Two Year Anniversary

Just happened to notice that my first and oldest Gentoo box, ‘rockley’, is now two years old 😀

The box stopped being my primary box here on March 4th when I acquired kensington, an 800MHz P3. It has now been regulated to a headless stable box that I very occasionally use for x86 arch testing.

Some statistics:

  • –synced 138 times
  • merged packages 2590 times
  • unmerged packages 1155 times
  • Estimated update time (for emerge -e world): 3 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes.
  • number of packages in ‘world’: 76

mark@rockley ~ $ emerge --info
Portage 2.1.1-r2 (default-linux/x86/2006.1, gcc-4.1.1, glibc-2.4-r4, 2.6.17-gentoo-r4 i586)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.17-gentoo-r4 i586 AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
Gentoo Base System version 1.12.6
Last Sync: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:50:01 +0000
app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present]
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.0.30
dev-lang/python: 2.3.5-r2, 2.4.3-r4
dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5
dev-util/ccache: [Not Present]
dev-util/confcache: [Not Present]
sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17
sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.60
sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2
sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1-r3
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.14
sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22
virtual/os-headers: 2.6.17-r2
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CBUILD="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=k6-2 -pipe"
CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/X11/xkb /usr/share/config"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/gconf /etc/java-config/vms/ /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/terminfo"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=k6-2 -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoconfig collision-protect distlocks metadata-transfer parallel-fetch sandbox sfperms strict test"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.swin.edu.au/gentoo http://ftp.swin.edu.au/gentoo "
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats --timeout=180 --exclude='/distfiles' --exclude='/local' --exclude='/packages'"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://192.168.0.194/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 3dnow X alsa berkdb bitmap-fonts cli cracklib crypt cups dlloader dri elibc_glibc foomaticdb fortran gdbm gpm gtk gtk2 iconv input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse ipv6 isdnlog kernel_linux libg++ ncurses nls nptl nptlonly pam pcre perl ppds pppd python readline reflection samba session spl ssl tcpd test truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode userland_GNU video_cards_nv xorg zlib"
Unset: CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS

Channel Pimping

For those that don’t know, for 19 weeks we have had an IRC channel for Australian Gentoo users. Logically, the channel is named #gentoo-au and is now on the Gentoo IRC channels list, thanks to astinus. You can find statistics to the channel here. So, for those hundreds of aussies that IRC, pop in and say “g’day”, we won’t bite 😉

LCA

linux.conf.au is fast approaching with less than a month to go. Will be fun to put faces to all the people I only know via IRC.

My Head Feels Like a Frisbee

I got the results to some of my year 12 exams back; and they weren’t exactly what I was hoping for. It is a strange experience to realise that your efforts were not rewarded as you might have hoped.

My head feels like a frisbee; twice its normal size. Feels like a football and someone’s moved the goal posts. Everything is slightly out of joint and weird; disconnected. I had to hold onto the walls.

Such is the state I am in. While thinking about my results go through phases of:

  • depression
  • denial
  • apathy
  • anger
  • acceptance
  • contempt

Well, I will try to look on the bright side of life, and take each day as it comes. Luckily, I should have plenty to distract me with over the summer holidays. That and the prospects of next year should keep me somewhat happy.

Website Complete

Gentoo Australia logo

I would like to announce that gentoo.org.au is now up, and functioning as intended. Currently the pages are a little scarce on text, but that should change as time goes by and events are organised.

We decided in the end to go for a MediaWiki based site, but switched the default skin for a slightly modified version that the Beagle Project kindly provided the tarball for.

Any Australians reading this, if you could register on the wiki and add yourself to the locations page so that we can get estimates of numbers.

There is a special person I would like to thank for hosting the site, and doing various tidbits with it to get it working – David Shakaryan (aka omp.) Thanks also goes to Redhatter, who helped modify various parts of the website.

