Developer Donnie Berkholz, who is a council member, the X maintainer and PR team lead, spoke with David Abbott of LinuxCrazy. Download the podcast.

He described how he became a developer as well as his work on X, the council, the public relations team and the Summer of Code project he's mentoring for. Donnie also recommended the best video cards if you support open source. He saw the Linux desktop's future as increasing integration and security. Here's how Donnie described how Gentoo makes progress and where to go from here:

"The more time I spend in Gentoo, the more I realize that it's the individual developers who really drive most of our innovations. They don't happen because the council makes a decision. They happen because the developer, or a few of them, think that it sounds like a cool idea, and make it happen. ..."

"Making Gentoo great is my biggest goal right now, and greatness is a process. It's not a place. So you can't get somewhere and say you're great. You always have to keep striving for it. For a while we've been content to stick with the status quo instead of striving for greatness, but we have to change that and to always improve Gentoo."

If you would rather read it, forums user dch24 created a transcript of the interview.

Discuss this!

The May issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: Gentoo Foundation status, Summer of Code interview, network monitoring, and more!

Discuss This!

If you're interested in the legal standing of Gentoo, you can relax because in the past week, the State of New Mexico declared that the Gentoo Foundation Inc has returned to good standing and is free to do business. This accomplishment allows other aspects of the foundation's work to proceed again. The foundation takes care of Gentoo's intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks) and money. It ensures that nobody violates our copyrights and trademarks, serves as a place to hold money, and decides where to devote that money.

Thanks to everyone involved with returning Gentoo to good legal standing, and thanks to our community for your patience!

Discuss this!

Joshua Jackson and Josh Nichols contributed the draft for this announcement.

2008.0_beta2 is here. Thanks to you, our community, for testing beta1 and filing many bugs. You can help make 2008.0 amazing! Test out this beta and report any functionality issues you encounter. Since this is still a beta, we're looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork.

This should be the last beta and will be followed by the final 2008.0 release after further bug fixing.

Get 2008.0_beta2 from the usual places.

Discuss this!

The April issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: Summer of Code, Interview with Hyves, Speedup your boot time... and more!

Discuss This!

Council member Mike Frysinger, one of the most experienced and most active Gentoo developers, talked to David Abbott of LinuxCrazy. Download the podcast here.

Mike described his work on the toolchain (gcc, glibc, binutils) and embedded Gentoo, and he explained the short- and long-term goals of the Gentoo Council.

He also told a story about how and why he got into Linux and shortly after into Gentoo, explained the origins of both his nicks, vapier and SpanKY ("I came up with SpanKY because I needed something people would fear"), and described his typical day ("I wake up and keep programming until I fall asleep").

If you would rather read it, Marc Murphy created a transcript of the interview.

Discuss this!

Łukasz Damentko contributed the draft for this announcement.

OpenRC, the replacement for Gentoo's current services system (known as baselayout), will soon reach ~arch on all platforms. It replaces the previous bash-only rc system in baselayout with an rc system that has a C-based core and uses only POSIX-compliant shell code.

OpenRC runs natively on a wide variety of systems. Out of the box, it's compatible with Gentoo Linux, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Embedded Gentoo, and Gentoo VServers. It also works with FreeBSD and NetBSD and, once some installation problems get fixed, will be added to their package repositories, ports and pkgsrc.

Before upgrading, read the OpenRC Migration Guide so you update your system properly once OpenRC and baselayout 2 are installed.

Discuss This!

Doug Goldstein contributed the draft for this announcement.

Roy Bamford, the newly elected President of the Gentoo Foundation's trustees, spoke with David Abbott from LinuxCrazy. You can download the podcast.

He talked about recent challenges the Gentoo Foundation faces, among other topics. You can learn about the reinstatement of the foundation, short- and long-term plans, a possible move to the Software Freedom Conservancy and answers to some common questions, like how you can contribute to Gentoo. On a more personal note, you can hear about Roy's long Linux and Gentoo experience, his hardware and the origin of his nickname, NeddySeagoon.

