Author: johnm

For all of those awaiting a more permenant fix to bug #85559, this has now been done. Hopefully you vanilla-sources users (specifically) will benefit from a big bandwidth saving.

Also on a similar note, there has been a lot of confusion recently about 2.4/2.6 kernel versions and headers. Let me clear this up.

Many moons ago portage didnt have support for cascading profiles, although the 2.5 kernel had just been made 2.6 and progress was being made on stabalising support for it in Gentoo. The issues we had meant that we had to rename the 2.6 versions into a new package. For example: linux-headers contained 2.4, and linux26-headers contained 2.6.
This meant that managing the dependancies within ebuilds was awkward and amongst other things, far from ideal.
It was also an illogical seperation of what is fundementally the same thing. You dont for example see vim5 vim6 etc, you just have vim.

Now then, what we did recently, with the help of cascading profiles was amalgamate these packages into their relevant counter-parts. Therefore, we now have vanilla-sources-2.{0,2,4,6}* and linux-headers-2.{4,6}* and it is up to the profiles you run to manage which versions should be unmasked for you.
As part of this move we also moved to 2.6 by default for many architectures. As a result, and in true gentoo philosophy, you will find underneath your profile either a 2.6 or most likely a 2.4 subdirectory. If you link your profile to that directory instead then you will no longer be forced to update to 2.6, however I do encourage you to upgrade if you have no valid technical reason to stay.

So with this concludes:
emerge yourfavourite-sources will emerge 2.4, OR 2.6 depending on your profile. Most likely 2.6
emerge linux-headers will merge the appropriate headers.

IF you are upgrading from 2.4 to the newer 2.6 as part of this move, PLEASE PLEASE ensure your new kernel is installed and running along side your new 2.6 headers, since there are several reports of random segfaults occuring with 2.6 headers on a 2.4 kernel.

If you find that its installing a version you dont want, then just relink your /etc/make.profile to ${PORTDIR}/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.0/XX where XX is 2.4 (or 2.6 on different archs in some cases).

Hopefully this has now brought some clarity to the situation 🙂

for those faithful following my heartbreaking drama story of a car and its owner, there is still no progress been made. The weather is getting wetter, and my poor baby is trying to hold the fort against the elements to prevent itself from rusting, and although I fret I have began to come to terms. Still no news about claiming for its repair yet, and still no news about making a statement but I suppose thats just slack police 🙂

A few things happening in gentoo land.
modconf has been removed, excellent. Its been in the tree (same ebuild, only trivial changes) for 2 years. It had come to the decision of keeping it, and bumping it to working or dropping it. After brief discussion, the latter prevailed.

bugs #85410 and #84856 are closed. Anyone having problems with unipatch working on something other than base10, and madwifi not building if you use KBUILD_OUTPUT things are looking up! 🙂

bug #77190 has been closed. Anyone who was setting a LANG/LC_ALL variable which screwed up unipatch should now be working fine without needed to mess with anything.

And, plenty more to come. All in all, I don’t have a great deal to add really. Only thing worth noting is I’m not feeling well and if things get much worse my availablity might become a little awkward.

So shortly following the purchase of my new car, I was driving home at a very reasonable speed, when all of a sudden a newly passed driver in a citroen ax came around the blind corner too fast hitting the car in front of me. So, I swerved to not get hit by the spinning AX, and bits of the cars were flying all over my bonet.

I rang 999, done the normal stuff – luckily everyone was completely fine. Anyways, checking the damage to my car and it was nothing worth crying over I left and went home. While at home I saw that it had ripped big chunks out of my paintwork all over my bonet, door panels and bumpers.
After spending a good half an hour on the phone to a police officer dealing with the accident, I think he finally believed me and so I took it to the local station so that they could check it. Now all I need to wait for is something to happen to pay for the damage to be repaired before it starts to rust!

And to add to the annoyance, the only reason I drove away from home in the first place was to pick something up from a shop which rang me to say something I wanted was in, only to find by the time I got there they were mistaken!

