After a whole year, I had the chance to go to a rap live again. Well, I’ve been very busy the last year with various stuff, and although I’ve been travelling a lot to Athens and Thessaloniki as usual, i didn’t have the luck to overlap with a live act. It’s not my fault though, most of the names (and I’m talking the foreign ones, I don’t care about the greek lives any more) weren’t so good in my opinion. Not all of them, I admin I lost some. I’ve been in some non-rap concerts though, like Serj’s performance in Athens and Archive’s performance in my city (I never blogged about the second right? Well, they were awesome, go see them ) Anyway, time for another trip to Thessaloniki.

Support Acts

The place is called Block 33. It has two halls, a small one were the support acts took place, and a large one were the actual event happens. DJ Waif and DJ Booker kept us company for about an hour and a half with their brilliant DJ set. Then, a breaker came on stage and started dancing, another breaker came afterwards wearing a mask. He removed the mask and turned out to be the first rapper for the night, 12ος Πίθηκος. Very good performance in general, although I don’t like his music at all. He performed many tracks, along with Πελίνα, and the crowd really enjoyed them. Afterwards, Ψυχοδράμα came on stage, which is one of the very few greek bands that I still listen nowadays. Their performance could have been better, but I didn’t care, I had lots of fun. It was only ΔΠΘ (who was totally wasted) and Άγνωστος Χειμώνας there, along with some non-members on stage, like Sadomas. And after a long wait, about half an hour, the doors of the main hall were finally open.

Time for some live

So, we are in. The hall is huge, and I couldn’t believe that it was full at some point! I didn’t even know that so many people even knew who Psycho Realm are. DJ FM was there warming us up, with his old-school latin rap selections, for more than half an hour. Then, Sick Jacken and Cynic came on stage, and I couldn’t stop dancing, although I was exhausted. They performed for almost two hours, and included everything: old and new (even not released yet) Psycho Realm tracks (I’m an oldie, I went crazy on Stone Garden and Showdown ), with Cynic rapping Big Duke’s verses, the best of “The Legend of the Mask and the Assassin”, English, Spanish, Latin, everything! What I personally found really awesome though is that the rappers were very warm, made us make really comfortable and it was like they were talking to each one of us. Of course the group mentioned Sick Jacken’s brother, Big Duke (who is paralyzed). Jacken ordered us to throw our hands in the air to show our love for him, and he showed us back his appreciation after seeing how the crowd responded. Excellent performance, awesome tracks, crazy DJ, in a place full of people. I had a really good time at that night, no reason to say anything more, just don’t miss the opportunity to see them. I didn’t take any pictures, but there are some low quality videos here. Thank you guys.

PS It is really funny when Americans try to say the word “Thessaloniki”

Introduction

FOSSCOMM is the most popular open source event in Greece. In my opinion, what makes it so special is the fact that is hosted in different city each year. It is very unique for me as well, for the following four reasons: 1) I met a lot of people in those conferrences, and made a lot of friends as well 2) one of them was hosted in my city and organized by my college’s LinuxTeam, 3) the Gentoo Greek Community made it first appearance there,  and most importantly 4) I had a great time in all of them. Since I never blogged about any one of the FOSSCOMM conferrences, I decided to do a little flashback before talking about this year’s event.

Flashback

The first one was hosted in National Technological Univercity of Athens, the best university in Greece, at 21/22 March 2008. The teams that organized it were FOSS NTUA, Ioannina LUG, HELLUG, the Greek Debian Community and Slackel. Our LinuxTeam was pretty new at that point, and we applied immediatelly. The purpose of the conferrence was mainly for the open source teams in Greece to present themselves, so we get to know and maybe do something in common. Apart from that though there were many other interesting talks (I recall the one about the CERN) and the very promising idea of the FOSS NTUA guys about creating a Free Software Academic Alianse (but never came to life unfortunately). The ~20 people of my LinuxTeam travelled all together to Athens, and had lots of fun. Our talk was on the latest, and a little before that we heard the idea of hosting the event in different city every year, and immediatelly we started telling to each other “hey, next year it is ours”. So, at the end of his talk, my friend sinak (Γιώργος Πορτοκάλογλου) expressed our desire to host it in our city next year, which was welcomed by the audience.