If you would rather read it, David Hubbard created a transcript of the interview.

David Abbott plans to interview more well-known Gentoo developers. Next on the list is Mike Frysinger, a member of the Gentoo Council and many Gentoo core projects like the base system and the toolchain. We'll keep you posted.

Discuss this!

Łukasz Damentko contributed the draft for this announcement.

Thanks to overwhelming support from the open-source community, Google extended the deadline for student applications until April 7. If you'd like to spend your summer being paid by Google to work on Gentoo, this is your chance. This gives you until next Monday to work on your project idea. If you haven't yet submitted an application, now is the time. Students have submitted many interesting and unique ideas so far, and there's still room for your ideas. For more details, see our Summer of Code page.

Discuss this!

Joshua Jackson and Łukasz Damentko contributed the draft for this announcement.

When we said "soon," even we didn't realize how soon it would be. 2008.0_beta1 is here. Your support and enthusiasm are greatly appreciated—thank you.

You can help make 2008.0 amazing! Test out this beta and report any functionality issues you encounter. Since this is the first beta, we're looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork. We expect to release a second beta once your testing has helped us fix problems with this first beta.

A migration to RPM was carefully consideredagain for this release, but in the end we decided to wait for the few remaining RPM-using distributions to migrate to the superior packaging format of ebuilds.

Get 2008.0_beta1 from the usual places.

Discuss this!

For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal's licensing status. Is it GPL version 2? Are we moving to GPL version 3? Could we even if we wanted to? Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]? As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.

Understanding licensing, and the differences between licenses, is more important than some realize. Open source is not the same as public domain. Open source and Free Software requires that source code be made available and that others are allowed to make use and share of the source code, but there are rules attached to how they can do so just as there is with proprietary software. For example, not all open source software can be combined, and there are requirements for how you distribute the source code of a program. Knowing which of those rules apply to Drupal, and to Drupal modules and themes, is important not only for the health of the code base (so we know what we can and can't do with the work of over a thousand people) but also to the health of the growing commercial Drupal economy.

I am pleased to announce that we now do have firm answers to these questions, and have a new and shiny FAQ up to answer them. There is nothing new in the FAQ; it is just a clarification of some edge cases that didn't used to exist.

We'd like to thank James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center for his help in working out the details. We also wanted to take a few moments to go into some of the reasoning behind how we reached a few of these conclusions.

read more

When the site gets too busy, the infrastructure team sometimes disables the built-in search function. When this happens, you can use Google to search by putting site:drupal.org in with your query. There are also a couple of unofficial sites mentioned in the comments below. The issue to discuss how best to handle providing an alternate search is here. Comments have been disabled on this post because they were becoming unproductive. If you are able to help with the problem, please do so via that issue. Please note that saying "someone" needs to do "something" will not be any more helpful on that issue. We are already well aware of that.

Michelle

This Wednesday we opened the registration for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 and some of the early birds are already in! If you sign up before the end of June you will be able to buy your ticket at the extra discounted price of 80 EUR. From July the price will increase to 120 EUR, from August on to 160 EUR and just before and during the conference it will be 200 EUR to attend. We also help you get a hotel room and buy shuttle bus tickets until July 24, so if you'd like to go the easy way, make sure to register by then.

A week ago we published the sponsor packages. We received positive feedback from several companies and we already sold our first platinum package! As you might have noticed we only have 3 gold and 4 platinum packages available this Drupalcon. So if you want to get the exclusive benefits of these packages and get your company's name on one of our BoF or session rooms, contact us as soon as possible. To make the conference a huge success again, we will need your help: if you know a company that could be interested in sponsoring Drupalcon please get in touch!

