Monkeydust.net

Just incase you’ve been living under a stone for the past few months, Gentoo’s 2008.0 release is finally upon us.

A big congrats to all involved, its been a long journey but well worth it.

Highlights include:

The 2008.0 final release is out! Code-named “It’s got what plants crave,” this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD. LiveDVDs are not available for x86 or amd64, although they may become available in the future. The 2008.0 release also includes updated versions of many packages already available in your ebuild tree.

• Updated installer: The installer now only performs networkless installations using the packages and ebuild tree on the LiveCD. It also contains numerous fixes for extended and logical partitions.
• Improved hardware support: Moving to the 2.6.24 kernel added many new drivers for hardware released since the 2007.0 release.
• Complete rework of profiles: Restructuring profiles allowed significant cleanup of redundancies, reducing developer maintenance and confusion. The difference for you is that profiles now appear in /usr/portage/profiles/ under default/linux/ instead of default-linux/. See the upgrading guide for more details.
• Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD: To save space, the LiveCDs switched to the smaller Xfce environment. This means that a binary installation using the LiveCD will install Xfce, but you’re still free to build GNOME or KDE from source.
• No LiveDVDs on x86 or amd64: In the interest of getting the release out, the release engineering team decided to postpone LiveDVDs because of problems in their generation. They may show up later—if so, we’ll let you know.
• Updated packages: Highlights of the 2008.0 release include Portage 2.1.4.4, a 2.6.24 kernel, Xfce 4.4.2, gcc 4.1.2 and glibc 2.6.1.

A big thanks goes out to our release engineering team members for their hard work over many months to turn 2008.0 into reality.

Get the new release from our “Get Gentoo!” page.

After first seeing it mentioned in irc last night, i took a look at former gentoo dev, kloeri’s current project called Exherbo which seems very much to be Gentoo 2.0. So far its got a number of former Gentoo dev’s onboard, including Ciaranm, who, regardless of his sometimes lacking people skills, *is* a very competent programmer. It seems their big aim is creating a gentoo-esque distro thats been built with all the experience available from working on Gentoo for years coupled with a desire to build a forward looking distro that shuns the massive amount of legacy code that other linux distros have picked up over the years.

Surprisigly though, what would appear to have been a low-key announcement in kloeris blog, has somehow been picked up by both slashdot and more surprisingly, TheRegister. While Slashdot takes the usual fairly negative view which it seems to have towards anything even *vaguely* linked to Gentoo. It was nice to read the Reg piece though and not see a totally negative or sarcastic article, they almost sound positive about exherbo!

I have to say im intrigued at the very least and am interested to see where this goes, especially as im a quiet supporter of Paludis (note to anyone reading this, im supporter not a fanboy! ), and have liked how it has forced portage to actually document how everything works via the EAPI’s, which makes it easier to figure out if a certain behaviour is a bug or actually a feature!

While ive no intention to actually try and install Exherbo at this point (as im just a mere user!), i do intend to watch and see what it grows into, and whether it can fulfil its rather lofty aims.

Well, i figured i should at least post something here Thanks to beandog for adding me planet larry, although lately my work with linux has taken a downturn. For those who somehow found my blog beforehand (ie. no one) would have known ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Thats had to take a backseat for now, its still something i want to do, even if using catalyst can be a pain at times. My thinking now is that im going to save myself some trouble and use sysrescuecd as a base as they too use catalyst and seem to have working X autoconfig (which was my main stumbling block), they also have a few other cool bits that i like, so it makes sense to start with them.

Ive also started a new job lately which has left me with more free time, but due to an early start im more tired so what free time i have is being used up with me being tired and lazy, lately thats meant playing eve-online and not doing stuff i should be.

Im determined to get something done, who knows, maybe il finish off this livecd soon!

Ok, so i made a slight oopsie when building the x86 livecd, seems i forgot that building a x86 chroot on amd64 system might cause problems, id seen the solution, read it then promptly ignore it.

So after emerging setarch as told and lauching the 32bit chroot with linux32 im now recompiling everything to make sure there are no hidden problems, so only 694 packages to go

So, ive finally managed to find a bit of free time now that work allows me the whole weekend to myself so ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Ive previously tried using catalyst, the official tool used by gentoo to build their livecd’s but its not exactly intuitive so ive been using a somewhat more manual way as detailed over on the gentoo wiki.

As with many wiki articles through its less of a guide and more of a jumble of ideas thrown onto a wiki page, which is a shame as if you dig through the crap there are quite a few handy tips and the basis for some scripts to simplify the process a bit. Ive taken many of these and hacked them around a bit to create something a bit easier to reuse. At the minute theres not much there, really just scripts to automate mounting, unmounting and generating the squashfs and cd image however ive a few more ideas id like to add based on stuff ive found useful while working on my cds.

Hopefully il have a basic x86 cd ready to go sometime in the next few days, sadly i suspect i broke the amd64 one  when i got a little bit carried away tried to use openrc/baselayout2 on the livecd, while mostly it worked a few of the changes seem to have broken the hardware detection scripts used and i cant find any fixes, so looks like im starting from scratch again

What i am trying to decide on though is what to include on the livecds in terms of software, so far ive got networkmanager and possibly OSSv4 (initially disabled, but could be a nice way for people to test if it works for them), after that though i get a bit stuck, il probably throw in some more wifi drivers and thats it, im open to suggestions through

Well, ive been twiddling my thumbs for months waiting for someone, somewhere to answer my prayers and create a working linux x-fi driver. Creative did release an ‘official’ beta driver last year but ive never had any luck with it like a large number of other people.

However it would appear that our prayers have been answered, at least in part. As with the latest release of OSS there is a basic x-fi driver, and whats more, it works! Its not amazing, currently only stereo sound is available but it works, and works ok therefore im happy.

If your interested in getting it running on gentoo then take a look at the official OSS forums as there is an overlay available that has working ebuilds in it.

Ive also just finished putting together a patched ebuild that adds support for OSS v4 to gstreamer so that sound works inside gnome, take a look on the downloads page for details (many thanks to seawright on the OSS forums for the patch).

So im making progress in getting this site working, although most of my tinkering has been behind the scenes lately, but i now have subversion and trac working (for anyone who cares trac is running on http://dev.monkeydust.net/trac) although i did hit some snags getting trac running in the root directory of dev.monkeydust.net so for now its running in /trac, perhaps il get round to taking another look at some point. Of course it doesnt matter much at the minute as i currently dont have anything to host there!

With any luck il have some more time to actually devote to learning python and i might even make a start on one of the many program ideas ive got bouncing in my head, so far im trying to get my head around the layman source code as id like to try and make it work with paludis (while playman works, its not as pretty as layman and wont remove repos for you), my other idea is a basic pygtk front end to tpb (thinkpad buttons) to make it a bit easier to control what button does what.

If anyone has any ideas though im open to other suggestions for useful (basic) tools, anything that will force me to learn more python is good

Well after months of procrastinating making excuses to myself ive finally taken the plunge and bought myself a domain and setup some hosting so i can now share my rants and rambles with the world (well, maybe a few people less than the whole world).

If your seeing this on planet larry then it means everything works (woo for me!), so now ive just got to justify this gentoo tagged post by saying well, this post is gentoo powered, at least the server its coming from is. Thanks to they guys over at www.bytemark.co.uk im running gentoo inside one of their vm’s, i had tried ubuntu for a short time but it just didn’t feel right so i decided to stick to what i know best and run gentoo. Things are a little slower due to being in a VM and sharing resources with others but other than that its not too bad.

Expect more posts as i muddle my way through setting everything up and find things to blog about.