mark_alec

Elections are Over

The elections for userreps have been over for a few days now. There were 477 votes, which isn’t as many as I would have liked, but doesn’t matter so much as the nominees were all so wonderful :D.

User Relations will soon be contacting the N-number of elected userreps, so keep watching Gentoo Universe for updates.

In other news, I have added larrythecow.net and Planet Larry to my favourite gtk+ RSS reader, liferea. I am really liking reading a bunch of users’ and ex-developers’ blogs, as it provides a perspective on Gentoo that you don’t get to see on Gentoo Universe. My only issue is, that with the increased content, the amount of time spent reading has increased, luckily it isn’t stopping me from doing things in Real Life^tm (yet).

User Representatives [Part 3]

The elections are going to be opening on the upcoming Monday/Sunday unless extenuating circumstances delay them (again). It has been almost a month since the nominations closed so it seems like a good time to finally start voting.

I would like tomk, Maedhros and the other forum administrators kindly adding some features the forums to make the elections easier to create and manage.

Migrating to X11R7, Woes … and Victory

Finally got around to updating to modular X on my last computer, followed the excellent migration guide with no problems. Then it came to starting X.

Typing startx only resulted in errors relating to not being able to start DRI. This was strange, as I had never attempted to use DRI with 6.8 and it had worked fine. I decided it would be a good time to create a new xorg.conf, so I used xorgconfig to create one for me. Unfortunately I still got the error relating to DRI but X was starting up now.

Starting any heavy programs such as konqueror or firefox resulted in X being frozen, and requiring a hard reset. After whining about it on IRC and crashing my system some more, I decided to track down the issue and solve it :). Started by searching for forums for ‘VT3785’, and the thread Modular X, dri and the savage driver [solved] gave me some clues as to the problem. Rebuilt the kernel with DRI enabled for Savage, and rebooted, hoping all went well.

Unfortunately, KDE remained crashing my system. I could startx and run links -g perfectly, but anything gtk/kde based seemed to kill it. Set about googling for the problem but couldn’t find anything useful. Then an idea popped into my head. I would search freedesktop.org’s bugzilla. Searching for ‘savage’ enabled me to quickly find https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5878 which had diagnosed the problem as an incompatability between the kernel’s savagefb and X’s savage driver. Another kernel recompile, this time disabling savagefb finally. Reset, and this time X started perfectly, DRI and all.

Victory 😀

User Representatives [Part 2]

It has been a week since I last blogged, so I decided it would be a good time to give a status report regarding the userrep project. There are now 24 nominees that have provided the information necessary for the upcoming elections.

I am currently aiming to have the elections open on Monday 17^th July. They will be held in a hidden poll on our forums for two weeks, after which time the results will become public and the userreps chosen. I am considering having a large number (~9) of userreps elected so that we get the coverage of users, and more minds can work at improving the distribution we love best.

User Representatives [Part 1]

I have been spending the last one and a half days contacting the nominees for the new position of User Representative. So far, I have had amazingly positive responses, with fifteen of them already having provided the necessary information for the upcoming election. Some have declined their nomination, but it was inevitable that not all could invest the time or interest in the position.

The thing that strikes me is that there are so many people that love Gentoo enormously, and want to ensure that it remains a highly successful, community developer distribution.

If this project is successful, a year from now I hope to see a much tighter community, with a greater amount of communication between the developers and users.