We also opened session submission last week. If you have a topic that you would like to present this Drupalcon please fill in the form. Our track chairs will then evaluate your proposal and choose the sessions that will become part of the conference tracks. Session submission will be open until the last week of July. You can also submit BoF session proposals for our unconference program. This Drupalcon we are going to have 3 bigger rooms for larger BoFs (and an open space for smaller ones), so make sure to get the word out about your plans and spark interest in them sooner then later.

Drupalcon North America 2009, Drupalcon Europe 2009 as well as Drupalcon [place your idea here] are being planned right now. If you would like to have a Drupalcon in your town please let us know by submitting a formal proposal. If you have questions regarding the submission process feel free to contact the Drupal Association and someone will help you.

read more

Last week, I released thevintageaviator.co.nz. It was probably one of the most challenging Drupal sites I've ever done, but also the best so far. It's a presentation of a local WW1 Warplane workshop, containing build stories, reference material, and thousands of great images of plane reproductions and archive materials.

The build story is a long one, mostly because the requirements shifted along the way quite a bit. This story is targeted at current Drupal site developers who are interested in the tools and techniques used. Mostly to head off the "so how did you do that?" questions we get whenever we do a write-up :-)

However among the interesting thing for developers and designers will be the complex layered look, the way this layout was optimized to scale to all screen sizes, and the surgery I did to Drupal to make this all happen.

Initial feedback we've received so far has been overwhelmingly positive (save some justified grumbles about the page weight) and I'd like to share this case study.

read more

SourceForge.Net is a site which strongly believes in Open Source and what it stands for, in much the same way as the Drupal Community. Every year they host a competition where their community votes for their favourite packages and this year is no different. After reading through the Program Information I cannot see any reason why we shouldn't try to get Drupal up there ("Any open source project of any kind can be nominated by anyone (yes, that means you!) to be a finalist in any category" - from their website).

On their site they say "This is for the prize" in regard to voting, however I'm not completely sure if the prize is simply winning or if there is some financial gain for the Drupal Association.

So, lets try to get Drupal nominated for an award on Sourceforge.Net...
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-nominate

read more

In preparation for a web seminar with Drupal local group organizers in the North and South American time zones on Monday June 9th 5PM PDT, I've updated a map with Drupal local groups. Full Map

Real map after the break.

read more

We have just launched the Beta release of Sparkle*Shelf (http://sparkleshelf.com), a site that provides beauty enthusiasts with the latest information and tutorials on fashion, hair and makeup. We currently host fifteen regular feature writers, who contribute a total of 3-5 articles a day.

Sparkle*Shelf is also a place for members to connect with other like-minded members. There are basic social networking features as well as a number of beauty related applications/games, such as polls, quizzes and "smack-downs".

read more

The 2008.0 beta is roughly a month behind the original tentative schedule. A number of factors contributed to this, including the migration to new release processes, the usual delays that affect most open-source projects, and the death of a close relative of our developers Chris Gianelloni and Chrissy Fullam.

Work on the first beta is still underway, and we expect to release it soon.

Discuss this!

Gentoo is part of Google's Summer of Code for its third straight year. We are excited to work with ambitious students on projects to improve Gentoo for everyone. Gentoo's Summer of Code page has some project ideas, but you can propose anything! We look forward to your creative and unique ideas for improving Gentoo.

Starting next week, you will be able to submit applications for potential projects during the summer. Applications are open March 24-31. Please be as detailed as possible with your application so we know what your goals are. The full timeline for the Summer of Code is on Google's FAQ page.

Discuss this!

Alec Warner and Joshua Jackson contributed the draft for this announcement.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/general_sciences/Eureka_Science_News_just_launched';

Eureka! Science News just launched – it is a site dedicated to provide the very latest science news, but with a special twist – it is entirely automated! There is no human editor behind it - it finds relationships between news stories from all major science sites and regroups, categorizes, ranks, tags, finds related press releases and publishes them directly on the site. The result is an efficient overview of everything happening in science, right when it happens. The following details how we built the site.

read more