So, anyways, Gentoo stuffs.
kernel-2 changes have gone in to better accomodate KV_EXTRA and family.
linux-mod changes have gone into the tree to take over the pcmcia work from pcmcia.eclass, and pcmcia-cs changes will be made soon.

instead of it now working out and patching a load of odd pcmcia sources, it just tarballs up the pcmcia-cs sources at build time, and uses that for the future. Please please please dont delete /usr/src/pcmcia/pcmcia-cs-build-env.tbz2 once these changes go in or you might experience problems 🙂

Aside from that, nothing new to report.

So, all in all this has been a fun weekend. The weather has held out which is good, I have a new car (new Hyundai coupe UK US: works under epiphany!) which I’ve been driving around a lot all week.

I’ve been on the phone every day to Manx Telecom (my ex-employers) recently trying to arrange for my internet access to be reconnected. One of the perks of working there was free ADSL, however for some anomaly it was never added to my line. Therefore, it was ceased and I have had no internet access for almost a week. Apologies to those waiting on me for stuff with Gentoo, but the above explains my lack of activity this past week 🙂

I’ve also been dabbling a lot recently in the new multisync cvs builds, uclinux updates and a couple of other goodies. Hope to push some of it to the blog/tree soon.

On top of this I’m going to commit nicer support within detect_version for the newer kernel scheme, something I’ve wanted to do but with 2005.0 and my lack of net access its had to wait.

On Saturday I visited the folks at Salford uni to attend the Gentoo UK 2005 Conference. There is a fine write-up on it in this weeks GWN so I won’t elaborate on this too much, but I would like to extend my thanks to all of those participating in the event this year. It was a pleasure to meet those dev’s I’ve never met before in person. Shouts out to Tim, Tom, Dan, Stuart, Rob, Stephen, and although I never recognized you on the day Marcus! If there is anyone I have forgotten, my apologies and shouts to you too!

Gareth Bult of Flash Linux fame spoke about the technical limitations of USB keys, which I found most interesting, and also (indirectly) raised a few points which I would like to rant about. Documentation! Everyone knows our documentation team do a great job and our handbooks are nothing short of superb, however there are so many other documents which we look after which are terribly outdated or have not been made aware of. Hopefully the planet is a good push towards the aggregation of information, although I for one will be making more of an effort to keep documentation well organized and up to date.

Daniel Drake (dsd) spoke about his views of the kernel, mostly the 2.6 branch and its organization and touched on a few nice subjects. Monolithic vs. Modular for example. I felt a little embarrassed that I attended and didn’t put in any talks of my own so I must apologize for that, however I thoroughly enjoyed Dan’s talk and he would have shown me up anyway 😉 Something I would like to add however is that in the coming few months I am going to make a more conscious effort to keep the project page updated and our TLP roadmap accessible. With 2005.0 still being up-in-the-air I am going to hold off however.

Unfortunately I missed most other peoples talks in full as Stuart and I ran off to the side-room together! But from what I hear Rob only swore once, so way to go!

All in all, thoroughly enjoyable.

On a different note I went to Alton Towers on Friday and even the weather held out! It was a lovely day, and it was an awesome amount of fun. Anyone who’s going, I recommend staying the night in “The Bulls Head Inn” its just down the road, and the breakfast is fantastic. I think I went on every ride coming close to 4 times or so. Hex was the biggest dissapointment but numerous goes on Oblivion and Nemesis made up for it 🙂

Gentoo wise, there are several things coming up in the next few weeks with Kernel. There is of course the 2005.0 release which has been prepped for and requires further work once released to clean up old packages in the tree and so on.
There has been some excellent progress made in migrating all the older sources to kernel-2 and older kernel module ebuilds to linux-info/mod eclasses.
I will also be auditing our version detection mechanisms in the eclasses to ensure the recent move to a more refined upstream release scheme will be sanely catered for, and also addressing any issues which may have popped up from my recent unipatch change. Which reminds me, I am actually going to finish that re-write soon so devs can expect a much more powerful unipatch syntax and speed-ups.
I would also like to welcome Carlos Silva (r3pek) on board! It’s going to be a pleasure working with you.

So there is my first ever blog post! And I would just like to take this opportunity to thank Dan and all else involved for their dedication and initiative which made Planet Gentoo. It truly is an excellent tool!