Gentoo/Alpha Status Report
1.
Status Reports
Preliminaries
This is the status of the Gentoo/Alpha porting team. It will be posted
regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted to
gentoo-alpha@gentoo.org.
The Gentoo/Alpha porting team, has its own project page (just like
almost all other Gentoo projects). You can find it at
http://alpha.gentoo.org/. Also you can contact us
via IRC at #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net. The latest status report
can always be found on the Gentoo Linux Alpha Status
Reports subproject page.
Index
This status report will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives,
and/or projects related to the Gentoo/Alpha porting team:
2.
Content
New Developers
Since the last status report, the following developers have joined the
Gentoo/Alpha porting project:
-
Christel Dahlskjaer (christel)
Christel joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team recently to help with
testing kernels on SMP hardware.
-
Thomas Cort (tcort)
Thomas joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team in early April to help
with bug fixing, keywording, documentation, and security bugs.
-
Chris Gianelloni (wolf31o2)
Chris joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team recently to help
with testing kernels on SMP hardware.
Keywording and Stabilization
Stephen Bennett (spb) has continued
his work with SELinux on alpha. hardened-sources is now keyworded for
alpha. Thanks to the work of Stefaan De Roeck (stefaan) and others, modular X has been
keyworded and is working well on alpha. The Alpha arch team is also
pleased to announce that we have stabilized gnome-2.12.3 and kde-3.5.2
since the last status report.
Firefox and Thunderbird are Broken
The mozilla project has chosen to
discontinue the development of the 1.0.x versions of firefox and thunderbird.
Since that decision, multiple security holes have been uncovered. As a
result, we had to mask the 1.0.x versions of firefox and thunderbird
to keep our users secure since there are no plans to fix the security
holes.
No one on the Gentoo/Alpha team has been successful at getting the
1.5.x versions of firefox and thunderbird to run correctly, see Bug #113944 and Bug #131359. If you can help get
these packages working on alpha, it would be very much appreciated.
Documentation Project
The documentation subproject has written multiple new documents:
-
The Gentoo/Alpha FAQ -
an FAQ intended to answer some of the most frequently asked
questions relating to Gentoo/Alpha and Linux/Alpha in general.
-
Alpha
Porting Guide - a guide intended to show C programmers how to
port programs written on other architectures to the Alpha architecture.
Thomas Cort (tcort) has begun work
on an SRM console guide. It will be published in the documentation subproject
section of the Gentoo/Alpha project page.
Alpha Arch Testers Project
The Alpha Arch Testers Project was recently created by Fernando J.
Pereda (ferdy). The project is
meant to help the Alpha Arch Team provide a stable, secure and up to
date Gentoo Linux port by allowing users to participate in the testing
and stabilization process. If you want to learn more about this
excellent opportunity to give back to Gentoo, please check out the Alpha Arch Testers Project
Page.
New Alpha Project Page
Our project page was significantly revamped by Jose Luis Rivero (yoswink) and Fernando J.
Pereda (ferdy) with the help of
the rest of the Gentoo/Alpha team. The developer list has been
refreshed to reflect the current team membership. We now have
information about our subprojects too. Most subprojects now have their
own project pages.
Donations
Hardware donations are always welcome. We will gladly accept spare alpha
hardware. Even an old AlphaServer 1000 is useful for testing installation
media and kernels. More powerful systems could be used to assist in
testing packages, to provide developers with access to alpha hardware
to port applications, or to assist in building releases. Alpha computers
aren't the only hardware that we could benifit from; a SCSI or IDE DVD
burner would allow us to test dvdrtools, PCI 802.11 NICs would allow
us to do more extensive testing and unmask the wifi USE flag (currently
only 1 dev has an alpha with wireless), PDAs would allow us to
test PDA applications and unmask the pda USE flag. If you would like to
make a donation, please drop by #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net or
send an e-mail to alpha@gentoo.org.
2.6 SMP Kernels
The Linux kernel developers have been working hard on the Alpha port.
SMP is functional again and has been tested by a number of developers
and users in #gentoo-alpha. 2.6.15.1 and 2.6.16.19 have both been
tested on SMP hardware with good results.
The contents of this document are licensed under the Creative Commons -
Attribution / Share Alike license.
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