Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 26 May 2008Welcome to the May issue of the Gentoo monthly newsletter! As usual, you can discuss any aspect of this issue of the GMN in the corresponding forum thread. We look forward to hearing from you! Thanks to the efforts of the Gentoo Trustees, the Gentoo Foundation is once again a nonprofit organization. The Gentoo Council held its monthly meeting on May 8, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:
Some items were rolled over from the previous meeting:
Interview: Google Summer of Code Student Eric Thibodeau GSOC has started, and GMN editor Anant Narayanan has interviewed one of Gentoo's students, Eric Thibodeau. GMN: Give us a brief introduction of yourself. Where are you from? Where and what do you study? What's your homepage or other means for fans to stalk you? Eric: I am from Montréal, Québec (Canada) and have been studying at the École de technologies supérieures (aka ETS) since 2000. I've completed a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering (Information Technology profile) and was offered to continue on with a masters in parallel processing and Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm profiling which I am hoping/have to finish this summer ;). I've given BASH labs and classes at that same University on and off depending on my time availability (now why am I giving a lab this summer is beyond me ;) ). I use my personal wiki (http://wiki.neuralbs.com) mostly as a sandbox for jotting down stuff I do with Gentoo. I am not a big fan of personal web pages since they are outdated by definition and would require too much of my time. The best way to reach me is usually by poking at me on Freenode where I lurk around and pester the really smart people from #gentoo-(cluster|science|server). GMN: Were you already involved with Gentoo and/or open source in general before acceptance into SoC? If yes, briefly tell us how you got involved and why you like writing open source code. Eric: I've been mostly involved with Gentoo as a sysadmin, user and a preacher (of some sorts). Due to my studies, my involvement usually revolved around creating ebuilds for packages that were missing from the tree (ie: OpenMPI which I was really glad a real dev took over ;) ), reporting bugs and sharing my experience/expertise surrounding parallel processing, NFS booted Gentoo SSI (Single System Image) and High Performance Computing. GMN: How has your experience with the Gentoo community been so far? Eric: I can't really give an assessment of the Gentoo "community" since I've been using Gentoo since 2002 and might be biased by my first impression which was 1) excellent documentation, 2) The "raison d'être" of open-source and Linux: software compiled and optimized specifically for your hardware and finally 3) A very active community where anyone can easily contribute (ebuilds are just text files). GMN: Please tell our readers a little about the project you're working on, and why you think it will be helpful to Gentoo users. What was your inspiration for starting the project? What do you expect to achieve with it? Eric: I'll be working on building a Gentoo LiveCD/DVD with a twist: it will be used to create a Beowulf computation cluster "on the fly". I picked this project up after seeing a request for such a CD on the gentoo-science mailing list (it was actually "if there is someone crazy enough out there"). What prompted me to take on the project is the fact that I have rebuilt a cluster a few years back by creating my own Gentoo SSI and cluster head node. The process was long, frustrating, half-documented and mostly not completed to my satisfaction due to lack of tool integration and poor reproducibility of my setup. My primary goal is to make clustering under Gentoo more accessible and faster to deploy rather than learning every bits and pieces required to build such an infrastructure. GMN: What do you do when you're not coding? (hobbies, interests, favorite T.V. shows etc.) Eric: Apart from coming up with excuses to stay in front of the computer to "chat with this otherwise never accessible godlike dev" on IRC, I enjoy taking care of my nine month old daughter, watching off-beat movies with my girlfriend. Although it's been a while since I've had a chance to do so, I usually help out in designing some eccentric clothing (http://www.mekkreations.com) which tend to reuse computer parts (hard disks are so cool!) GMN: Thanks for your time, and wish you all the best for the Summer! Porthole 0.6.0 nearing release Porthole is a gtk+ Portage tree browser and front-end. It strives to put the most important and useful information there for you to learn about a package before deciding to upgrade or install it. It also provides the most commonly used emerge operations with just a click or two. One of Porthole's greatest features is that information is much quicker to find, especially if you do not know what you are looking for. Porthole can search for (partial or complete) package names, as well as searching package descriptions. Porthole allows you to easily select and set USE flags, keywords, select specific versions to emerge or unmerge, and toggle any of the emerge options off or on. There is also a "Run Custom Command" option to send nearly any command to Porthole's terminal. The terminal has configurable message filtering (since before Portage implemented elog capabilities) and has a command queue that can be paused and restarted. New in porthole-0.6.0 is a saved description database that Porthole creates and automatically updates when it sees that the Portage tree has been updated. This provides for very fast description searches even on older slower hardware. The results are browseable with just a mouse click. Another new feature in porthole-0.6.0 is the ability to add "Sets" support to existing Portage versions without waiting for portage-2.2 or switching to pkgcore or paludis. Sets let you easily create your own package groups such as a custom Gnome set, a server set, etc. Porthole is available in several languages, and its developers are looking for volunteers to update the translations and add new languages. They would also like additional arch testing. Follow its development on Bugzilla and this