“Nothing gets people’s interest peaked like colorful graphics. Therefore, graphing the web of trust in your local area as you build it can help motivate people to participate as well as giving everyone a clear sense of what’s being accomplished as things progress.” I graphed the Gentoo Developer Web of Trust, as motivated by the (outdated) [Debian Web of Trust][2]. Graph (same as link above) – Redrawn weekly : http://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/wot-graph.png Stats per Node : http://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/wot-stats.html Source : http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/qa-scripts.git;a=blob;f=gen-dev-wot.sh;hb=HEAD Enjoy.

The Gentoo Miniconf is over now but it was a great success. There was 30+ developers that went and I met quite some users too. Thanks to Theo (tampakrap) and Michal (miska) for organizing the event (and others), thanks to openSUSE for sponsoring and letting the Gentoo Linux guys hangout there. Thanks to the other sponsors too, Google, Aeroaccess, et al. More pics at the [Google+ event][3] page. It was excellent to meet all of you.

There are thousands of guides out there on this subject, however I still struggled to set up an IPSEC VPN at first. This is a HOWTO for my own benefit – maybe someone else will use it too. I struggled because most of the guides involved setting up the VPN on a NAT’d host and connecting to the VPN inside the network. I didn’t do that on my linode, which has a static public IP.

Preface: I use to use rsync.net for my offsite backup needs. They offer a nice solution, especially with the F/OSS contributor discount, but my needs were lesser than their offerings and I didn’t quite feel comfortable paying monthly for such needs. That is, get my critical (but small) backups off my host, MySQL, a few important files, etc. Most of my online world is now externally hosted (cloud) or easily rebuilt with key pieces of info.

I’ll be there. [][1] [1]: http://www.linuxdays.cz/en/

On my Linode running Gentoo Linux, I converted to ext4 some time ago and didn’t have any issues until now for some reason, mostly because I don’t reboot that often to notice. The symptoms are : Every reboot, you will see: EXT4-fs error (device xvda): ext4_journal_start_sb:296: Detected aborted journal<br /> EXT4-fs (xvda): Remounting filesystem read-only<br /> and a subsequent reboot fixes this by a forced run of fsck. Now that is an annoying one, every other reboot results in a crippled system and otherwise a fsck “fixes” it and you have no issues.

Colemak is my new keymap of choice. Luckily, Gentoo Linux supports it well. Unlike some of the crazy instructions people have posted out [there][3], you only need to edit 2 files to convert your console and Xorg server. Note, I’m taking the time to write this because I couldn’t find easy instructions out there… ` % cat /etc/conf.d/keymaps Use keymap to specify the default console keymap. There is a complete tree of keymaps in /usr/share/keymaps to choose from.

(Preface: Target audience for this post is Gentoo Devs + GMail WebUI users, however, anyone that forwards bugmail to GMail and has procmail between them could also use this.) I find it annoying that the GMail web interface chooses to thread messages based on subject name alone, this creates two threads for every new bug report sent to you from bugzilla. Sadly, we can’t control the threading that Google tells us is “the only way” (subject based threading or email header based threading, which bugzilla does correctly).

Well, I got sick of setting -python -perl on my Gentoo hosts, I even consider them “questionable defaults” for a majority of Gentoo users.. So, let this be an advanced notice that you may see some rebuilds for useflag changes. There has been sufficient testing such that there should be few to nil problems, but we can’t test everything. Please file bug reports, if needed. See also: Gentoo Announce Message

I don’t know how many people know about per-package environment variables in portage since 2.1.9 or so. (ref: bug 44796) It is a worthwhile enhancement to know about, regardless. Like most people, I have my PORTAGE_TMPDIR on tmpfs to speed up compilation times and reduce I/O usage. My 2G tmpfs mounted on /var/tmp/portage is large enough for almost all packages, even multiple jobs at once, however, not all. Solution: % cat /etc/portage/package.env app-office/libreoffice notmpfs.conf % cat /etc/portage/env/notmpfs.conf PORTAGE_TMPDIR=“/var/tmp/notmpfs” (More info available in the portage man page) Now, when I find my next package that needs notmpfs, it is as easy as: echo "cat-egory/pkg notmpfs.conf" >> /etc/portage/package.env which is much easier than bashrc hacks or something else insane that I have seen.