As a result, the people behind the event (mainly the same people who organized the first one) gave us the permission to host the second one in our city. It took place at 9/10 May 2009, in Technological Educational Institute of Larissa, and organized by our LinuxTeam. Some of us went to FOSDEM three months ago, so we “stole” some ideas, like providing booths for the communities, and doing a beer event of Friday night. We extended that with a tsipouro event on Saturday night. One addition was also the workshops. The day after FOSSCOMM, the Greek Fedora Community had a hackfest in our LinuxTeam Lab. In general, it was much fun for the attendees, with many interesting talks, maybe more interesting than last year’s, as most of the teams presented themselves already, so there was more space for advanced talks. As I said, I had the chance to present to Greece the Gentoo Community as well, with a talk about our community and the Gentoo as a distro and as a project (by me and Νίκος Ρούσσος, who is now a Fedora Ambassador), and a workshop of a Gentoo installation in KVM machines we had prepared, by Alex Alexander.

The third was hosted in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki at 24/25 April 2010 and organized mainly by Χρήστος Μπαχαράκης, Στέλλα Ρούζη and Χρήστος Χουτουρίδης. Thessaloniki is the best city in Greece. Apart from that, the conferrence got bigger and bigger, it became a monster now. There were many talks, side events, workshops, that we had a hard time deciding where to go. A bunch of LinuxTeam guys went there as usual, but this time we were splitted in different places to see the talk of preference. Some that I really enjoyed were the one by the TasPython team about GIL, an OpenWRT and an Asterisk talk, and the one by the Greek Fedora Team with the funny title “Fedora fails… and that’s a good thing” showing the mistakes that are made in such a large organization, and what actions are taken to decrease them. We as Greek Gentoo had an installation workshop (again) by Άκης Κιούσης and Ανδρέας Παπουτσής, and a presentation of some inside of Gentoo and some ebuild/development stuff, by Alex and Μάρκος Χανδράς. Apart from that, we had a great time in a great city, drinking beers with the other fosscomm guys.

The present

The fourth FOSSCOMM was hosted in University of Patras (a city unknown to me) at 7/8 May 2011, and organized by the Patras LUG and the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics. I had my birthday two days ago, and was with the minimum amount of sleep and maximum amount of alcohol in my system, which made me kind of pass out in the bus. This time the trip involved a mix of LinuxTeam and OpenSuse guys, since three of my LinuxTeam colleagues are now OpenSuse ambassadors. After a nice trip, with Στέλλα providing us food, we finally arrived and headed to the Hotel, which was a bit far from the center of the city, but close to the University. Because of that we spent our nights at the Hotel drinking beers, and on Saturday we also had an OpenSUSE 11.4 release party there. We only saw the city very briefly when we went for a coffee, and personally I didn’t like it at all.