forum thread. Project Sunrise: the Gentoo user overlay We all know that the Portage tree is huge, but even with the size of Portage, sometimes some package is missing: a plug-in for some specific mail client, or a brand-new fork of a web server. In such cases, you'd usually file a bug at bugs.gentoo.org, but there's some chance your ebuilds won't make it to the tree from there, at least not for awhile. The trouble is "maintainer-wanted@gentoo.org" in the AssignedTo field, which indicates that a Gentoo developer has yet to step up and maintain your package. How about being your own maintainer of a package? Guess what: it's possible! Thanks to Project Sunrise, you can make your own ebuild and add it to a package overlay maintained by users. After a review of your ebuild by Gentoo developers (which usually takes at most two days), everyone will be able to easily install your ebuild, as transparently as if it was in the Portage tree. Interested? Check out http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise or stop by on IRC at #gentoo-sunrise on irc.freenode.net. Happy ebuild crafting! Interview with Donnie Berkholz Gentoo developer Donnie Berkholz talked to David Abbott of LinuxCrazy. Download the podcast. A transcript is available on the Gentoo Forums. He described how he became a developer and his work on X, the council, and the public relations team and the Summer of Code project he's mentoring for. Donnie also recommended the best video cards to buy if you want to 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." Decibel Audio Player: Joshua Saddler has been working to bring Decibel, a clean, userfriendly gtk+ audio player, to Gentoo. It's finally been added to the tree, so try it out. Microcode: Ryan Hill informs how one can load microcode updates for Intel-based processors. Python: As Python is the base for our main package manager, Ali Polatel tells us about the current state of Python. Portage: Portage developer Zac Medico describes some new features of Portage and documents the behavior of Portage in detail: dependency resolution and automatic unmerge on blocking packages. No Gentoo on virtual server? No problem!: Gunnar Wrobel has a guide on how to install Gentoo on rented virtual servers. System tool: Luis Francisco Araujo announces the 0.20 version of his tool Himerge, a graphical frontend to Portage. Replacing grep: Although it sounds weird, Tobias Klausmann describes why there is a nice alternative to grep. LZMA vs. bzip2: As more and more GNU tarballs are available as LZMA compressed files, Tobias Klausmann does a quick comparison of the standard compression tools. Organising meetings on IRC: Donnie Berkholz has some experience in organising IRC meetings as member of the Gentoo council. His experience is worth sharing. RDEPEND vs. DEPEND: Diego Elio Pettenò has written down a summary of the differences between RDEPEND and DEPEND and why you should respect them. Gentoo received a favorable review from Jones Productions, even beating Ubuntu 8.04. The author also praised the extensive documentation.
The thing I love most about Gentoo is it gives the user the power to do anything
they want, and its just awesome to be able to use a Distro that you built
yourself.
Command-line network monitoring Have you ever wanted facilities like top, but for your computer's network? This tip shows you what options you have in command-line network monitors. The first is IPTraf:
Using it is easy:
It is a highly advanced ncurses interface. You can choose view your network status from many angles: IP traffic by port and IP address, general interface statistics such as number of packets passing through, speed and volume of packets passing through, and much more. Another network monitor is vnstat. This program is useful for historical statistics. It keeps a database for your interfaces.
It will need an hour to gather enough statistics. vnstat is installed with a cron script (/etc/cron.hourly/vnstat) that updates vnstat's database every hour. Once you have enough data in the database you can get hourly, daily, and monthly data from vnstat. For example, to see hourly statistics:
A third program is iftop. iftop does for networking what top does for CPU usage. It shows you which connections have the most traffic going in and out. Install iftop:
Then run and use it just like top:
You can press ? to view options that you can use. Gentoo is made up of 261 active developers, of which 43 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 642 developers since its inception. 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:
This section summarizes the current state of the Portage tree.
The following section lists packages that have either been moved or added to the tree. The package removals come from many locations, including the Treecleaners and various developers.
The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. The following chart summarizes activity on Bugzilla between 20 April 2008 and 20 May 2008.
Of the 11141 currently open bugs: 16 are labeled blocker, 103 are labeled critical, and 374 are labeled major. The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are as follows.
The developers and teams who have been assigned the most bugs during this period are as follows.
The GMN relies on volunteers and members of the community for content every month. If you are interested in writing for the GMN, do write in to gmn-writers@gentoo.org with your articles in plaintext or GuideXML format.
We solicit feedback from all our readers on the newsletter. If you have any ideas for articles, sections, or have anything to say about the GMN, don't hesitate to email us at gmn-feedback@gentoo.org. You can also give us your feedback and comment on this particular issue of the GMN on the forum thread. 9. GMN subscription information To subscribe to the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter, send a blank e-mail to gentoo-gmn+subscribe@gentoo.org. To unsubscribe to the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter, send a blank e-mail to gentoo-gmn+unsubscribe@gentoo.org from the e-mail address you are subscribed under. The Gentoo Monthly Newsletter is available in the following languages: |
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