come2linux in Essen

Today I visited the small Linux-Congress come2linux in Essen. Other than last year the organizers moved the date from December to September and moved the place to the university in Essen. So the problem was, you have to take a walk of 300m from the exhibition-hall to the lecture-rooms…

Anyway, I was glad to meet a lot of the Ruhrpott-Gentoo-folks (and developers) there again. Some I didn’t met for quite a long now, as I don’t have the time any more for the monthly Gentoo User Meetings in Oberhausen. It’s everytime a pleasure to have a talk with ian, dertobi123, stkn and our other supporters.

During my walk around I wanted to make a short stop at the CACert table. As I’m an assurer who can assign 35 points I was forced to assure 10 people who stood at the table… But now I’m again one of the top 100 assurers 🙂

And I had a long talk at the Free Software Foundation Europe table as I met Rainer there. Funny enough, together with me he is one of the founders of the CCC meeting in D

Splashimage in the initramfs with genkernel on the Pegasos

With kernel 2.6.16 several things changed in PowerPC-land. The kernel-maintainers decided to merge the ppc32 and ppc64 architectures into powerpc. That gave us some headaches, because a lot of the Makefiles changed as well.

Since March I had problems to build a kernel with an included initramfs for the Pegasos (because an external initramfs could not be loaded). In the past I used the target make zImage.initrd, but this failed now with genkernel. Today I finally found some time to look into that problem again, as I need a proper genkernel for release-building. I though I had to touch Makefiles and rewrite a couple of the kernel-build system… But in the end I could fix this problem with a simple two-liner-patch in genkernel, as only two pathes needed to be changed.

I tested the patch in Bug 141153 with the Pegasos at home and added the 2006.0-splashimage into the initrd. Now I have a nice bootsplash during the rare reboots 🙂

The other result was a working test-CD for the upcoming 2006.1 release. Unfortunately I can’t test the Apple-part, as I don’t own a working Apple any more. So I have to rely on other devs or release-testers (we need more of them!). And testing with qemu isn’t possible. It dies shortly after the kernel has been loaded…

Friday: Hacking Contest

Tomorrow, the CIPHER2 contest takes place again. This is a Capture-the-Flag like Challenges in Informatics: Programming, Hosting and ExploRing, organised by the university RWTH Aachen.

Last year I visited the team in Aachen with the fellow devs dertobi123, pYrania and bonsaikitten. We got a nice introduction to the game and I thought, one day I will take part as well.

But things changed and since March I’m mentoring a group of students in the subject “Computer- and Networksecurity” at my university of applied sciences in Krefeld. I told them about CIPHER and they founded a group that will enter the contest. And I’m their

A bunch of upgrades for Gentoo/PowerPC

Last night the Gentoo/PowerPC-team had its monthly meeting. Our main-topic was the upcoming 2006.1-release and if we want to switch the toolchain. gcc-4.1.1 gives a lot of advantages especially for PowerPCs and all devs tested this compiler-version during the last weeks. There are some troubles with strict-aliasing, but this can be changed in the ebuilds and notify upstream about the problem. Furthermore we will change to glibc-2.4, so that users will have one big move instead of several small moves.

For the upgrade I already created a 2006.1-profile which relies on this toolchain. An older gcc and glibc is masked in that new profile. Then I masked the newer toolchain in the current 2006.0-profile, so that users, who want to test the new toolchain have to switch the profile. And we can stabelise the new packages already without any trouble for the user, as long as he doesn’t change the profile. I consinder the new profile is testing as long as the 2006.1-release isn’t out.

Another topic was the stabelisation of Xorg-7.1 on ppc. I expected some objections and so I’m really glad that even Gentoo’s Xorg-maintainer, Donnie Berkholz, suggests all arches, which don’t have problems with binary drivers (that means all beside x86), should switch to the new Xorg.

I think, I’ll add the new Xorg as stable in the 2006.1-snapshot and make it stable for everybody later. Or I will mask some package-versions in the profile like I did with the toolchain.

Power-users are welcome to test the new toolchain and Xorg-7.1, and report bugs when something goes wrong.

But all in all 2006.1 will be a big step for Gentoo/PowerPC. I hope we can stay the best ppclinux-Distro ever 😛

You can not hide as a Gentoo dev

As I wrote in my previous post, I attended the FrOSCon last weekend. For a first-time-event it went very well and even the number of about 300 visitors is acceptable.

I had a lot of discussions at my CCC-table, especially about politics and the lost of our privacy. But there were also several people who remember me as a Gentoo developer only. They thought I would show Gentoo there, but wondered about the CCC-stuff on the table