Josh Saddler

Well. Looking at my forum posts, today appears to be my two year anniversary of using Gentoo.

And, about a 3-year anniversary since I first found out about it. This is gonna sound weird, but I first heard of Linux in 2003 after seeing it in action on a roommate's PC. And I then spent a solid year reading about it online, about distributions, LiveCDs, watching the xfree86 --> X11 shift, following trends, reading about how to install for different distros, reading and participating in Linux forums, etc. Linux seemed so totally different than Windows that I wanted to learn everything I could so that I could get it right on my first try, since I knew I just had to try it.

Flash forward to fall '04: I first entered the world of Linux LiveCDs by various distros or attempting to install this new kid on the block Ubuntu (their installer was a POS). That didn't work, so I moved on to the most interesting distribution I'd run into, one whose forums I'd been reading for months . . . Gentoo 2004.3!

I installed 2004.3 toward the end of January '05. If I recall correctly, it did take a few tries to install Gentoo; I went with a stage2 install, since the handbook indicated that it would "impress my friends and other users" or some such (yes, 1-3 were supported options at the time). I actually got it right the first time, though it took 3 straight days (mostly kernel configuration time), since I was in college and had classes to attend. Then, once Gentoo was installed, I immediately reinstalled, now that I was a bit more confident about what this Linux installation thing by CLI was all about. Result? An unbootable system! Promptly re-reinstalled and settled for the working system. An interesting thing is that I've never had a faster boot time than I did with 2004.3, even when I had my full desktop installed. Cold boot to logged in Gnome --> 22 seconds. Even this workstation, which is easily 10x more powerful on its worst day, can't top that. Something to be said for vintage Gentoo. (Side note: 2004.3, and later, 2005.0 was back when running with cflags=-O3 on my P3 laptop actually was perceptibly better than -O2. Don't ask. And don't try -O3 with 4.x.)

Of course, the biggest problem, judging from my first forum post two years ago, was that I had some funky USB/PS2 mouse issues. Pressing the "k" key killed everything whenever I typed it. Weird.

What'd I do with my dual-boot system? Well, I tried to not use Windows except for gaming, and immediately plunged back into the forums that had helped me so much, and I tried to help other users in return. It wouldn't be long before I started on my first big community project, helping out with what would later become The Jackass! Project, which was originally designed to meet some shortcomings in the stable toolchains distributed with Gentoo by advocating nptlonly and an optimized gcc 3.4 (~arch at the time).

Of course, I felt pretty strongly at the time that CFLAGs and such shouldn't be stripped; after less than a month of using Gentoo, I wrote a post to that effect. I thought it made its way into the GWN, but after searching the archives I only found some other thread I wrote much later that got a mention. Ah, well.

And, eventually, after a month or two, I decided that I'd really like to help out the Gentoo developers in some way, in addition to Jackass! work. What to do? Well, I wasn't comfortable writing ebuilds from scratch or hacking makefiles, I didn't have enough time to be a mod, and most other projects just didn't grab my interest...save one: The GDP. I started submitting patches and bugs about in May '05, and towards the end of that month, I made another big step and tried out this IRC thing and #gentoo-doc (heh). The rest, as they say, as history. I was well and truly Hooked On Gentoo(tm).

Highlights from my first humble beginnings with Gentoo Linux. I don't regret one bit of 'em. And you know, two years later, working on Gentoo is still worth the time. The pay isn't that much, but the devs I hang out and make the work so enjoyable easily beat any form of payment. Even ponies. And the ice cream machine.

Where to go from here? Why, I'll stick with what I've been doing, of course, helping out where I can. Seemant, Alec, Donnie, and other devs who've blogged about how developing for Gentoo is like scratching an itch are right. There's just something ineffably satisfying about it. Here's to another two years.

I added my new Xfce Configuration Guide to our documentation repository tonight. I hope it'll get some of you to try out the wonderful creamy goodness that is Xfce.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xfce-config.xml

* It might take an hour or two to show up; the mirrors have to finish syncing first.

...And part of those new things include:

Time for a status update from my last post!

I finished editing flameeyes' autoepatch documents, just before he sent in his retirement announcement (it's still a ways off, though), and before all his troubles with the stupid BSD-4 licence.

Added random bits and fixes to several docs, including a blurb about branding to the Gnome Guide, prompted this forum topic.

Only the first few items on my TODO list have changed from my previous post:

1) VDR guide updates and autoepatch: Done. Massively overhauled the provided patch (Englishification!), and finished Diego's stuff thus far.
2) Other assigned bugs: Much more progress. I got vivo to send in some patches for some ancient mysql docs bugs just before his retirement, so I closed those old bugs. Love closing old bugs! I've thought of a few more things to do on the pcmciautils migration guide, so I'll get those in and email brix for feedback.
3) Ebuilds: Got some help from Diego on this in exchange for the autoepatch docs. Some progress.
5) SwifT's alternative handbook: added some more tidbits. Ended up using some material I recently added for...

X) Forgot to add this to the last post, but one thing I suddenly decided to do a few days ago was write an Xfce Guide similar to the Gnome/KDE/Fluxbox guides already available. Something randomly clicked in my mind: we've a huge hole in the docs! I love and use Xfce (4.4-rc2, even) on my laptop! I should write something! Originally I'd meant to have it done over the next few months, to coincide with an upstream release, but...

So it took me all day today (since I was sidetracked for a good 7 hours), but I finally cranked out an Xfce Configuration Guide. It's the first all-new standalone guide I've written in awhile. It's much longer than what you'd expect for a guide on a lightweight desktop, because my approach was threefold.

First, I wanted to show how to install & configure a basic, minimal Xfce, and second, I wanted to show how to go beyond that and create a powerful, full-featured desktop environment that still adheres to the Xfce principles: fast, lightweight, configurable, and modular. Finally, I wanted to write a forward-thinking guide. Xfce-4.4 will hit final release sometime in the coming few months, and eventually the stable Portage tree. Therefore, I tried to write it in a way that's immediately accessible and practical to those who will be installing 4.2 (currently stable), as well as requiring minimal rewriting once 4.4 and all its huge changes hit Portage. To that end, I think I've succeeded. I'm hoping that this will be a real resource to all the folks that come to the forums asking "which one?" and "what should I run on this old hardware?"

I did quite a bit of research these subjects, examining not only the applications used on my (quite underpowered) old laptop, but also what the forumites were suggesting. Alas, many of the threads were quite old (2005), and most packages were no longer available -- a good example would be any gtk-1 apps, such as webbrowsers and email clients -- or too heavyweight to warrant consideration. Firefox and firefox-bin are the heaviest packages by far recommended in the guide, and even they run nicely on 128MB memory, a slow hard disk, and abysmal system I/O.

On a final note, my ISP has been completely sucking tonight. Internet availability has been terribly spotty. It's making it impossible to shop online for a headset for Skype. I got my first taste of Skype a few days ago, though it was only listening in to a few of my fellow devs; I had to use IRC to talk. That was pretty cumbersome, but now I feel the pull of Skype...must use it! It's so much more fun to hang out with the guys in #-dev via VoIP.