Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 22 January 2007Adobe recently released the final version of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Gentoo developers were quick to add it to the tree. Note that this version of Flash does not include a debug version, and it is still hard-masked. Thanks to Jakub Moc and Olivier Crete, for taking care of it so fast. Adopt-a-developer project update The Adopt-a-dev project has been neglected lately. The project would like to remind the users that developers can always make use of hardware or technical books to help bring better support and build a better distribution. Contributions are most welcome! For example, Diego Pettenò recently needed a cheap, low-end SoundBlaster card. This is the area where you can help his ALSA development efforts with a small donation. Chris White received a book on Perl from a user; he's putting it to good use maintaining and testing the Perl packages. Thanks! Once again, we need both developers and users to request and offer any resources that can be donated. It doesn't have to be a substantial donation -- you'd be surprised how often a simple item turns out to be exactly what is needed. Due to lack of leadership, time, commitment, technical know-how, skills, and the resources to implement and maintain a knowledge base, the KBase project has been ended. Also, there was no traffic on the mailing lists despite several queries, and the threads on the forums indicated lack of interest from the community. This lead to the decision that Gentoo doesn't need a knowledge base at present; the existing documentation provided by the Gentoo Documentation Project is sufficient. Note that the KBase developers are not retiring; they are still active in their respective areas of Gentoo development. Only the project has been retired. There are no plans to revive the project in the future.
20 year old developer Dimitry Bradt, also known as diox, grew up in De Panne, Belgium and now lives in Oostduinkerke, just off the Belgian coast. Dimitry lives with his parents, two younger sisters, and a cat named Felix. Dimitry attended college in Kortrijk for several years, studying for a bachelors degree in Multimedia and Communication Technology. After a few years study, he realized that it wasn't what he really wanted to do and left to pursue other interests. After leaving the university, Dimitry followed in his parents footsteps and became a cook. Though what he does comes pretty naturally, he is considering an Administration job with the government. When Dimitry isn't on his computer, he enjoys watching Anime. His favorite Anime show is Bleach. Not so into the pub scene, he says he's the kind of guy that enjoys visiting friends and having cozy chats over a bottle of wine. His favorite type of music is a good drum and bass or a mix of jazz and blues that he learned of from the Anime show Cowboy Bebop. Dimitry likes to read and watch movies. His favorite movie is The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain (aka le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain). As if he isn't busy enough with Gentoo and personal interests, Dimitry also found time to start a non-profit organization that assists the elderly with computer lessons. When diox moved into student housing in 2004, a room mate used Gentoo and quickly got him hooked. He fell in love with Gentoo and started contributing to the Gentoo Documentation Project by translating documents. He was later recruited and mentored by Xavier Neys. Currently diox is the Dutch lead translator and works with the Events, GWN, and Adopt-a-Dev teams. Diox's home computer collection consists of a P4 desktop and three AMD Athlon64 servers. The first apps that diox launches are fluxbox, rxvt, irssi, gajim, audacious, vim, azureus, and gaim. Introducing Planet Paludis! Alexander Færøy, a contributor at the Paludis project, wrote a blog post about their new asset, http://planetpaludis.org. For the people living under rocks, Paludis is an upcoming alternative to Portage written in C++, designed to offer improved performance, a more flexible configuration system and providing many much-asked-for features that were unable to be added to Portage. Planet Paludis is updated every 30 minutes to bring its community speedy updates. Because most of the Paludis developers are also Gentoo Developers, Danny Van Dyk will give a talk on it at FOSDEM 2007. He will be explaining how people can simplify maintaining packages within a basic Gentoo installation. Suggestions for a minimalistic system Vlad Dogaru was trying to create a minimalistic system to run on an older computer with 384MB of RAM. He was considering switching to Ratpoison as a window manager. Also, he was looking for a replacement for Firefox, but his experiments with Conkeror and links had proved unsatisfactory, as the former was too emacs-oriented and the latter lacked tabs. Readers were unfamiliar with Conkeror, an offshoot of Firefox with keyboard-only navigation modelled after emacs. Some confused it with KDE's Konqueror. Others, while interested in the project, noted that, with or without a minimalistic interface, Conkeror was still Firefox under the hood, and as big of a memory hog as Firefox. Readers suggested using Dillo, which is both lightweight and has tabs. Dillo has the disadvantage (if it is one) of not running Flash and having primitive Javascript capabilities. Others suggested Opera, which, while not free/libre software, was fast and tabbed. Window manager suggestions included evilwm, pekwm, XFCE and, oddly, KDE. The point was made that use of an integrated environment, be it KDE or Gnome, can be more efficient since the apps share libraries. Issues arise only when one tries to mix and match KDE and Gnome and wind up loading both sets of libraries. Australia: Linux.conf.au, Sydney Last week, a few Gentoo developers attended the Linux Conference in Sydney, Australia. Attending devs were: Daniel Ostrow, Mark Kowarsky, Christian Marie and Daniel Black. Though they didn't have a booth, they did have a great time. The most fascinating talks were: Keith Packard's talk on RandR, Andrew Cowie's and Madely's talk on GTK+ programming and Chris Blizzard's talk on OLPC. Besides the talks, there were many interesting things going on for attendees. Gentoo users, unlike the other distributions, weren't given chairs, but instead got a box full of chair parts and got to build their own! 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:
An assertion in oftpd could lead to a denial of service vulnerability. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement WordPress: Multiple vulnerabilities WordPress is vulnerable to SQL injection, information disclosure, and cross-site scripting attacks. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Kronolith: Local file inclusion Kronolith contains a flaw that could allow the execution of arbitrary files. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Mono does not properly sanitize pathnames allowing unauthorized information disclosure. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement This section lists packages that have either been moved or added to the tree and packages that have had their "last rites" announcement given to be removed in the future. The package removals come from many locations, including the Treecleaners and various developers. Most packages which are listed under the Last Rites section are in need of some love and care and can remain in the tree if proper maintainership is established.
The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 14 January 2007 and 21 January 2007, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 10728 currently open bugs: 25 are labeled 'blocker', 98 are labeled 'critical', and 458 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 GWN is staffed by volunteers and members of the community who submit ideas and articles. If you are interested in writing for the GWN, have feedback on an article that we have posted, or just have an idea or article that you would like to submit to the GWN, please send us your feedback and help make the GWN better. 10. GWN subscription information To subscribe to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, send a blank e-mail to gentoo-gwn+subscribe@gentoo.org. To unsubscribe to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, send a blank e-mail to gentoo-gwn+unsubscribe@gentoo.org from the e-mail address you are subscribed under. The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter is also available in the following languages:
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