Category: Gentoo

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 🙂

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 Lifetm (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 17th 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.