Category Archives: SCALE

Scale 9x: Day 3

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Sunday

The final day of SCALE 9x arrived far too early, since the Gentoo developers were still recovering from the merriment the previous evening/morning. We congregated in the hotel room Mike & I shared. You know you’re having some good times when hotel security places a call to your room, asking you to keep the noise down.

The hotel experience

The Hilton is a terrible, terrible hotel. I know the organizers needed a bigger venue, and the Hilton provided more rooms. Still. All the Gentoo developers and all the attendees I talked to commented on how much worse the hotel itself was compared to the Westin from previous years. The location is worse compared to what’s in the area, the parking is more limited and expensive, the rooms were more “ghetto,” and the hotel’s prices for everything were ridiculously expensive. $5 for a half-glass of orange pulp, I mean, juice. Next year I may not stay at the Hilton, even though that would be less convenient. The expo actually felt just as packed-to-overflowing compared to previous years at the Westin, so hopefully they’ll have to move SCALE again for next year.

The expo floor

Sunday is usually more sparsely attended at SCALE; Saturday is the “big” day. However, we still had a decent amount of traffic at our booth. We gave away the last couple of LiveDVDs and a bunch more minimal LiveCDs. I just manned the booth all day, since there weren’t any talks that looked particularly interesting. This gave me an opportunity to do some swag-hunting. I picked up some Ubuntu stickers for my laptop, which dual-boots Ubuntu Studio along with Gentoo. I also got to try out the upcoming Unity desktop user interface. I dunno why everyone hates it; in my brief hands-on, it was pretty cool. Plus you can switch back to the “classic” Gnome interface at any time, so there’s no reason to complain.

I picked up some excellent swag from the OpenSUSE booth, including a plush penguin and gecko. They’re pretty cute. (Side note: I had an awesome chat with their Greek ambassador; we talked about community, and how hard it is to get people to contribute, as well as discussed KDE. I gave him one of our LiveDVDs, since he’s been talking with the Greek Gentoo KDE devs, and in return I got an OpenSUSE 11.3 disc. 11.4 will be released in just a few days.)

The expo floor and conference rooms were much better this year in a key area: wireless internet. This year the SCALE organizers managed to create and maintain a speedy wifi network. I never experienced the dropouts and miniscule bandwidth that plagued previous years. I read somewhere that a 45mbit network was setup, and that it was never oversaturated. The wifi connection, even with over 1000 users, was still faster than my home network. The organizers and admins deserve special thanks for delivering such an awesome experience. I was able to check bugs, upload files, and make CVS commits as I discussed issues with my fellow developers, all without leaving the Gentoo booth.

The machines

Sometime after noon, Robin grabbed me and told me to get my USB stick with the PowerPC ISO. Why? IBM was demoing their massive server, which included a POWER7 blade. They wanted to know if Gentoo would run on it! Our handbook doesn’t list anything more recent than POWER5, so this was a good time to learn more. A few of us headed over to watch Gentoo get loaded onto new hardware. We got a few photos and videos of Gentoo booting on the massive server; here’s one:

Gentoo on POWER7

It made it through nearly all the boot process, but apparently there are some differences in POWER7 console/tty devices or some such compared to POWER5, so it hung at the inittab step, but still. Gentoo on POWER7! It mostly boots; just needs a couple of trivial changes. That’s fantastic, given that it’s an unmodified ppc64 ISO.

We demoed a few different machines at our booth. I forgot to get any pictures of this year’s gear; sorry. Everything ran Gentoo, of course. We displayed a pair of Cr-48 ChromeOS notebooks, my ThinkPad running Xfce 4.8, an ASUS notebook, an ARM-based Nail board by Tin Can Tools, and a tiny blue XXS MIPS-based firewall/VPN cube by MyCable.

The people

Before I drove back down to San Diego, we got a group shot of current and former developers:

Gentoo Developers at SCALE 9x
Left to right: vapier, omp, antarus, dertobi123, wolf31o2, nightmorph, solar, wormo, ramereth, robbat2

SCALE was a blast; it was even better than last year. We chatted with all kinds of users, corporate reps, and people from projects like XBMC. Thanks to all the folks that came by our booth and talked with us — you guys rock. I’m looking forward to next year’s SCALE!

SCALE 9x: Day 2

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We’ve had a pretty successful day at SCALE. We’re all out of LiveDVDs. The fifty-disc spindle was gone by the end of the day, as was nearly half of the 100-disc spindle of minimal LiveCDs.

We had pretty heavy traffic at the booth pretty much all day; I kinda camped out there since none of the talks appealed much to me. There were a couple on media centers (XBMC, Boxee) that looked vaguely interesting, since I run ‘em on my HTPC, but I can watch those online later. In a show of solidarity, we all attended fellow developer Lance‘s talk on Ganeti. Was a good talk to end the day.

Our booth is in a really good location this year; we’re visible from half the floor, right by the schwag-happy OpenSUSE guys. They gave me mini-power strip and a stuffed iguana.

We’ve got a bunch of developers and former developers here: 10 so far! It’s the biggest group since SCALE 5x. We’ve even had a couple of devs fly in from Canada and Germany.