It has been awhile since I’ve posted about what I’ve been doing with Gentoo Linux. So, here is a general update for the team that I have been spending most of my time with. You may have seen the Bugzilla upgrade that Christian was working on. Gentoo moved from the bottom of the list provided from one of the upstream devs to the top of the list. (As of April 2011) I finally put an idea of mine into reality of graphing the number of “emerge –sync’s” against the rsync.gentoo.org rotation.

Scenario: You need to setup a service that requires ssh access to a remote host, possibly/probably by the root user. This service needs to run at regular intervals and it is critical that it works without a human entering a passphrase (even once). Solution: The obvious solution that comes to mind is a ssh key. But a password-less key that allows root login? RED FLAG. However, there is a way to accomplish this without allowing a root login completely.

The problem: % dmesg | grep -i micro Atom PSE erratum detected, BIOS microcode update recommended Atom PSE erratum detected, BIOS microcode update recommended microcode: CPU0 sig=0x106c2, pf=0x4, revision=0x208 microcode: CPU1 sig=0x106c2, pf=0x4, revision=0x208 microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 , Peter Oruba I found out that some recent kernel that I loaded at an unknown time, was able to point out that I had ‘old’ microcode for my processor on my Aspire1 ZG5.

This post will probably annoy some people, or bring bad “spotlight” to Gentoo Linux. I call it a case study, but it is just my opinions… The QA team has said that there is some sort of “policy” on masking packages that break reverse dependencies. I’ll subscribe that that policy for the sake of not breaking users machines on purpose, however, let’s take a look at the current case study: poppler-0.16 package.mask (in context, name removed because it isn’t needed): +# Masked because of ABI change, breaks +# depending packages.

Xfce-4.8pre2 was announced yesterday. Gentoo has it available already thanks to the work of Samuli (ssuominen). The pre1 version was available with 0day bumps too, that proved to have the normal beta release “issues”, there are many bugs fixed in pre2 (ChangeLog). I saw several Gentoo users participating on the Xfce bugtracker, thanks. If you are of the type to test and report bugs, feel free to upgrade to 4.8pre2 and help make 4.8 final a solid release by participating upstream ([bug tracker][3]).

There seems to be a semi-meme going [around][2] on some of the planets I read. My concern is long directory paths and I wanted a dymanic solution for it. Surely, I cannot be the first person to think of it, but I haven’t seen it in use anywhere else. jolexa @ helios :: ~ %% and jolexa @ helios :: ~ %% cd projects/prefix-tinderbox/really_long_dirname_so_that_binpkgs_can_be_shortened/a/b/ jolexa @ helios :: .../a/b %% (the colors and wrapping are representitive only) and the code that produces that: _chomp_path() { local path=${1/${HOME}/\~} local last=${path} sedout= count=0 count2=0 sedout=$(echo ${path} | sed -e 's:/: :g') for i in ${sedout}; do (( count++ )) done if ((count > 2)); then last="..." for i in ${sedout}; do (( count2++ )) if (( count2 >= count - 1 )); then last+="/$i" fi done fi echo ${last} } PS1='\[\033[1;34m\]\u \[\033[1;32m\]@\[\033[1;34m\] \h \[\033[1;30m\]::\[\033[1;37m\] $(_chomp_path $(pwd)) \[\033[1;30m\]%%\[\033[0m\] ' If anyone wants to improve that function, let me know.

