Gentoo Linux News

LinuxTag 2010 runs from June 9th to June 12th in Berlin, Germany. With more than 10,000 visitors last year, it is one of the biggest Linux and open source events in Europe.

You will find the Gentoo booth at Hall 7.2a, Booth 203a. Come and visit us! You will meet many of our developers and users, talk with us, plus get some of the Gentoo merchandise you have always wanted.

Discuss this!

Alex Legler contributed the draft for this announcement.

After the success of the 2009 Screenshot Contest the Contest Team is doing it again!

Gentoo Users, Developers, and Staffers are encouraged to submit their sweetest screenshots. Please head over to the 2010 Contest Page for all of the details.

You can visit this forum post for comments and suggestions. OK enough talk, get started tricking out that desktop.

On June 26th we again invite you to take part in this year's bike ride: "Gentoo White Nights in Russia". Gentoo White Nights is a nighttime bike ride along the most beautiful city in the world - St. Petersburg - in the most magical time - the White Nights.

As last year's experience showed, it's possible to ride in the rain, so the event will take place regardless of weather. The event will take place during the night from 26th to 27th June this year. The starting point is the Moskovsky railway station at 10:00 PM. If you'd like to join the Gentoo White Nights, contact Andrey Surganov or Alexey Shetsov.

Andrey Surganov contributed the draft for this announcement.

Bookkeeper, Accountant, or CPA

And that means? We are looking for help from the Gentoo Community to help us in Accounting/Finance. We are in the process towards the goal of tax-exempt status with the United States Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit corporation. If this is your background, we could really use your help.

Please contact trustees@gentoo.org or visit Gentoo Foundation for details.

Today we have an interview with Andrzej Wasylkowski, and since August 2005 he has been a PhD student at the Software Engineering Chair at Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germany. His research field is software engineering, with strong focus on program analysis techniques and their application to automatic defect detection.

One of the projects he is involved in is checkmycode, which is a service that allows you to compare your code with the "wisdom of the crowds", over 200 million lines of C code from the Gentoo Linux distribution.

Please continue on and read the complete Andrzej Wasylkowski interview and learn all about the project and its use of Gentoo!

Gentoo has been accepted for its 5th consecutive year in the Google Summer of Code! GSoC pays college students $5000 to work full-time on an open-source project for a summer. Check out our GSoC 2010 homepage if you are interested in this year's GSoC for Gentoo. We particularly encourage applications from students who aren't already involved in Gentoo development—many of our students become Gentoo developers after a successful summer.

Interested students can browse Gentoo's project ideas. Student applications will be accepted starting March 29.

Developers, if you'd like to apply to be a mentor, you can do so on the webapp. Please read the mentoring guide before applying.

What: Gentoo Council Meeting of 8 March 2010.

Voting by email

Ideas seemed to converge on how to vote by email but it was noted that this would constitute a change of GLEP39 which the council can't modify without an all-developers vote. Since there were already other changes planned or suggested to GLEP 39 it was decided that the council would work on a new text and submit it to a vote when ready. Calchan has volunteered to gather all ideas and work on the text.

Do we want a policy for changes in metadata.xml?

Adding such information to metadata.xml was considered a bad idea for two reasons: this information is of no use to the users and would bloat the file for no good reason, and it would be a technical answer to a mostly social problem. It was suggested that reducing territoriality could help. Ideas were proposed like making it official that after sending an email to the maintainers and waiting one week anybody could touch a package.

In the end it wasn't clear what exact problem was to be solved. So scarabeus volunteered to animate the discussions on the mailing list. The goal is to find out what the source of the problem is and what solution(s) we can apply.

For more information, read the summary or the complete IRC log.

Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2010 is almost here, and Gentoo will be there!

This years Chemnitzer Linux-Tage on March 13th and 14th is another great chance to:

• get in touch with Gentoo developers
• buy Gentoo shirts (be quick, first come first serve)
• chat, discuss, start with ebuilds and overlays, you name it

The "Chemnitz Linux Days" is a conference that deals with Linux and Open Source Software . It is open for everyone, novices and experts alike. This event is organized by IN Chemnitz, CLUG, Computing Center and Faculty of Computer Science of Chemnitz University of Technology, and many volunteers.

See you there!

Sebastian Pipping contributed to the draft for this announcement.

SCALE 8x is almost here, and Gentoo will be there!

Southern California's premier open-source software event is just around the corner, running from Friday, February 19 through Sunday, February 21. Several Gentoo developers will be there; it will be our biggest showing since SCALE 5x.

We'll be showing off some nifty devices running Gentoo, and we'll be giving out installation media. Whether you're a developer, user, or simply curious, be sure and stop by booth #33. See you there!

Gentoo has turned up in lots of interesting places before, but Michael from Misa Digital has put Gentoo to work in something entirely different: a unique instrument he invented, a MIDI guitar that uses a touchpad and digital keys instead of strings!

Behold the Misa Digital Guitar:

The Misa runs Gentoo Linux on an AMD Geode processor, using the Linux kernel version 2.6.31. It sports MIDI and Ethernet ports for connectivity.

I had the chance to ask Michael some questions about the guitar and his preferred choice of operating system:

Why Gentoo?