If you’re in the LA area, come on out to SCALE, pick up some install CDs, and say hello to the folks who create your favorite distribution!

SCALE, git, docs, Xfce

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SCALE

SCALE 8x is just around the corner! I and something like 8 or 9 other devs will be there — it’ll be our biggest showing since SCALE 5x a few years ago. Several folks coming from the Bay Area or flying in from across the state. I’ll drive up Friday sometime to help setup the booth, and maybe try to get my Beagleboard working a bit better in time for the show on Saturday.

Git

Since my last post, I’ve opened up a couple of public repos at GitHub: one for my fork of LogJam, and one for my overlay, overnight. (Clever, yeah?)

The LogJam fork is to create a sane base for Gentoo and other distributions to get an up-to-date version of LogJam without having to maintain a huge patchbase. I was delving into the Fedora patchset; they had a few dozen they maintain for their RPMs. Once I’d finished updating my fork, submitting an upstream pull request was as easy as clicking a button and adding a short note. Awesome!

GitHub does nifty graphs about which sources have ties to other projects, as well as commit history charts. The downside is that since there’s lots of javascript and Flash powering the site, responsiveness can suck.

So, why choose GitHub? For all the reasons so far, plus the fact that there are a lot of Gentoo projects on there already, including other overlays. And LogJam upstream’s already on there, which really makes it easy to interact via the web interface.

Now, I should mention that I’m not married to GitHub or anything. In fact, I’ve registered an account at Gitorious, too, just in case I switch. Or if I want to have separate/mirrored projects at both websites.

I’m even thinking of git hosting some of my other personal projects, like night-sources. You know, stuff that needs organization. However . . . the problem I have with GitHub is that binary file hosting SUCKS. Lemme say that again: it’s terrible. Really bad. There’s no such thing as a static, canonical file name for a given archive, like you’d expect from SourceForge or Gna! or similar. Instead a small commit hash is appended to every file name, which is just ugly.

Let’s say that I have a kernel patchset (labeled only by a version number) that I distribute in an ebuild’s SRC_URI. I can’t just call it ${PV}.tar.bz2; it has to be something like ${PV}-36x746avF.tar.bz2. The maintenance for each subsequent ebuild version goes up, because you have to change SRC_URI every single time, which takes away the flexibility of using variables in the first place!

Now, I understand that with GitHub, supposedly the hashname increases security, as you’ll always know which commit it’s from. Same for which branch, etc. However, it’s also unnecessary, because the version number is right there in the file name. It’d be nice if you could always get individual tarballs the way you’re used to:

2.6.22.tar.bz2
2.6.23.tar.bz2
2.6.24.tar.bz2

. . . instead, you’ll get a bunch of random crap, appended to a really/long/tree/master/ URI.

So GitHub, if not git itself, is not ideally suited for binary packages, be it tarballs, image files, PDFs, etc. Lots of stuff cluttering up the path, and I have no clue if it can actually be removed. None of the support conversations I read on GitHub had a fix, either.

So I’m still looking for a good alternative. I may just have to keep everything in my devspace. As much as I’d like better organization of, say, night-sources (like the genpatches team has), I don’t want to deal with those kinds of weird versioning issues.

Docs

In spite of CIA being down for some time and losing lots of commits, I’ve done a fair amount of docs work in recent days.

Yesterday I spent awhile bringing the Printing Howto up-to-date for HPLIP, as well as fixing all the kernel config and usergroup info. There are also a buncha updates I made to the Openbox Guide; all patches were supplied by Nate. (Thanks!)

The Localization Guide also some some luv; I pruned the old section on using localedef with the real way to generate locales, localegen. This stuff was already in our other documents, including the handbooks, but somehow I just missed this one.

The Portage handbook received some updates for automatic block resolution, as well as using examples for packages that are still in the tree. Not all the commits I make are huge rewrites; some of them are small but really helpful. The Gnome Guide, for example, lacked explicit instructions to follow the Xorg setup doc before installing Gnome.

Now, it is possible to install Gentoo and then immediately go right to installing Gnome. However, you may end up with a few misconfigured or missing bits along the way. New users would probably not know what to do next, so by adding this short note about required configuration, hopefully some of those pitfalls can be avoided.

Xfce

Almost forgot this month’s Xfce desktop! I found a really neat wallpaper, and started looking for some gtk+ themes with similar colors, to save me the trouble of creating one myself.

I decided to redo my desktop in a general Elegant Brit theme. I also decided to try out the Cairo Dock ebuilds. (These were originally from the desktop-effects overlay, but I brought ‘em up-to-date and submitted a pull request to the maintainers. Git makes collaboration easy!)

I later unmerged Cairo-Dock, as I found it to be very unstable and buggy. Even now, DBUS and DBUS-apps still aren’t working correctly, as not all of them can use the notification area anymore. Lame!

rather elegant

icons: Area o.43
gtk+: Elegant Brit (Pixmap and Mist engines)
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk (yes, it is confusingly named)
background: night launch

I rolled my own icons for Cairo-Dock, using a mix of Brit-inspired stuff from gnome-look.