Day One

OK, enough with the beers. The conferrence got even bigger now, with even three or four side-talks hapenning at the same time. There was a big screen at the main hall which showed all four rooms that had presentations. It was pretty difficult for me to decide were to go, but I must admit that this one was the best in terms of quality of talks. The organizers were very well prepared, they even created some helpful web-apps for our smartphones (although I don’t own one yet). After the usual welcome from the communities, I went straight to the Django talk. Oh yeah, finally, someone talking about django. The title was “Django Test-Driven Development: A bit of theory and a test case” by Κωνσταντίνος Μπαϊκατάρης, who is working at Indifex. Indifex is the company behind Transifex, the well-known translation tool, and its office is at Patras. The subject is very obvious, the guy talked about writing proper tests in a web application, with examples of Transifex, in order to make the code more professional. Excellent. After that some of my brother’s friends (Διονύσης Ζήνδρος, Πέτρος Αγγελάτος) presented WebGL. They are actually working on a WebGL MMORPG game for quite some time, and they presented what is that technology, the browsers and companies that support it, and a few examples to see it in action. This technology is very interesting, and since it is quite new I suppose more people will start messing with it really soon. Two sysadmin related talks were next. First was by Νικόλας Καβούλης, about hardening the network with open source tools. It was a really nice presentation, with lots of jokes, that I really enjoyed, but nothing new to me. The next one though was the best talk of this conferrence, and one of the best talks I’ve ever seen. Γιώργος Μαμαλάκης and Χαρίτων Καραμίτας described in detail a rather complex system they have developed (in C), in order to have a unified account management with LDAP, Samba and Kerberos. Apart from their system, they also described in short how these technologies work, what they do and why it was hard to unify them. Also, they did a detailed presentation of their setup of those services in action, in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where they work. After the lunch break, I saw the presentation of another Indifex employee, Απόστολος Μπέσσας, entitled “Making Web Applications Fast”. Many cool tricks were presented, that I am definitely going to use in mine web-apps definitely. Another excellent talk. Afterwards I went to Firefox 4 presentation by Πιέρρος Παπαδέας followed by the Enlightment Project presentation by my colleague Γιώργος Κούτσικος, and then spent some time in the OpenSuse lightning talks before calling it a day.

Day Two

The second day was also interesting. Although the main hall didn’t have power due to a programmed power cut, but the guys managed to keep it going, making sure that all presentation rooms are going to operate fine, since they fired up generators. Anyway, another day of interesting talks has just started, although we reached a bit late First one was by Γιώργος Κεραμίδας, Google Employee and FreeBSD Developer, who presented an Automated Testing Framework that is being used in FreeBSD and looked rather cute I must admit. Lunch, and then I went to the Fedora Activity Room for a couple of hours, where Πιέρρος Παπαδέας and Νίκος Ρούσσος (Fedora Ambassadors) talked first about SSD Optimizations (excellent) and then about GNOME 3, which I never had the chance to see. It looked in better state compared to the first steps of KDE 4, and had some very interesting ideas as well. I didn’t like the overall philosophy of it though, don’t think I’ll try it further. At that day I also saw a couple bad presentations that I’m going to skip entirely At the end, there was a presentation of hackerspace, a place for hackers, in Athens. I’m gonna visit it next time I go to Athens (probably next week). And last, the organizers presented themselves and ended the event.

Outro

Finally, I’d like to say that there were many other interesting talks, that I was unable to attend at that time. I saw a few of the videos at home, and had long discussions with my friends about the talks that we saw, as we were scattered around. Some other interesting talks were the packaging ones, (one for deb/rpm with OBS by the OpenSuse guys and one for RPM by the Fedora guys), the IPv6 Workshop by Γιώργος Καργιωτάκης, “Porting Linux to custom hardware”, “Network exploitation with Ncrack”, the Andruino presentation, and last but not least, the Wargames workshop. I had a great time there, saw again a lot of guys and met the Dr.Konqi developer in person finally. I’m really jealous of those distro booths at every event, maybe I should start organizing the Gentoo booth for the next one. Anyway, it was a great event, well done guys.

PS Our FOSSCOMM was the best
PS2 You can also read my friend’s skiarxon blog post here

This blog moved from the server hosting www.gentoo-el.org (the website of the Greek Gentoo Community) to the Gentoo Blogs (wordpress multi-user installation). This means that I have one less wordpress installation to maintain yey!! The new URL is http://blogs.gentoo.org/tampakrap/. The old URL (http://blog.tampakrap.gr) and all of its sub-links still work though. This is how I did it:

I exported all my data from the old wp installation, through Tools->Export, in an XML file. In the other side, I created a new blog for my user with the same name. Then, I installed the WP Import plugin, and uploaded that XML. About four or five image URLs were broken, I fixed them manually. Then I installed the WP-Oxygen theme and set up the Akisment/WP-Stats account in the new blog. I had to hardcode the banner URL in the theme as well. If you find anything else broken, please notify me.

