Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 5 March 2007Opengear has shown its generous side to Gentoo once again. Last year, Opengear donated two CM4008 console servers and followed up with yet another CM4008 this year. If you're not familiar, these console servers provide secure access to serial and network consoles, allowing infrastructure to monitor and control servers and switches remotely, from anywhere and at any time. These have been a great resource for infrastructure and the developer community. Thank you for your donations Opengear! Gentoo's Xfce project gained it's official Gentoo project status, thanks to Joshua Saddler and Joshua Nichols. What's coming up next for the Xfce Project? There is an open stabilization bug for the Xfce Desktop Environment 4.4.0 and architecture team sign off on a list of stabilization and keyword bugs. "I sacrifice my x86 hardware on the altar of source-built distros!" - Joshua Saddler, nightmorph
Joshua Saddler, also known as nightmorph, is this week's featured developer. He is 24 years old and resides in San Diego, CA, which is in the South-West of the US, next to the Mexican border. Josh lives with his wife Melanie; they celebrate eight months of marriage - congrats! In 2005, Josh graduated college with a degree in theater. He has always been into art, theater, and music classes; so much so that he's been playing the piano for 16 years. In his free time, Josh likes to read, write, listen to music and browse the local bookshops. Josh's love of literature is obvious. He currently works as a librarian and worked in a bookshop prior to that. Though he's shy to admit it, Joshua's poetry has been published. When he's reading, which is whenever he can find time, it will probably be a fantasy novel. His favorite authors are Timothy Zahn, David Weber, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Josh likes chill/world/ethereal music, though he enjoys a wide range of music types, which goes from jazz to rock, even to classical. Like any good developer, he also enjoys relaxing with a good online fragfest: UT2004 on his AMD64! Josh started using Linux after seeing a friend using Linspire. After a lot of research, he found his favorite Linux flavor: Gentoo. Some time later, after wondering how he could give back to Gentoo, he decided to help with the Gentoo Documentation Project, since he isn't into programming. Josh joined the documentation team and contributes documentation for other projects in need. His documentation skills have been put to good use for various teams, including the newly formed Xfce project. Josh reflects on the last two years of being a developer from his being mentored by Shyam Mani to his recent contributions on his blog post. When Josh's AMD64 workstation boots, he opts for a GNOME session and the following applications: gnome-terminal, audacious, Firefox, Thunderbird, gvim, irssi, mplayer for movies and k3b for writing discs. Also of noteworthy mention is his laptop, a vintage 2001 Toshiba that has burned out two hard drives, various sticks of ram, and even a memory slot whilst compiling Gentoo over the last few years! Belgium: Free Open Source Software Developers European Meeting, Brussels If you weren't one of the fifty plus Gentoo developers that came to FOSDEM this year, here's what you missed out on! FOSDEM'ers met up Friday evening at Le Roy d'Espagne, on the Grand Place for a traditional pre-FOSDEM beer. Did I mention the FOSDEM tab exceeded 5,000 Euro? Gentoo developers, users, and a few admirers enjoyed an elegant dinner at Restaurant Roma Saturday evening. In typical developer fashion, the elegant dinner was followed up by a round of good old fashioned Brussels bar hopping. How about the event itself? The Gentoo booth boasted a handsome display of developer boxes to include a HPPA C3600 and several EFIKA setups - touch screens, gaming boxes, and more. Gentoo talks, talks, and more talks. Some might say the devroom talks were the hit of the Gentoo presence. The chairs were not only full for every Gentoo talk, but virtually every talk left little to no standing room. While FOSDEM 2007 was definitely a success, the Gentoo Events project is already working on ways to make it bigger and better in 2008 - hope to see you there!
Want to read more or check out some FOSDEM pics... check out the developer impressions at Planet. Germany: Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, Chemnitz The third year in a row, Gentoo Linux presented a booth at the Linux-Tage in Chemnitz, Germany. On March 3rd and 4th, developers Wernfried Haas, Hanno Boeck and Robert Buchholz, former developer Jan Seidel (tuxus) and Mr. Big had the opportunity to chat with users and discuss the distribution, as well as see beyond their own noses by visiting the close-by Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora booths. Besides getting stickers and case badges, some of the 2700 visitors of the "Linux days" could see a Gentoo cross-compile installation on MIPS and installations on a ppc-iBook and on a x86-notebook.
Gentoo was also featured with an introductory talk by Wernfried Haas called The Gentoo Metadistribution (slides in German).
Copenhagen, Linuxforum 07, Denmark The annual Linuxforum event, held in Copenhagen, is one of the largest events in Northern Europe. This year's venue received over 2,900 visitors! The Gentoo booth was covered by developers: Stefan Cornelius, Sune Kloppenborg, Thilo Bangert and Alexander Færøy. Alexander gave a speech on Gentoo, making strong points about choice, compiling by source, and why Gentoo has such a great community. 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:
A buffer overflow was found in MPlayer's RTSP plugin that could lead to a Denial of Service or arbitrary code execution. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement CHMlib: User-assisted remote execution of arbitrary code A memory corruption vulnerability in CHMlib could lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Snort: Remote execution of arbitrary code The Snort DCE/RPC preprocessor contains a buffer overflow that could result in the remote execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement SpamAssassin: Long URI Denial of Service SpamAssassin is vulnerable to a Denial of Service attack. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement ClamAV contains two vulnerabilities allowing a Denial of Service. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Mozilla Firefox: Multiple vulnerabilities Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Mozilla Firefox, some of which may allow user-assisted arbitrary remote code execution. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Mozilla Suite: Multiple vulnerabilities Several vulnerabilities exist in the Mozilla Suite, which is no longer supported by the Mozilla project. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement AMD64 x86 emulation Qt library: Integer overflow The AMD64 x86 emulation Qt library makes use of an insecure version of the Qt library, potentially allowing for the remote execution of arbitrary code. 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 25 February 2007 and 04 March 2007, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 10426 currently open bugs: 17 are labeled 'blocker', 113 are labeled 'critical', and 423 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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