The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:

night launch

I cropped it from the original at APOD. That was the last planned night launch of the Space Shuttle before it’s retired at the end of the year. Neat!

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See you at SCALE, on Saturday!

SCALE 8x recap

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So SCALE 8x went okay.

I was interviewed by the SCALE Public Relations team; you can see the video here.

Gentoo@SCALE

I’d say we had the most diverse assortment of machines at any booth — something like 10 different machines on 5 architectures. Certainly we had a bunch of developers; we haven’t had a showing like this since SCALE 5x.

Everyone loves event pictures, so here’s the Gentoo team:

Gentoo @ SCALE 8x

Left to right: vapier, nightmorph, antarus, nerdboy, wormo, omp, halcy0n, solar
Not pictured: blackace (he took the picture)

And now, the hardware running Gentoo! On the table, from left to right:

1. Beagleboard running E17 on the huge monitor
2. Hammer/Nail board by Tin Can Tools (in the clear orange-capped tube)
3. Blackfin development board (hooked up to the middle keyboard, and with a touchscreen running Doom)
4. deployed Blackfin module (that 2-inch square to the left of the wireless mouse)
5. my Core2 Thinkpad running KDE4
6. a mini-notebook
7. OLPC XO (green/white, on top)
8. PowerPC Walnut board (in the K’Nex case). Barely visible behind it is the laptop that’s tied in via serial port.

There were a few other Gentoo-powered laptops, subnotebooks, and smartphones demoed throughout the conference, but not all of ‘em are visible in this picture.

I mostly demoed KDE 4.3 on my laptop, since the desktop effects and eye candy proved to be a good draw, especially the “falling snowflakes” animation. Man, I love that thing! It’s a built-in KWin effect, so there’s nothing special to install. Now all I want is a “falling raindrops” effect on my desktop, without resorting to Compiz.

I did occasionally switch the laptop to Xfce when I wanted to save power, or just to showcase Gentoo’s flexibility. I got a good draw not when showing a standard Gentoo wallpaper, but when I showed off a desktop rather like this (clean version here). There were a buncha little kids that stopped by and oohed and ahhed over that for a bit.

Sessions@SCALE

The talks were rather disappointing this year. Several of my fellow devs stated that they “just plain sucked.” Basically, none of us attended because of the talks. There just weren’t any powerful draws. I was only vaguely interested in attending a couple of sessions, the ones on startup-up/embedded improvements and building a featherweight desktop. Didn’t actually get to see those, as the timing and draw was just kinda “meh.”

Instead, I found myself at the Mindstorms talk, which was very lackluster. I expected to see lots of toys in action, and videos, and whatnot. The speaker wasn’t at all engaging, and the single Lego robot was impossible to see, and it wasn’t working correctly for the entire presentation. I stopped by another session or two, but nothing grabbed my interest. I spent most of my time on the show floor, helping in the booth or wandering the floor. Speaking of which . ..

KDE@SCALE

I stopped by the KDE booth to see the newest 4.4 and 4.5 stuff being demoed, and I also tried to help one of the devs figure out the build dependencies for one of the latest libraries. Man, source building on Ubuntu sucks. There’s some really, really nifty Plasma desktop stuff going on for small screens. The newspaper-like activity flow is something I wouldn’t mind using day-to-day on my workstation.

Another neat bit of 4.4/4.5 is the ability to switch your Plasma desktop widgets while still keeping your applications open in front of you. It’s sort of the opposite of workspace switchers, where each application group is on a separate virtual workspace, while the desktop remains fixed. I never bother with more than one workspace, but I do like the idea of switching the widgets behind whatever it is I’m working on.

The 4.4 improvements and upcoming 4.5 features are definitely enough to keep me interested in KDE, so I’ll leave it on my laptop and look forward to the day 4.4 is stabilized in Gentoo.

Elsewhere@SCALE

The Gnome and XBMC booths were just across the alley from our booth, but I didn’t get a chance to check out either. The Gnome guys blasted pounding techno music the whole conference, which gave all of us–even the ones without hangovers–good-sized headaches. The XBMC folks were running some pretty impressive demos on their Zotac MAG, but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to go over and chat with ‘em.

In the last few days, I’ve decided to put together a living room HTPC built around an Acer Aspire Revo and XBMC Live, and it woulda been good to see the thing properly demoed a couple of weeks ago. Still, from what I saw from the Gentoo booth, XBMC is one heck of an awesome app.

Our booth was fairly well trafficked, but overall it felt like attendance (and interest in Gentoo) was down from previous years. Take that with a huge grain of salt, though — while I felt like SCALE was more sparsely attended and the talks sucked, the actual numbers tell a different story. The event organizers say attendance was up more than 10% and there were more standing-room-only talks than ever before. So make of that what you will — but I might not go back next year if it’s going to be anything like my experience this year. There need to be more sessions that are relevant to my interests.

One of the high points of SCALE was meeting the folks interested in Gentoo, and definitely talking with our existing users, like the ever-loyal calculus from IRC. Thanks for coming by, folks!