In order to have both domains working, I used apache’s mod_proxy without changing anything in bind. Here is the vhost:

<Virtualhost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@gentoo-el.org
ServerName blog.tampakrap.gr
ProxyRequests On
ProxyPass / http://blogs.gentoo.org/tampakrap/
</Virtualhost>

The KDE meeting had the usual monthly meeting yesterday. After a long discussion we decided to switch to add Trinity ebuilds finally in tree. There has been a lot of time we were working on those ebuilds, we consider them mature enough now for end users. Since we lack the manpower to provide support for two DE’s, we will have to move KDE 4 ebuilds in a user-maintained overlay, called kde4-sunset. A Gentoo KDE 4 team may suffice of course, but until that happens, we are obliged by our QA team’s policy to remove any non-maintained / obsolete ebuilds away from our users, especially for security reasons. The following actions will take place in the following days:

Software in the making edition

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• System packages include: Linux Kernel 2.6.37 (with Gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup 3.1.6, bash 4.1, glibc 2.12.2, gcc 4.5.2, binutils 2.21, python 2.7.1 and 3.1.3, perl 5.12.3, and more.
• Desktop environments and window managers include: KDE SC 4.6, GNOME 2.32, Xfce 4.8, Enlightenment 1.0.7, Openbox 3.4.11.2, Fluxbox 1.3.1, XBMC 10.0 and more.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: OpenOffice 3.2.1, XEmacs 21.5.29 gVim 7.3.102, Abiword 2.8.6, GnuCash 2.2.9, Scribus 1.9.3, GIMP 2.6.11, Inkscape 0.48.1, Blender 2.49b, XSane 0.997, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, Arora 0.11.0, Opera 11.0, Epiphany 2.30.6, Seamonkey 2.0.11, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.7.10, Quassel 0.7.1, Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.7, Claws Mail 3.7.8, Qtwitter 0.10.0, irssi 0.8.15, and many more.
• Development applications include: KDevelop 4.2, KDESvn 1.5.5, qt-creator 2.1.0, Bluefish 2.0.2, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.4, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, DVDAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.4, ffmpeg 0.6, GNOME-MPlayer 1.0.0, SMPlayer 0.6.9, and several others.
• Special Features:
  • Writable AUFS support so you can emerge new packages!
  • Persistancy for $HOME is available; press F9 for more info!

The LiveDVD is available in two flavors: a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64 multilib version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-11.0 version will work on 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64. If your CPU architecture is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64 boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64bit kernel and install a customized 64bit userland while using the provided 32bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-11.0 version is for x86_64 only.

And now some KDE specific words: the LiveDVD was finished the same day that KDE SC 4.6.1 was released, but we decided to give it some testing before adding it to the LiveDVD (of course it is available in the tree, you can even update it from inside the LiveDVD). As for KDEPIM, although we initially installed 4.6beta4, we saw too many objections and went with the old good 4.4.10, but I really hope to have a KDEPIM 4.6 (or a separate LiveDVD flavor) soon included. Apart from KDE SC, you’ll find a huge list of KDE / Qt applications (and you can always emerge the ones you want that we didn’t include), of which some are even maintained by Gentoo Developers, like Trojita, Avogadro and qTwitter. If you have any suggestions for packages we should include, feel free to contact me.

Please select your architecture to be redirected to a mirror for download:

• x86
• amd64
• Torrents are available at http://torrents.gentoo.org

Please read the FAQ on using the LiveDVD.

We have also started a discussion thread in our forum. Please post any bugs you encounter.

Thank you for your continued support,
Gentoo Linux Developers, the Gentoo Linux Foundation, and the Gentoo-Ten Project.

