Went to the Gentoo 2005 UK meet yesterday, here in Manchester (well, Salford, apparently they are different cities even though one encloses the other)

I had put the slides for my talk on the internet and also brought it on floppy just in case. Well, the internet wasn’t working at first and nobody had a floppy drive. But once Rob (tigger) got internet going on his laptop, we sorted it out and I started my talk about 20 minutes late. Felt a bit pushed for time, but managed to get through everything and got some positive comments from those who listened.

One thing I found particularly interesting is that my talk was done from Rob’s laptop running Flash Linux. For whatever reason, he didn’t have OpenOffice installed on his laptop, but there were several USB keys floating around with Flash Linux on, which (optionally) include OO. It was very impressive to see a live system boot from a USB key like this. It’s much better than using a LiveCD as you can directly write back to the flash disk after its booted – it’s literally a live and portable Linux system running a GNOME desktop with common applications such as Firefox/OO on it. It uses genkernel’s autodetection routines on top of Gentoo’s baselayout init scripts to start up the system, so you can literally take your working system on your USB key to any system and it will autoconfigure itself. Rob also seemed impressed by it, he had been introduced to it the day before.

Unfortunately the joys of owning an nvidia-based motherboard mean that I can’t boot from USB. But I think you can use the FlashLinux livecd to boot the USB stick – a question I forgot to ask. Maybe I’ll check this out and buy a USB stick.

After my talk, the Flash Linux developer (Gareth) did a talk on Flash Linux. I’m glad this was rescheduled as I would have missed it if it had been done first thing in the morning. A lot of thought has been put into this and it is a very impressive piece of technology. What I would like to see now is some of this being fed back into Gentoo, and expanding Gentoo’s own build tools to be more suited for building flash-based systems.

Rob did a talk on his source code auditing project for Gentoo, which is a project that I didn’t even know existed. I found that interesting, and Rob will be happy to know that he’s won another gcc+SSP convert, and also that he’ll have the pleasure of looking over some of our older kernel security bugs which we have doubts are actually real issues.

Tom (slarti) did a quick presentation on simple ways to work on the command line better. The presentation was good, but what impressed me most is the live demonstration of the things he’d just talked about which he just improvised on the spot. Great job!

I also enjoyed meeting some other people that I hadn’t met before. I fired off about 20 things about genkernel at Tim (plasmaroo) and he fixed and commited them within a few minutes. That was very useful and shows that developers meeting up in the future to do development work would be very productive.

We ended the afternoon with a discussion on how Gentoo UK should progress in the future (more meetings, etc), before going out for a few final drinks.

As promised, the slides for my talk are here, in SXI (openoffice) format. Apparently this will be available for download as video sometime soon (ugh!). Thanks to everyone that turned up and listened to me :)

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Planet Gentoo, a resource intended to improve communication between the user and development communities, plus enhance communication internally between developers.

Contributing developers write articles to their weblogs, which will then automatically be published on Planet Gentoo, providing a good overview of what is being developed and where things are going. At time of launch, we have over 50 contributing developers, a number which will grow further as more and more developers see the light :)

Planet Gentoo started life as an Enhancement Proposal: GLEP 30. After some inactivity, we’ve finally got it launched, and its looking great.

I’d like to say a quick word of thanks to the following people, who helped out in some way or other: Stuart Herbert, Alexander Plank, Kurt Lieber, Lance Albertson, Karl TK, and anyone I forgot. Also, thanks – the developer feedback from the last day has been great, I’m very pleased with the response so far and that we’re able to launch this with such a big proportion of our active developer base involved. For those developers who are missing out, just email me and I’ll get you involved. If you don’t have a weblog, thats not a problem, we can provide you with one.

I’ll be talking some more about this tomorrow at the Gentoo UK 2005 Conference here in Manchester. It’s now free admission, so if you live nearby, just turn up at the door!

In light of the recent GLEP discussion, I see my Planet Gentoo GLEP being used as an example.

My opinion is that Planet Gentoo should never have been a GLEP. We’d discussed the idea in detail on the developers mailing list. There were no arguments against it, and even those that admitted they weren’t the blogging type were able to see that at least aggregating existing developer weblogs would be a good thing.

I became involved, when at the Gentoo UK 2004 meetup, I was chatting to Stuart and a couple of others about it – I recognised the interest. It was obvious that we had demand from users. We had demand from developers. There were no concerns raised in the discussion. The concept was obviously working well for other open-source projects. And setting up a Planet wasn’t exactly going to change much in the way Gentoo works. Its not like having to use repoman instead of CVS commit or anything like that, its totally independant. But we were told we had to “GLEP it” for it to have any chance of happening.

The only major criticism that came up through the GLEP discussion is that the Planet might be seen to be harming our image if there wasn’t enough activity there and it was just left to rot. With 50+ developers on the roll and 10+ emails in my Inbox from developers who want blog’s setting up, its fairly obvious that this is nothing to be concerned about.

As for my views on the GLEP process, after having to go through it, I’d say it was a fairly easy process. Maybe thats just because nobody properly opposed it. I see the timeframe of 4 months being quoted. It would have been much quicker, but with me starting university, getting more involved in other things, I was low on time. Also, the activity of Kurt Lieber, the infrastructure contact who was in charge, was decreasing and this made it harder. Once Lance Albertson took over, and we went over some of the finer details, we had it set up within a couple of weeks. Infact, it only took me part of one evening to get Planet and B2evo (developer log hosting) set up.

On the other hand, the extra time it took might have been a good thing. During that time, the Gentoo Experimental guys demonstrated that the developer demand and interest in this had grown much more. We can now launch the Planet with more than twice the amount of contributors I was expecting when I wrote the GLEP, and thats great.

Announcement coming later today :)

With Ramereth’s help we finished getting Planet Gentoo set up tonight. It’s currently running at a secret URL and is looking really good :)

I’ve sent a mail out to gentoo-core. Please read it, and if you aren’t listed or are on my I-need-to-talk-to list, please send me an email.

Planning to release and announce this on Thursday or Friday, in time for the Gentoo UK 2005 meet on Saturday. So please get yourselves added quickly! There are currently 29 developers on there.

Although the “Planet Gentoo” idea has been on hold for a while, another member of the infra team, Ramereth, has offered to help getting it up and running in Kurt’s absence. I plan to take this opportunity at the end of this week, when my exams have finished…

For more info see GLEP 30