I’m back from a fun week in sunny Vilanova. Highlights include the food, the Nit de Sant Joan firework night on the beach, the Fluendo and Nokia parties, meeting with too many interesting people to list, and seeing an OLPC prototype (those things are tiny!).

The Gentoo dev-lunch: foser, Andreas (suka), myself, Zaheer

Joe Shaw and myself at the open-bar Fluendo party

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be attending the 2007 event (to be held in Birmingham, UK) as I’ll be working out in Boston. I will probably be at the GNOME Summit later this year.

I’ll be at GUADEC once again this year — hoping to have as much fun as last time :)

I’m staying in the GNOME village with Scott, my long haired fire-juggling friend from near home. We’ll be there from 23rd-30th June.

EDIT: I have been asked to provide evidence of this absurd claim. Here we go then. If you see anyone wondering around Vilanova with flaming batons, you’ll know who it is.

Following on from the last 2 years, we’re hosting another Gentoo UK users-and-developers conference this year.

For the last 2 years, we have held the event in the north of England. This year, we decided to try in the south, in a more accessible location: Central London. The event will take place on Saturday July 8th.

The event will be composed of a series of sessions and presentations by Gentoo developers, and one or two by external speakers. Anyone interested in Gentoo is welcome to attend, just let us know you are coming by pre-registering (no cost). There will be plenty of time for socialising with other users and developers before and after the conference. More information is available from the event website.

It’s very encouraging to see interest from developers from other parts of Europe at such short notice. Danny van Dyk, Bryan Østergaard, and Tobias Scherbaum will be flying over for the event, and hopefully a few others will follow (contact me if you are interested). I have made a list of attending developers which is growing all the time.

Users experienced with Gentoo’s console install method may be familiar with net-setup, a simple ncurses/dialog utility to configure network interfaces. It can also be used on a live system (found in the app-misc/livecd-tools package).

One source of confusion during installation is the naming of network interfaces – this is sometimes different from the naming on a live system (eth0 swaps with eth1, etc).

I added two additional dialogs to the net-setup wizard which attempt to make it clear to the user exactly which interface is which. The data mostly comes from sysfs. Here are some screenshots:

This will be available in the next livecd-tools release.

Thanks to Google, a number of Gentoo-oriented Summer of Code projects are being sponsored. Hopefully Gentoo’s Gentoo Summer of Code project page will be updated soon to reflect the projects in development.

We have added some of the participating students to Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe, the remaining participants will be added over the next few days. We have also set up Planet Gentoo Summer of Code which provides a feed exclusively from the SoC students. I look forward to watching the projects unfold.

This is some interesting news.

My first thoughts were if and how this would affect ZyDAS’ current Linux driver maintenance efforts, which have enabled us to write a nicer driver quickly approaching kernel inclusion.

Then I remembered about the Atheros range of PCI wifi hardware which is supported by the madwifi driver, which was originally written by Atheros and released to the community. So hopefully this means good things for vendor communication.

Edit: I’ve just been informed that madwifi contains a binary blob, i.e. a large closed-source element of the driver. Maybe this is more of a mixed message…

Planet vs Universe

Due to a once fairly even split of opinions, we actually have two versions of Planet: Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe. The universe aggregates entire blogs (articles of any topic) into a single page, whereas the planet site only aggregates “on-topic” RSS feeds, where “on-topic” is loosely defined to be anything related to Gentoo/open-source/tech-stuff.

The Planet Gentoo on-topic thing doesn’t work too well. To pull it off, we require developers to provide us with a separate RSS feed for the Planet. Usually, people just create a new category called “Gentoo” and give us the category-specific feed URL. However, many people use their “Gentoo” category for Gentoo-only articles, then they publish other interesting open-source related articles outside of the Gentoo category, so they do not appear on Planet.

Also, under normal circumstances, there isn’t a lot of difference between Planet and Universe (that is perhaps slightly different today due to the site being spammed with old content).

So, I’m thinking of killing Planet and replacing it with what we have on Gentoo Universe – complete aggregations of everyones weblogs, where the only restriction is that content must be ‘sensible’ and written in English. How do people feel about this? I’m especially interested in the opinions from those who originally said they didn’t want to be reading what people ate for breakfast every day (the people who wanted an “on-topic-only” Planet to read).

This change will be discussed on the gentoo-dev mailing list before I take action, if I decide this is a good idea.

Looking for a co-maintainer

Maintaining the Planet and Universe sites really is quite straightforward, yet people will tell you how slow I am to add or remove weblogs. Most of the time, I’m too busy with other things, so planet requests end up sitting in my mailbox until a rainy afternoon.

For this reason, I’m looking for a co-maintainer who can be more on-the-ball than myself. I say co-maintainer, actually you’ll probably be doing most of the work, but I’ll definately still be hanging around and contributing the odd few minutes now and then, as well as continuing the more advanced maintenance tasks.

To be more specific, what the position really involves is:

• Adding new weblog feed URL’s to 2 config files (one for planet, one for universe) when developers see the light and set up their own weblog (or when new developers join the project). These files are kept in a subversion tree, just commit them and Planet picks up the changes within 1 hour.
• Removing those feed URL’s when developers leave.
• Uploading developer hackergotchi’s to the designated location on request, and referencing them in the config files.
• Creating developer weblogs on our b2evolution installation – this is provided for those who don’t want to host their own weblogs.
• Removing comment spam from our b2evolution install (we are working on better anti-spam measures).

That’s really not a lot – but it’s not particularly interesting either.

All you really need is experience with weblogs (even if that’s just installing and running one), basic knowledge of subversion, and a notion that you’ll be able to be more responsive than myself. PHP/Python skills are a bonus if you are interested in getting even more involved, but that’s not a requirement. This is open for both existing Gentoo developers and non-developers too. Anyone interested?

Republishing of old content

Occasionally, the Planet republishes all articles in someones weblog as if they were written on the current day.

This has been happening a lot lately, partly due to people mass upgrading to WordPress 2.0 (for some lame reason that ends up slightly changing the dates of all your previous articles), and partly due to some buggy weblogs which randomly change the article dates when they feel like it. We’re tracking the recent occurances in bug 128895.

The sites are powered by a small python application cunningly named Planet. One thing I miss from the old Planet version was that when this happened, I could simply open Planet’s cache files, modify the dates of the old articles to be too old to be aggregated (i.e. changed the publish date to be 1 year ago), then re-run Planet in offline mode. This was an acceptable workaround.

The newer versions of Planet do not use a human-readable cache format anymore, so I can’t do the date hacking thing. Is anyone interested in writing a python app which parses the cache files and allows me to modify dates? Planet is dead simple to set up and hack on, no webserver required – its just a script which outputs to a .html file in a certain directory. The source code can be found here.