The number was about 600 when I first joined the team

Next target: 150

Yesterday I finally had my laser eye operation, called LASIK, which went really great. It lasted less than 10 minutes, really impressive. Right after the surgery I was feeling much annoyance in my eyes, like there was something inside them, plus I couldn’t stand the light. I was also a little dizzy, but nothing strong, and most importantly, I didn’t feel much (any?) pain. After two hours I was back to normal, no problem in standing in light places and no pain at all. Of course I have to be very carefull for the next two weeks (at least), and continue the eye drops for about 2 months. I’m not allowed to touch my eyes, thus I’m wearing eye patches at night, and I can’t wash them yet, which is the most annoying thing, as they are itchy almost always since yesterday. On the bright side, I have no myopia at all any more (opposed to my previous -6.50 degrees, to get the picture, everything further than ~20cm was blur). My original plan to stay offline for a number of days is not needed according to my doctor, as long as it doesn’t bug me. Actually, I take regular long pauses, the light is still a bit too intense for me, so don’t expect me to come into active development soon.

I’m too excited now, I highly recommended to everyone, just do the preliminary tests and if your doctor gives you the green light go for it, no second thought. Finally, some freedom. Thanks to all the people that supported me (online/RL), much appreciated.

PS: RSIBreak is great, it notifies me about my next pause plus my eye drop time

Since random people poke us in IRC about the same questions, I decided to redistribute the last meeting’s summary in my blog.

0) Elect new lead

Wheee I am the new Leader! I am the head, the boss, the godfather, the lord of the rings, the bourne identity (joke stolen from The IT Crowd). I can’t see how that affects anything though, in my opinion team leaders are useless positions, the council is enough.

1) Status regarding hal

Since KDE SC 4.6 is out, we don’t need it anymore. As soon as 4.6 gets stable, hal can die

2) Should we try to form a “stable KDE devs” team? Meaning just call for volunteers on the gentoo-dev mailing list?

dilfridge stated that since most of the kde team members use ~arch, stable seems to lag behind. The problem is very obvious now, mainly because we haven’t stabilized 4.4. The problem will go away as soon as 4.6 gets stable though. Apart from main kde, the misc apps are also slow in stabilization. We expect users to request for stabilizations in bugzilla.

3) kde-git/eclasses migration and status, move kdepim 4.6 beta in tree masked

reavertm, Sput, and scarabeus did a major cleanup in our eclasses and added git support to eclasses and ebuilds. In order to migrate the eclasses to tree we will need to get git-2.eclass in tree first (it is now in kde overlay as well). ETA: not less than a month. As a side note, we decided to remove koffice-specific codeout of the eclasses.

4) Shall we drop useflags kdeenablefinal and/or kdeprefix to simplify code?

First of all, both useflags are masked. We agreed to keep kdeenablefinal, since it is an upstream feature. About kdeprefix, the problem is that bindings are not prefixed, and a possible fix (proposed by reavertm) would be to slot sip. tampakrap said he’ll work on this, and bring the topic back in next meeting.

5) Dropping of semantic-desktop useflag with guide update (mostly even kdebase needs it on now)

This entry is invalid, semantic-desktop is not needed by kdebase. The problem is in our ebuilds (plasma-workspace is semi broken, kdeplasma-addons is completely broken). We have open bugs for those, the problem is clearly in our side.

6) Making +consolekit and +policikit or removing the useflags as whole (non working stuff run-as is annoying)

scarabeus and dilfridge are in favour of dropping them, since it caused a lot of trouble debugging various user reports. reavertm prefers adding it to IUSE defaults. No consensus was succeeded, the topic will be continued in the gentoo-desktop mailing list (Here is the topic).

