Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 27 August 2007Announcement: forums scheduled downtime What is the problem, why is this needed? Being a part of the OSL data center, forums.gentoo.org relies on their backend database servers, which already have been upgraded to MySQL v5. We need to follow now and have forums.gentoo.org lifted up to v5 too. What will be done? The database will be shutdown and backed up. After some final consistency checks the migration procedures to the new database backend will be executed. If nothing unforseen happens, the conversion to full UTF-8 support is the last step. In order to have the needed steps executed quickly, the forums administrators have decided to shutdown the forums during this time. When will this happen? This activity will most likely start on 2007-09-08 and will take approximately 48 hours. The actual status will be regularly updated and shown on this status page. What if anything goes wrong? The admins have tested extensively to assess any possible pitfalls. Most have since been solved, while others need additional tuning before we can start. It may be possible that (very) few posts are not converted correctly or that usernames with special characters will not be able to login any longer. For the latter, please send an email to the forum mods whom will work such issues out case by case - please be aware that there might be the need to have your user name changed. Where to find additional information? If you have any further questions, before and after the conversion, please take a look at this thread in Gentoo Forums Feedback. As it won't be available during the conversion, please visit the status page during that time or feel free to drop by on IRC in #gentoo-forums on freenode. In a recent GWN, we reported about changes in nVidia driver packages. We have additional information that may be of interest for ATI video card owners: improvements in both Open Source and proprietary video drivers. Hanno Boeck announced recently in his blog that support for tv-out has been merged into the official xorg ATI driver. Thanks to his effort to relicense GATOS project code under the MIT license that is used by xorg, tv-out support will find it's way into one of the next releases of xf86-video-ati. The code is anticipated to work on most R200 and R300-based cards and is part of the new randr-1.2-branch. randr 1.2 is a new X technology that allows much better control of resolutions and output connectors. Until now, owners of the newer ATI hardware were in a better situation as official fglrx driver had support for tv-out. Maybe its use wasn't very easy, but users could use this functionality. It could be just pure coincidence, but in a recent driver release, as reported in Phoronix's short review, tv-out has been improved and now is supported by catalyst control center. It means that now it should be much easier to use TV with help of fglrx driver. The Gentoo Java Team is seeking people interested in contributing. They are particularly seeking people who can help package and/or maintain: JBoss, Glassfish, Eclipse IDE, and Enterprise stacks. If you are interested in helping out, please join the Gentoo-java mailing list or read their getting involved page. Let Bash Save Your Aching Fingers One the greatest things about Linux is that all you really need is a command prompt to get some work done. Of course, this comes at the expense of stressing out your finger muscles. Or... does it? Here's some nice little tips to save your aching fingers. Sometimes you get tired of entering the same commands over and over again.
Use the alias command to save a lot of typing
Or better yet, make it permanent by putting the alias in your .bashrc
Now, using "ls" has the same effect as "ls -loBh --author --color=always --group-directories-first". So you can replace the long commands above with much shorter commands. Sometimes using an alias might not be as convenient as searching the history. Most everyone knows that you can scroll through recent commands by using the up arrow and down arrow keys at a command prompt. But, did you know there's a MUCH quicker way to get to a recent command? Suppose you need to update your environment variables and source your profile. You know that sometime in the last 30 or so commands you typed 'env-update && source /etc/profile'. You could hit the up arrow 30 or so times until you find it and then hit the enter key, but you remember a cool trick you read in a recent GWN. So you hit ctrl - r and type "env". Magically, as you type the letters the whole line "env-update && source /etc/profile" pops up.
Next, you hit the enter key and the command executes. If you decide you want to edit the command before executing it, you can hit the left or right arrow and the command will be placed at the prompt so you can edit it. For those that have taken the time to master vi, it's also possible to use vi key bindings instead.
Now, you can type escape / and enter the search string. By pressing the 'n' key you can scroll through the previous entries, 'N' will scroll forward, in case you accidentally go past the command you want to run. Sometimes aliases and command history doesn't help you at all, because you haven't type in the command before. Bash completion comes to rescue here. In most places on the command line, you can hit the 'Tab' key and Bash will complete the word for you. This applies to both commands and sometimes even command arguments. This comes in very handy when you want to view the contents of a long directory path. Now the following command can be typed in only 27 keystrokes instead of 60, including hitting the 'Enter' key.
Here's a final finger saver for you when backing up important files before you make changes to them. Most people like to make a backup of an important config file before making major changes. Next time, instead of typing the following:
Take advantage of Bash's brace expansion and type the following for the same effect.
Now that you know how to use brace expansion to make backup files, you can easily see the changes with the following:
Of course, this is just the tip of the ice berg for cool bash tricks. Check out some of our previous GWN bash tips and tricks or for more helpful Bash tips, join #bash and check out this helpful wiki. Previous GWN Bash Tips
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:
Qt: Multiple format string vulnerabilities Format string vulnerabilities in Qt 3 may lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code in some Qt applications. 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 19 August 2007 and 25 August 2007, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 9820 currently open bugs: 10 are labeled 'blocker', 102 are labeled 'critical', and 352 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. 8. 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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