In other news, I managed to ‘find’ a new computer: 2.66GHz Celeron (P4 Generation), 13GB hard-disk, inbuilt ethernet, video and sound. I will blog about it more later…

Website Progress

The gentoo.org.au website has finally seen some progress. Currently it is just index page with no content, but over the next few days I plan to: setup a wiki back-end, design a theme for it, add some template pages and fill in the basic content.

Last time I blogged about the site, I was almost certain about using Drupal. I have since decided that a CMS is more complex than the needs of the site. The pages will mostly be static, and discussions will happen mainly in #gentoo-au or possibly on a mailing list. Thus, a wiki seemed like the logical conclusion, as it allows easy on-the-go editing.

The image that I have as the logo is just something I hacked up in Inkscape quickly. As you can probably notice it is just a default Gentoo ‘G’ with an Orange/Burnt colour scheme. Other ideas are welcome, and if anybody wants to make a logo, send it through and I will see if I can work with it.

I have also registered for linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney. The programme looks really interesting, and I hope that I can find a way to squeeze into as many talks and tutorials in the four days I plan on being there. It will be the first computer related conference I attend, and I hope to meet up with some people I currently only know from the Internet. A page to organise an informal meet-up of Gentoo users there will soon be made on the new site.

Gentoo Australia

While reading Australian Personal Computer magazine I came across an interview with one of the members of the Ubuntu Australian Team.

This together with events such as the Gentoo UK 2006 Conference have pursuaded me that I would like to create a similar community in Australia.

So, 4 weeks 5 days (16h 56m 15s) ago I decided to revive the #gentoo-au channel on Freenode. Currently there are a few less than a dozen different people in it, but the community seems to slowly be growing thanks to word of mouth, and the forum thread I made some ago.

Plans still need to be written up for a website, that will contain all the information necessary to organise conferences down under. My goal is to aim for a mini-conf at linux.conf.au 2008. Hopefully before then we can even organise a meetup of some kind to try to spread the word about Gentoo on a grass-roots level.

Any readers of this from Australia, please join #gentoo-au, and we will see what community we can build.

gentoo.org.au

A few days ago I purchased gentoo.org.au (no, don’t bother looking, it doesn’t point anywhere yet :p).

I have been investigating various programs to help manage the webspace. Started off looking at various CMS programs:

  • Joomla – can’t say it grabbed me at all. The default setup is way too messy, and even after fidling with the seconds for 5 minutes couldn’t improve it.
  • Drupal – much cleaner interface, and default, this actually creates reasonably sexy pages without much effort.
  • Geeklog – looked, moved on quickly.

However people in #gentoo-au have recommended that a CMS may be overkill and to try out a wiki. So it looks like I will be experimenting with phpwiki and mediawiki over the next few days.

#gentoo-au’s Expansion

Seems that a little bit of advertising goes a long way online. We have expanded from a channel of less than dozen to a channel of less than thirty, almost overnight.

This couldn’t have happened without the help of people getting the word out on IRC and on their blogs. So I would like to thank them for helping to start establish our community down-under.

I have also been interviewed for Open Source On The Air and mention a few things about Gentoo in general, and Gentoo-Au. I will blog about this more later, after the interview is broadcast (at 9:30pm AEST for those who are interested.)

I’m on an Australian Radio…

Last week I was interviewed for Open Source On The Air, an online radio show made by James Purser.

You can download the whole show in either mp3 or ogg formats. Additionally, my good friend Jorge has made an edited version available: Ogg Vorbis, mp3: high quality and low quality.

Read below if you want a transcript of the show.
Continue reading I’m on an Australian Radio…

Introducing the User Representatives

A little delayed, but I would like to introduce the following people as the Gentoo User Representatives:

  • cheater1034
  • kopp
  • CoffeeBuzz
  • nephros
  • Richard Fish
  • loki99
  • Q-collective
  • lxnay
  • toskala
  • cokehabit
  • likewhoa

They can be contacted via the email alias userreps@gentoo.org, or found in the #gentoo-userreps channel on freenode.

Currently no projects have been started by them (that I know of), but that will soon change as we (userrel) are having an IRC meeting with them this weekend. I look forward to seeing what we can achieve in the coming year 🙂