7) HT/overlay/bugzie access policy

Since we don’t have a clear list of who is an HT and who isn’t, we decided to compile a list, and state what priviledges the HT has. (HT = Herd Tester). Some people don’t have time/motivation to complete their ebuild quiz, thus we’ll have two groups of people: * full HTs (overlay access, editbugs, access to ktown, IRC cloak) * overlay commiters We decided to drop the KDE HT Lead title, seems rather useless. (As a side note, we always welcome new members, either for HT or for full developer status, feel free to contact me).

8 ) LiveDVD issues

LiveDVD comes with KDE SC 4.6 as default DE, and we called likewhoa (the guy behind it) to report any issues. He said that everything seems to be fine, but random users wanted the cool gentoo graphics to be applied to in-tree ebuilds as well. The KDE Team is willing to do that, likewhoa said he’ll provide us some artwork and we’ll discuss again the USE=”branding” issue.

9) documentation status

There has been a major improvement in the guide, added some 4.6 specific tips and troubleshooting parts, we need to add a hal->udev migration guide (there is a draft in my devspace, based on this forum post), and migrate some texts that are in kde overlay to guidexml.

10 & 11) 4.6 (and misc apps with 4.6) status / Early discussion about 4.6 stabilization

KDE SC 4.6 is going fine, we all agreed that 4.6.1 could be a good candidate, we’ll discuss it again after its release. About a 4.6 KDEPIM version, no idea yet, we’ll have to wait on upstream moves first. Most misc apps seem to be fine with 4.6 as well.

*) Open floor

One major issue is digikam, it comes with lots of bundled libraries, which violates the Gentoo QA Policy. We heard that Debian has same thoughts on the matter, we’ll have to bring them to table. Relevant bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=265328

Desktop Summit! We were invited last year to Akademy to give a talk about Gentoo-KDE, noone made it. Some of us expressed interest for this year’s event, which combines GUADEC and Akademy. Also, some of our gnomies may be there, which is a perfect opportunity for some in-person trolling.

Gentoo KDE team meeting Summary and Log

My college’s team was the first team in Greece that organized a KDE Release Party, we are so proud of this. Special thanks to Claudia and the Promo Team for sending us some fine KDE materials. We didn’t have much attendance, which is very reasonable given that we organized it during our exams, without giving it much thinking. Apart from the usual talk about how awesome KDE is, we also had a little presentation, where I talked about the history of KDE, SC and Extragear, PIM (Akonadi, Nepomuk, Strigi), and my colleague Giorgos Tsapaliokas (twin brother of Antonis) talked about Plasma and Activities, and did a quick live demonstration of those. Apart from the usual LinuxTeam guys, two guys of the greek openSUSE community came to our small city, and a teacher also attended the presentation, who showed great interest and expressed his impression especially about Nepomuk. Let’s hope we’ll see more KDE desktops in the future. After the event, we went to consume some tsipouro, where we spend a few more hours talking about FOSS in Greece.

Photos can be found here

Disclaimer: This is not a Gentoo or KDE related post, but I am the administrator of this planet.

I’m getting a laser eye surgery that will keep me away of screens for at least  two weeks. Planet/blogs requests may lag a bit, Joshua should handle them. The rest (Overlays, KDE, Qt) should be fine, they have strong active teams behind. I’m really excited about this, I suppose it will be a great freedom not to rely on glasses or contact lenses, being able to sleep anywhere. No more blur vision or tired eyes, I’ll be able to stay on my computer for more than the usual 16 daily hours. 

Below are a few highlights from fellow gentoo developers:

• miknix: have fun looking at girls in high definition with your new guys
• nightmorph: Sweet, laser eyes are a first step in becoming a cyborg
• wired: Yay, hardware upgrade! Just to be clear on this: are you getting a “laser eye” surgery or a laser “eye surgery”?
• likewhoa: ask them about the xray vision package
• me: I didn’t like that mutation, i chose to become magneto so I can control CPU’s and various PC parts
• c1pher: And remember, if you need a Gentoo fix, you don’t need to see the screen to do anything… Corny joke about using the force

And the all time classic (made by pchrist):