Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 17 September 2007GWN Staff seeking writing help The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter is staffed solely by volunteers from both the developer and user communities. While the team does have a good number of active and helpful writers from the community, it still needs more help. Each week, the GWN is delayed due to the lack of articles being submitted. This causes the staff to have to hunt down articles, which is a very time-consuming job. This is where you come into the picture. The GWN is looking for people from the community to join our writing staff to submit articles on a regular basis. The team is specifically looking for people to cover the following areas:
Of course, articles covering other areas, such as Gentoo News and Tips and Tricks are always welcome. Articles should be submitted in plain text or proper GuideXML. If you are not familiar with GuideXML, please submit in plain text. Please do not submit articles in HTML. If you are interested in having your work published, have a few hours a week to spare, and can read and write English, the GWN would love to hear from you. Just send an email to gwn-feedback@gentoo.org and one of the staff will get back to you as soon as possible. After several days of being read-only the Gentoo Forums are back online after the upgrade to MySQL 5 and a full conversion to UTF-8. The upgrade took a little longer than expected due to some unforeseen problems along the way, but the wait was worth it as all data is now in UTF-8 with very few conversion errors. If you notice any problems with topics or posts that have been converted incorrectly, or if you have any questions or comments please post them to the Forums topic UTF-8 conversion feedback. If you have any problems with your username or private messages please send an email to the Forums team. If you used any non-ASCII characters in your password you may not be able to log in to the forums, if this is the case you can request a new password. Gentoo Graphical User Interfaces Project Several Gentoo developers were discussing new goals within Gentoo, those discussions lead to the creation of the Gentoo Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) project. Gentoo is often called a command line oriented distribution; these developers sought to find new ways to improve the Gentoo's users experience. The main idea under this project is to develop applications to offer GUIs for most of the system tasks. They not only intend to develop applications from scratch, but also to collect and adapt existing GUI tools into Gentoo systems. They plan to work with the two most common GUI toolkits, qt and GTK+2. While the project is still in its infancy, the team welcomes participation and feedback from users and developers alike. For more information, visit the project's webpage and remember to enjoy the GUI experience! Quotes are for weak people, strong people have their own opinions - Dawid Węgliński (cla)
This week's developer of the week is 20 year old Dawid Węgliński, also known as cla. Dawid lives with his parents, brother, and sister in Sudetes, Poland. The Sudetes is a beautiful mountain range located in Central Europe. Dawid is currently attending the Agricultural University in Cracov. He is on his second year of studies for forestry. His goal is to become a full time Forest Ranger, who is responsible for management of forest goods; their main goal is to produce wood which is later sold. Dawid had the opportunity to work a contract for the National Forestry and is presently looking for similar work. Dawid likes to stay active; he enjoys soccer and volleyball. Locals may also know him as that strange man who takes long walks through the village at 3am! (Though since the interview, Dawid was reminded that late night Gentoo work is also a good way to pass the time!) His taste in music is rather varied, enjoying everything from rock, blues, jazz, and reggae. His favorite US bands are Type O Negative and She Wants Revenge. Dawid went on to talk about a recent festival he attended, The Woodstock Stop Festival, sharing his experiences of drinking, listening to great music, and having many wonderful and enlightening conversations. He stated that Woodstock is a great event that he hopes to attend next year as well. Dawid's favorite movie is Dzien Swira (aka Day of the Wacko), a drama about a man who hates his life and other people, as well as himself. When asked about Dawid's travels, he stated that he has seen a lot of southern Europe, to include Croatia, Spain, the Ukraine, France, Germany, and Switzerland. His favorite place was Barcelona, Spain. Dawid said that with his first computer, in 1996, he developed an interest in Computer Science. He was attracted to Linux as he was curious how things work, and more importantly, why things work the way they do. A friend showed him Gentoo, which quickly became his first Linux experience. Dawid recalled LiveCD 2005 and his stage2 installation. He said he first started helping out with English to Polish translations, which helped him learn how Gentoo works. He was able to apply his own knowledge in the IRC channels, which only served to motivate him further. When someone suggested that Gentoo create an Artwork team, similar to other distributions, Dawid got to work seeking a mentor. Karol Pasternak agreed to mentor Dawid, and was quickly rewarded with a Gentoo/OpenBSD logo. Dawid became a developer in April 2007, starting up the Gentoo Artwork Project. The Artwork Project is still in its infancy, but plans to work closely with Public Relations, GUIs, and Release Engineering. Cla is also on the GUIs Project, is an active GWN contributor, and still assists with Gentoo documentation translation. Outside of Gentoo, Dawid is one of the OpenSolaris International leaders, running http://pl.opensolaris.org and translating WWW, documents, etc for the OpenSolaris project. He also runs an IRCD server, irc.irc2.hu, which is mainly used by friends. Cla's home computers include his retired but still functional Pentium 166 MMX that he keeps around for nostalgia, an AMD Duron 800 workstation, and his Acer Celeron laptop, all of which are running Gentoo. He also administers a server running MySQL and Apache in Scotland for friends. When he sits down for some well deserved computer time, he connects to his IRSSI session, runs Gajim to chat with buddies, Opera to catch up on the news, and amarok because he just cant stand to do any of it without some good music playing. 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:
KVIrc: Remote arbitrary code execution A vulnerability has been discovered in KVIrc, allowing for the remote execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement A buffer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in Streamripper, allowing for user-assisted execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement RealPlayer is vulnerable to a buffer overflow allowing for execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement flac123 is affected by a buffer overflow vulnerability, which could allow for the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement A remote stack-based buffer overflow has been discovered in Eggdrop. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement id3lib: Insecure temporary file creation A vulnerability has been discovered in id3lib allowing local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement GNU Tar: Directory traversal vulnerability A directory traversal vulnerability has been discovered in GNU Tar. 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 09 September 2007 and 15 September 2007, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 9561 currently open bugs: 11 are labeled 'blocker', 109 are labeled 'critical', and 336 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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