Spider, I would recommend media-sound/synaesthesia for audio visualisation — presuming you’re using x86. It’s not at all portable.
As for the desktop side of things, one man’s flashy desktop isn’t necessarily anothers. I’d say stick with stock gnome as far as possible. XComposite drop shadows always look good with it.
As we all know, there are many sendmail compatible MTAs in Portage. Many users want to have these installed in tandem, so Gentoo provides an ebuild for BSD mailwrapper, enabled with the mailwrapper global USE flag. However, in comparison to… well… the rest of Gentoo, mailwrapper doesn’t really fit in that well. Having to comment/uncomment things in /etc/mail/mailer.conf is inconvenient and a hassle.
I woke up with a hangover a few Saturdays ago and while I was in the shower I had a bit of an idea: to provide a tool that creates symlinks for each MTA. I drafted an RFC and sent it into net-mail@gentoo.org. The idea behind it is to have a mailer.conf-style configuration file (I’ve called these profiles in the RFC, just for the sake of it) provided by each MTA. These are installed in /etc/mail/ and then a symlink is created to /etc/mail/mailer.conf so that no modifications to net-mail/mailwrapper are necessary.
As a result, no user is going to have to mess around with etc-update and /etc/mail/mailer.conf, nor will they have to worry about editing it by hand. They’ll just use a simple tool, mailer-config, to change which MTA is in use.
Expect it to reach Portage in the next week (or maybe even earlier).
I recently brought two new developers on board: Joe Sapp, A.K.A. nixphoeni (gdesklets) and Jory Pratt A.K.A. anarchy (qmail/vpopmail). Both seem to be settling in well.
I’ve bumped mail-mta/msmtp to 1.4.0. I think I’m the luckiest maintainer in the world with the package’s upstream, a chap called Martin Lambers, who:
It makes things very easy for me, and takes a lot of the nasty bits out of maintaing packages. I’ve gotten Markus Rothe (corsair), who is a PPC64 developer, to keyword 1.4.0 ~ppc64 too. In the next release, I’m going to try and push the current version to stable on all architectures so I can purge all the horrible old ebuilds without mailwrapper support.
I’ve convinced Simon Stelling (blubb) to add gtk-engines to emul-linux-x86-gtklibs. This means that anyone using the multilibbed GTK+ applications (the latest acroread, firefox-bin etc.) will not have to endure warnings about missing GTK+ theme engine modules on the command line, so long as they are using a GTK+ theme that uses an engine shipped with GNOME. Also, these programs will look a hell of a lot better.
Other than what I’ve mentioned, I haven’t really done much. I’ve been enjoying winding down from school this Easter holiday. Back on Monday though.