Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 26 June 2006The Gentoo Release Engineering project is looking for experienced users and developers to assist with the testing of the upcoming 2006.1 release. They are looking to have a wide array of hardware to test. All applicants will need to be available for testing, as well as have access to broadband Internet access, and a CD/DVD burner, since there will be a large volume of ISO images to test and new images will be released quite often. Interested parties should contact Roger Miliker with the following information:
They will select users whose hardware will give them the greatest coverage of testing capabilities, as well as users with a strong background in providing good information to developers for resolving issues. Gentoo x86 arch testers and developers wanted The x86 architecture team is looking for more ambitious members of the community who would like to help out by joining the team as Arch Testers. If you would like to give back to Gentoo, but don't know how, then this may be a good way for you to start. You would be helping by testing applications to be marked stable and assisting in general x86-specific bugs. Please take a look at the x86 AT documentation, and if you have questions about anything, please either email Homer Parker or Joshua Jackson. They are also looking for more developers to join the team and help out in resolving bug reports, keywording requests, and security bugs. Interested developers need only have a stable system or chroot, and be willing to work on bugs assigned to the x86 team. Please send an email to the x86 team alias, if you are interested in helping out. Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò has updated the ALSA packages to 1.0.12rc1 for compatibility with kernel 2.6.17's release. There have been some changes to the packages. The media-plugins/alsa-jack package has been deprecated and its functionality has been added to the media-plugins/alsa-plugins package. PowerPC users will be interested to know that snd-aoa has been merged into media-sound/alsa-driver for 1.0.12rc1, which is currently in package.mask, is in need of testing by users with the appropriate hardware before it can be unmasked. The Gentoo/Java team is pleased to announce that the new Java system is now unmasked in the tree. To begin using it, you will need to follow the upgrade guide. For those not familar with that this means, here are some highlights:
Larry the Cow - Lame? Some forum users have expressed a dislike of Larry. They feel that he has no purpose, is not relevant to Gentoo and is 'lame'. Others, however, seem to love the quirkiness of our Cow. Is Larry a useful mascot, a valuable part of Gentoo's history, or just an archaic character with no purpose? Gentoo/Alpha FAQ updated The Gentoo/Alpha FAQ has been updated with a patch by Thomas Cort and now includes additional answers about hardware maintenance, .dotnet support and the Alpha bootloader aboot. grep vs bash regex Roy Marples did some tests replacing grep with internal bash functions the results were impressive, with the internal bash functions being faster. His testing happened only on small files and assumes that grep may perform better on larger files as grep returns once a match is found whereas bash has to read the entire file. Author Hans Kwint has written an interesting article on his usage of Gentoo Linux on the desktop. Entitled A Gentoo diary: Intro", it is the first in a series of articles on Gentoo usage in daily life. Linux Link Tech Show (21 June 2006) The Linux Link Tech Show has a pretty long interview with four Gentoo developers, Mike Frysinger, Michael Cummings, Grant Goodyear, and Seemant Kulleen. It can be downloaded in either OGG Vorbis or MP3 format. The interview starts at about 24 1/2 minutes. AnandTech recently did a shoot-out of several different processors, including the Sun UltraSparc T1. For the article, they chose Gentoo Linux as the platform for the machines. Check out the article to see how the new Sun CPU fares against Intel's Wood crest and AMD's Opteron. While most of today's games won't run on Linux systems easily, there is still a wealth of options in yesterday's catalog that work great with an emulator. If you can hunt down an original copy of the games, ScummVM will run some classic point-and-click adventure games such as "Full Throttle", "Day of the Tentacle" and "The Secret of Monkey Island." The project first started out as a way to run old games that used LucasArt's SCUMM game engine, but now supports other games as well. See the compatibility list for all the games it can run. If you're not up to the task of hunting down computer games from the 1980s though, you're still in luck. One such game has been released for free distribution -- Flight of the Amazon Queen, and it's available in portage. To get up and running, first emerge scummvm on your system, which is already been marked stable on four architectures -- amd64, ppc, sparc, and x86. ScummVM itself runs on many other platforms: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PocketPC, PalmOS, OS/2 and more. Depending on your architecture, Flight of the Amazon Queen might be marked testing, so adjust your package.keywords file as necessary.
After that, add your user to the 'games' group if you haven't already.
If you are adding your user to the group, remember that you must log out and back in before the changes will take effect. Fire up scummvm, and it will open a graphical window where you can add your games. By default, FOTAQ won't be displayed in the list, but you can add it by clicking 'Add Game'. The directory with game data is /usr/share/games/queen. Once you navigate to that directory, simply click the 'Choose' button. After that, you should be good to go! You can also simply run 'queen' to start the game directly. The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:
The artswrapper part of aRts allows local users to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement KDM is vulnerable to a symlink vulnerability that can lead to disclosure of information. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement An integer overflow could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. 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 18 June 2006 and 25 June 2006, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 10343 currently open bugs: 53 are labeled 'blocker', 140 are labeled 'critical', and 544 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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