The Fringe

The September issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: EAPI-2 approved, Gentoo-Quebec training, learn to use iotop, and more!

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In future releases, Gentoo will focus on a more back-to-basics approach that will give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis and make much better use of our human resources. We're looking into automated weekly builds of the minimal CDs and stage tarballs as well as maybe an annual LiveCD release. We will keep you updated as we decide on the details of this new approach.

Consequently, we're canceling the 2008.1 release. The release engineering team has to reconsider its priorities—we overstretched our human resources during the prolonged 2008.0 release process. This caused too much stress for our release engineers and multiple postponements of the release.

You can help! The release engineering team is looking for new volunteers because it perpetually has a severe lack of manpower. We are particularly looking for people with a good grasp of ebuild development and the ability to debug/fix problems that crop up during building and testing of the stage tarballs and ISO images. We will update the staffing needs page with more details.

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Ben de Groot contributed the draft for this announcement.

What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs

Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs

When: Saturday, September 6, in a timezone near you

What do you need to bring?

• A Gentoo system, an Internet connection and an IRC client
• Your bug. If you don't have one, we will find you one to suit your area of interest and your skills
• Your favorite editor
• A way to test that your bug is fixed (asking people counts!)
• You don't need to know C, C++, or bash

What's a bug? Gentoo's way of tracking change requests. A change request can be anything from "I've found a typo in foo" to "I've built this really useful program called bar but there's no ebuild for it." Bugs have various levels of helpfulness, from identifying the existence of a problem to localizing the problem to providing the patch to fix it.

There are bugs in documentation such as man pages as well as ebuilds and the source code that Gentoo distributes. These bugs are problem reports. Bugs for things Gentoo doesn't do yet but you think should be done are feature requests. Bugday is more about fixing problems than adding features, but you won't be turned away if you want help with a new feature.

Want to know more about Bugday? It's held on the first Saturday of every month. It's an opportunity for everyone to contribute to making Gentoo better, and eventually you might even become a Gentoo developer. See the Bugday project page for more details.

Bugday is about community spirit. Gentoo is a community—there is no "me" and "them", there is only "we," so instead of lobbying for "them" to fix your particular bug, work together to fix it! Bugday is an opportunity to get help to help yourself.

If you've been wanting to get involved but weren't sure how, Bugday is a great way for you to see what goes on in making a distribution and get involved in Gentoo.

Discuss this!

Roy Bamford contributed the draft for this announcement.

The August issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: PHP4 removal, GSOC interview, new Gentoo-based distributions, and more!

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The July issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: 2008.0 release, Gentoo at Peel Fresco Music Lounge and more!

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For those unfortunate souls who couldn't boot or burn the LiveCD, we've provided the 2008.0-r1 revision bump. It fixes these specific problems:

• Bug #230998: 2008.0 LiveCD for x86/amd64 messes up when copying kernel/initramfs into tmpfs
• Bug #231024: LiveCD AMD64 image does not fit on ordinary 700MB CD

We apologize if you encountered one of these problems. We fixed them as quickly as we could after hearing about them. Get the new 2008.0-r1 revision from our "Get Gentoo!" page.

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The 2008.0 final release is out! Code-named "It's got what plants crave," this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD. LiveDVDs are not available for x86 or amd64, although they may become available in the future. The 2008.0 release also includes updated versions of many packages already available in your ebuild tree.

• Updated installer: The installer now only performs networkless installations using the packages and ebuild tree on the LiveCD. It also contains numerous fixes for extended and logical partitions.
• Improved hardware support: Moving to the 2.6.24 kernel added many new drivers for hardware released since the 2007.0 release.
• Complete rework of profiles: Restructuring profiles allowed significant cleanup of redundancies, reducing developer maintenance and confusion. The difference for you is that profiles now appear in /usr/portage/profiles/ under default/linux/ instead of default-linux/. See the upgrading guide for more details.
• Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD: To save space, the LiveCDs switched to the smaller Xfce environment. This means that a binary installation using the LiveCD will install Xfce, but you're still free to build GNOME or KDE from source.
• No LiveDVDs on x86 or amd64: In the interest of getting the release out, the release engineering team decided to postpone LiveDVDs because of problems in their generation. They may show up later—if so, we'll let you know.
• Updated packages: Highlights of the 2008.0 release include Portage 2.1.4.4, a 2.6.24 kernel, Xfce 4.4.2, gcc 4.1.2 and glibc 2.6.1.