Since the guitar is an embedded system, I needed a really minimal distribution that would boot fast and had a small footprint. After investigating Linux From Scratch, I realised I did not have the time to invest in building a complete system. I was told that the minimal install of Gentoo is like Linux From Scratch with a package manager. I probably made you cringe with that simplistic analogy but essentially it was right for me. Once I had the install up it took me no time to recompile the kernel and streamline it as much as possible. I'm not a Linux expert though, so I reckon someone else could shrink it even more.

Yes, there are other solutions out there but they are surprisingly inaccessable. And the "live-CD" style distributions do not allow you to change the actual workings of the system. I figured it was best if I just used Gentoo because I have full control.

What were the two biggest challenges in crafting this instrument?

I would say the two biggest challenges are: 1) manufacturing and tooling the actual parts; and 2) sourcing components.

When you are a lone developer with no company, trying to keep the idea "secret", no one wants to cooperate with you. For example if you need a particular electrical like a screen, ordering "one" of something is surprisingly difficult - and you can expect it in 4 to 6 weeks - really slow! And then when you get it, you realise it is not suitable, so you have to repeat the process. The only exception is a website called Digikey, which will have the parts at my doorstep in 1 week guaranteed. But they don't have everything.

Working with Gentoo was a breeze, the Linux community in general is extremely helpful.

What can you tell us about the hardware?

There is no signal processing, it outputs digital signals via a MIDI connection. I had toyed with having an onboard sound generator but ultimately you limit the sound possibilities. By using MIDI, you are guaranteed support with practically every sequencer, synthesizer etc on the market - it is a standard that has been around for over 20 years.

[The touchpad] is a 5 wire resistive touch sensor. These are the most durable screens available on the market. The LCD behind it is OEM and ordered from China.

What changes to Gentoo (as a distribution) would make it easier for you to run it on the guitar?

I thought Gentoo was a breeze to work with. And can I just say, the Gentoo x86 install handbook? BRILLIANT. I used it so much that I think I actually know it off by heart now.

What's in store for the future?

I'd just like to see these instruments hit TV :)

Thanks for your time, Michael, and for crafting such a unique instrument! Be sure to watch a demonstration video of the Misa Guitar in action.

A parting gift for the German Conspiracy,

Gunnar Wrobel recently acquired the rights for his own book about Gentoo, and it has now been published under a free license and is available for download. The latex source for the book is also included. Gunnar's intentions in publishing the latex source was to encourage translations... it would be neat if that really happens. Please take the time to thank Gunnar for all the excellent work he has done for Gentoo.

Stephanie J. Lockwood-Childs contributed to the draft for this announcement.

Yes, we will be there! Compiling all the way ... ,

Gentoo will be present at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3), from December 27th to 30th in Berlin, Germany. The annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club takes place at the Berliner Congress Center (bcc) in Berlin, Germany. Enjoy our ebuild hacking sessions, bug filing workshops, get some merchandise and use our local rsync/http mirror. You will find the Gentoo table on the upper floor.

Hope to see you there!

Robert Buchholz contributed to the draft for this announcement.

The Gentoo Foundation Inc. has been approached by a few large Gentoo users about purchasing advertising on the gentoo.org side bar. They are not in the IT industry so cannot support us in the traditional way, by donating their own product.

The trustees anticipate that more approaches of this nature will be received and view it as a sign of Gentoo maturing. Recognising that this would be a break with tradition, by allowing even major users to contribute to Gentoo in this way the trustees determined to put the question to a vote of Foundation members.

The recording date for the vote will be 29th November. Voting will be from 1 December to 11 December, to enable the result to be available for the next Trustee meeting on 13 December.

Important: To vote, your Foundation membership must be approved on or before that date.

Requirements:

Please refer to the Gentoo Foundation Bylaws, in particular 4. Article IV Members

The motion to be voted on will be:

Should major Gentoo users be permitted to purchase ads on the sidebar - Vote yes or No

If you have any questions please contact Trustees or on irc at #gentoo-trustees.

Please turn your KDE radio on, and make sure to increase the volume to its maximum level for this important message.

After multiple setbacks we have finally managed to stabilise KDE4 on both major desktop architectures (amd64 and x86), with other teams to follow.

For this and other reasons as discussed , those of you who still use KDE3 should be seriously considering an upgrade in the near future.

The KDE3 support is being deprecated with immediate effect. This means that ebuilds are dropping KDE3 support where they were broken, or clashing with KDE4.

If you wish to still use KDE3, and you want to help others with having KDE3 around, drop a mail to kde@gentoo.org, where we can give you commit access to the special overlay which will specifically contain only KDE3 packages.

This overlay (named kde-sunset) can be easily used via layman.

Sadly upstream is not supporting KDE3 anymore and we simply lack the manpower to keep support for both (as you might have noticed in the past few months KDE3 has become more and more rusty for which we humbly apologize).

Sorry to bring you the bad news and with hope that KDE4 will suit your needs,

Tomas Chvatal

KDE Teams substituting Lead

KUDOS to Nirbheek Chauhan and David Abbott for helping to put this announcement together and Alec Warner for proofreading it.