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.
This status report will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives, and/or projects related to the Gentoo/Alpha porting team:
Since the last status report, some of our developers have gone and some others have joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting project.
Developers who left the Alpha Team:
New developers, arch testers and contributors:
Toolchain and Kernel development
Due to some changes in the way the kernel headers allow to use the types declaration (knowing by "sanitized headers") aboot was not able to compile against kernel headers >=2.6.19.
Aboot uses a lot of kernel structure definitions so the only quick fix available was to use the old headers during the building process. Mike Frysinger was kindly enough to provide a revision of the latest aboot version and now we have a shiny: aboot-1.0_pre20040408-r1 marked as ~alpha.
The keywording process has suffer a major improvement thanks mainly to the work of armin76 and our arch testers. xorg-7.2, gnome-2.16 and kde-3.5 are stables on alpha as well as latest versions for all desktop packages.
We also keep the status of security supporting arch attending all the security bugs managed by the Gentoo Security team with a very good response time.
In the previous status report, firefox and thunderbird 1.5 series were broken on alpha. Currently, the situation has changed and now, the latest versions of these mozilla products are keyworded for alpha.
The Alpha Arch Testers Project was 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.
Hardware donations are always welcome. We will gladly accept spare alpha hardware. We are specially looking for desktops systems which aren't too big to keep them in a house. That's because we lack the resources to test some software which needs to have physical contact with the box (cd-writers, sound, bootloaders, kernels, etc.).
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, other hardware components are also quite useful to improve our developers machines. 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.
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