Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 23 July 2007Diego Pettenò completed a guide on enabling realtime support for multimedia processes. If you were playing with a MIDI instrument connected to a software synthesizer, a high latency would yield improper results. However, if you use multimedia processes only to play songs while doing other tasks such as surfing the web, you don't need realtime support. This guide was written for people who need the maximum priority for multimedia support. The beauty of this guide is that it will show you a simple method to get realtime support, without any extra software: you have only to set up PAM correctly. Thanks a lot to Diego for this nice guide and also to Josh Saddler for editing the guide. Compilation Optimization Guide Josh Saddler completed writing the Compilation Optimization guide, which has been added to the Gentoo documentation repository. This guide is an introduction to optimizing your compiled code using sane CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS and also includes an introduction to optimization in general. This guide was highly requested from users on the forums, Bugzilla, and IRC. Gentoo Artwork Project looking for volunteers Dawid Weglinski has recently kicked off a new Artwork project aimed at officially maintaining all Gentoo-related artwork and Gentoo desktop themes. The team is looking for new members and would appreciate any artwork contributions from the community. Qualifications for interested contributors should be a base knowledge on creating artwork, use of the related programs, as well as a sense of esthetics. There is particular interest for people with experience in configuring graphic environments (KDE, GNOME, Xfce), especially with GTK+ based applications. If anyone is interested, join #gentoo-desktop for discussions. Gentoo Alpha Project Status Update A new Gentoo Alpha Status Update has been released. Check out the update to find out more about the changes in core system packages (kernel, GCC, glibc), general port overview and even the latest news on the new aboot revision and security improvements. Linux+ has released an issue featuring Gentoo's latest release: 2007.0. The magazine release includes three articles about the Gentoo Linux Installer (GLI), an introduction to some of the basics of portage, and deploying Gentoo on multiple machines. The first article about the Gentoo Linux Installer was written by Preston Cody, who helped create the Gentoo Linux Installer. The article describes why the installer was created, what the hardest tasks of building the Graphical Linux Installer are, and what each step of the installation is about. The next article, written by Anant Narayanan, who has worked with GNU parted amongst other OSS projects, covers how to easily install Gentoo on multiple machines. The article gives details about the pre-requisites before you plan on duplicating the machine and then shows you how to do it with a program called Partition Image. The third article goes in depth about Gentoo's package manager and was written by Marius Mauch, one of the lead Portage developers. It gives some great insight on the portage package manager as well as the configuration, basic operations and explanations of the main tools used with Portage. A link to the magazine can be found here. Back in the December 4th issue of the GWN, a nice update script called update-world was featured in the Tips and Tricks section. Since December, several more update scripts have been posted by budding developers. One such script is simply called update. Update was started based on conversations around guenther's upgrade and count_zero's update-world. It has been in testing since mid-January 2007, and one such tester event boasts on its "flawless" performance. So, what exactly does this script do? Update is similar to other update scripts in that it will automatically skip failed packages and continue to emerge the rest of an emerge list. In addition, it has built-in support for automatically running revdep-rebuild, auto-mounting a tmpfs to speedup emerges, sync first, fetch files first, special options for updating a server via a cron job, and more. Another great feature is that it automatically hides most of the cruft from compiling packages, which makes it much easier to see einfo and ewarns, though this capability is less important with the newest versions of portage. You can also further reduce or even increase the log output with the use of the -q and -v options. Here is some sample output from a gcc compile.
Most users will likely find this script as an easy way to update their entire system.
The original forum thread and a download link for the script can be found at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-546828.html. Thanks to steveL for providing this script. 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:
Gentoo Security is on hiatus this week due to no GLSAs being released. 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 15 July 2007 and 22 July 2007, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 9915 currently open bugs: 11 are labeled 'blocker', 111 are labeled 'critical', and 362 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. 9. 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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