the award winning Gentoo Forums. In preparation for this change the Forum team has written a new document entitled "Gentoo Forums Moderator Policies and Guidelines". Gentoo Forums receive hardware donation Forum administrator Tom Knight's employers, Dialogue Communications, have generously donated two 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 hard drives and an AMCC 3ware 9500S-4LP SATA RAID controller. This hardware will mainly be used for development and testing of new forums features, including the long awaited UTF8 conversion which needs lots of I/O for testing. Thanks a lot! 64 vs 32 bit: is less really more? Triggered by Jem Matzan's article on Linux.com, this thread discusses the virtues of going 64-bit instead of staying with a 32-bit-architecture. As the article seems to find too little in terms of performance enhancement by the move at this time, the Forum regulars are a little disappointed about tomorrow's platform not being properly hailed as today's alternative, as they think it should be. UK: London Gentoo user and developer meeting Last Friday, a few Gentoo developers and users met up, albeit at very short notice, for a few drinks in central London. Gentoo developers Daniel Drake, Michal Januszewski (visiting from Poland) and Benjamin Smee (strerror) got together with event organizer George Prowse (more widely known as cokehabit) and Gentoo users Andy and Edwin for the afternoon. They are planning to organize a similar meeting later this summer, and this time there'll be some advance notice, promised!
A merry flamefest was kindled upon news that Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins had found employment with Microsoft. Among the readers commenting the short article, Hans Reiser could be seen putting drobbins' credit card debt in perspective with his own financial distress stemming from a messy divorce, other people volunteered to mount rescue missions, with about half the comments venturing into various sinister sci-fi analogies from Star Wars to Star Trek, apparently unable to decide whether it's been Darth Gates or Gates of Borg who lured Gentoo's ex-chief-architect into joining the forces of evil. The Age, Sydney Morning Herald (14 June 2005) Australian broad-sheet daily newspaper The Age picked up the story of Daniel Robbins' new employment at Microsoft from the Gentoo website. Author Sam Varghese puts the Gentoo founder next to Gnome's Nat Friedman as "about the only other prominent open-source figure" who has ever worked for Microsoft, with Ximian founder Miguel de Icaza having been interviewed once, but turned down. The same article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, a sister publication of The Age. A significantly more salacious way of wording the very same news item could be found at the Inquirer, a rather eccentric UK online publication who depicts Daniel Robbins turning into someone who "squeaks wildly in the burrow of the Vole" where he's "joined the forces of darkness" in order "to help Microsoft try to understand how Open Sauce works, a fairly major task." Yet another Gentoo-related article by Linux.com author Jem Matzen, this time about "64-bit performance in Gentoo Linux" -- or rather the lack of any really outstanding performance measured in his benchmark tests. An earlier test with FreeBSD in a 64-bit environment had already yielded similar results: "64-bit does make a difference, but that performance advantage may not be evident in all situations." Allowing for a few days of checking the background, ZDNet's Ingrid Marson wrote a more complete assessment of Daniel's new employment and the alleged ripples in the project's surface, which as she finds weren't as agitated as some expected. 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:
MediaWiki: Cross-site scripting vulnerability MediaWiki is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack that could allow arbitrary scripting code execution. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement webapp-config: Insecure temporary file handling The webapp-config utility insecurely creates temporary files in a world writable directory, potentially allowing the execution of arbitrary commands. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Sun and Blackdown Java: Applet privilege escalation Sun's and Blackdown's JDK or JRE may allow untrusted applets to elevate their privileges. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement PeerCast: Format string vulnerability PeerCast suffers from a format string vulnerability that could allow arbitrary code execution. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 12 June 2005 and 19 June 2005, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 8461 currently open bugs: 97 are labeled 'blocker', 214 are labeled 'critical', and 605 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:
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