A big thanks goes out to our release engineering team members for their hard work over many months to turn 2008.0 into reality.

Get the new release from our "Get Gentoo!" page.

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Elections just ended for the Gentoo council for the next year. Turnout was 57% with 145 developers voting, which is quite excellent. The council, created by GLEP 39 to replace Gentoo's previous hierarchy, decides on global issues and policies that affect multiple projects. To select council members, Gentoo uses the Condorcet voting method, which involves ranking them in order rather than just picking a single candidate. Here are your new council members, listed by ranking in the election results:

• Donnie Berkholz
• Mark Loeser
• Diego Elio Pettenò
• Petteri Räty
• Luca Barbato
• Markus Ullmann
• Tobias Scherbaum

All of the previous council members who ran again were re-elected, and the two new members are Mark Loeser and Tobias Scherbaum. A full list of ranked candidates is also available. These graphs illustrate the results more clearly. They are histograms, where higher columns on the left side indicate high rankings, and higher columns on the right side indicate low rankings.

The new council members will get right to work—the new council's first meeting, scheduled for July 10, is approaching fast.

Discuss this!

What: Gentoo contributors get together to help each other fix bugs

Where: irc.freenode.net, #gentoo-bugs

When: Saturday, July 5, in a timezone near you

What do you need to bring?

• A Gentoo system, an Internet connection and an IRC client
• Your bug. If you don't have one, we will find you one to suit your area of interest and your skills
• Your favorite editor
• A way to test that your bug is fixed (asking people counts!)
• You don't need to know C, C++, or bash

What's a bug? Gentoo's way of tracking change requests. A change request can be anything from "I've found a typo in foo" to "I've built this really useful program called bar but there's no ebuild for it." Bugs have various levels of helpfulness, from identifying the existence of a problem to localizing the problem to providing the patch to fix it.

There are bugs in documentation such as man pages as well as ebuilds and the source code that Gentoo distributes. These bugs are problem reports. Bugs for things Gentoo doesn't do yet but you think should be done are feature requests. Bugday is more about fixing problems than adding features, but you won't be turned away if you want help with a new feature.

Want to know more about Bugday? It's held on the first Saturday of every month. It's an opportunity for everyone to contribute to making Gentoo better, and eventually you might even become a Gentoo developer. See the Bugday project page for more details.

Bugday is about community spirit. Gentoo is a community—there is no "me" and "them", there is only "we," so instead of lobbying for "them" to fix your particular bug, work together to fix it! Bugday is an opportunity to get help to help yourself.

If you've been wanting to get involved but weren't sure how, Bugday is a great way for you to see what goes on in making a distribution and get involved in Gentoo.

Discuss this!

Roy Bamford contributed the draft for this announcement.

The June issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter has been released. In this month's issue: LinuxTag and FliSoL, GSOC interview, Gentoo in space, and more!

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Via Discovery News:
Scientists in California have developed a software algorithm that automatically creates a physical key based solely on a picture of one, regardless of angle or distance. The project, called Sneakey, was meant to warn people about the dangers of haphazardly placing keys in the open or posting images of them online.
...
When Savage and his students searched online photo sharing Web sites, like Flickr, they easily found thousands of photos of keys with enough definition to replicate. A more social person could simply use their cell phone camera to snap a quick picture of stray keys on a table top.
...
the researchers set up a camera with a zoom lens 200 feet away. Using those photos, they created a working key 80 percent on their first try. Within three attempts they opened every lock.

Check out the researcher's site here, where you can learn more and read their paper: "Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding."

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, you could have a camera with zoom hundreds of feet away from a door and leave it recording. If you've achieved the right angle, you could capture a few frames of the key pre-insertion-into-the-door that let you then make your own copy!

O'Reilly authors won three of four Jolt Product Excellence Awards. The winners are:

• Prefactoring, by Ken Pugh
• The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun
• Producing Open Source Software, by Ken Fogel

Maker Faire is fun for the entire family. There are plenty of things to make and hands-on activities for all ages. Take a look at some of the highlights and make plans to attend the next Maker Faire.
To download Maker Faire Austin 2008 - Kids MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

More Weekend Projects are on the way.

The Brothers Brick pointed out this amazing CGI animation of a LEGO fashion show by Fabrice Pathier (Four H). The clip features designs by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

Another nice "Things" video from Bre - laser cut animated horses!