It should be no secret that this site and my other co-location needs are hosted at Linode.com, for which I am a happy customer running Gentoo Linux. The reason for this post is that after an announcement today. All I had to do was reboot and then I received a 42% RAM increase. Yay. Thanks Linode, you are exceeding your competition! (Shameless plug for my [referral code][4] ) [4]: http://www.linode.com/?r=b4fa70eb87c890e08baf7b0c7852fb7cecd8963b

Prenote: According to tunnelbroker.net there are only 426 days until IPv4 exhaustion, at the time of this writing. You might have seen me say that the mirror-admin team will support IPv6 rotations “soon” multiple times. It took much discussion, mainly because it is a low priority subject, and thus much time as well. I say it is low priority because on our official IPv6 (rsync.ipv6.gentoo.org) rotation we only see about ~10-15 client syncs per day out of ~23000.

Just a quick note to say that http://sources.gentoo.org/, our web view for source repositories, has moved to a new host a few days ago. Some of you have noted on it being “faster” 😉 This was the goal as it is now on much improved hardware. (Thanks goto our Gentoo Linux sponsors for providing hardware/colocation) The templates for that site are hosted at [gentoo-viewvc-templates.git][2] repo. If you want to make any improvements, I can evaluate.

For some reason, Linode.com (my review) sets up their hosts to use dhcpd to grab the static IPv4 address on boot. This is in contrast to Host Virtual which uses the “Gentoo-way” to set static addresses. Now, there isn’t anything exactly wrong with using dhcpd on hosts with static addresses, actually, it may be simpler (and this is probably why they did it). However, I don’t like it for a few reasons, booting takes longer as it probes for IPs and it uses extra space for dhcpd binary on a low resource host – this includes extra time for updating.

In the past few months, there have been a number of things going on. I want to share those with the readers: New Document: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors-rsync.xml The tools-portage team has made app-portage/mirrorselect use this document to help users select rsync mirrors in a similar fashion as distfile mirrors. Additionally, I have a bug open to include this page in docs and/or the homepage. [http://mirrorstats.gentoo.org][3] – tracks community distfile mirrors for freshness. This page has been around before, but now it supports rsync and IPv6 as well.

You have probably seen the Host Virtual advertisements on the sidebar of [gentoo.org][2] website. I ran into a weird clocksource issue on my VPS that I haven’t seen elsewhere. This issue was that my time would progressively get worse and worse and eventually NTP could not keep up because the clock was so far out of date. This happened on a pretty quick interval, about 1-2 days until I had to manually reset it.

Installing Gentoo Linux on the Genesi EfikaMX (unboxing) is fairly simple. I have completed documentation for this process here. I have enjoyed working on this platform and will highly suggest it for applications that need low power and non-extreme hardware specs. Anyway, I’m not the first to have Gentoo Linux running on EfikaMX, but the first to document the process. Thanks go to Raúl (armin76) for working on the Gentoo stages, [Genesi][5] for the support, et al.

My linode is now my personal DNS resolver. I have officially ditched the ISP nameservers from this point forward now that I found unbound. Unbound is a lightweight, recursive resolver that is perfect for your LAN, co-located host, or even a single host. For your single host, emerge unbound, start the service, add 127.0.0.1 to the first nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf. Unbound is setup (by default) to accept connections from localhost and refuse anything else.

There was alot of of talk/flames on the LKML about devtmpfs. Looks like a big push for this was for embedded devices, android, etc. Since I read that it may give a boot time speed up, I was slightly intrigued. http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/4/30/182, yes…it is an old topic but it finally was released in stable .32 kernel. So, bootcharts: bootchart-2.6.31.6.png 39 seconds bootchart-2.6.32-no-devtmpfs.png 37 seconds bootchart-2.6.32-devtmpfs.png 37 seconds bootchart-2.6.32-openrc.png 26 seconds (devtmpfs) So, where is the real win here?

About a month ago, I installed Gentoo on the new-to-me Acer Aspire1. Installation went like anything else, it is just a normal x86 host after all. I don’t have everything on it working, because I don’t care. If you are looking for additional resources on getting the extras working, you may want to look here or here. The exciting part, that I got working and am ready to announce publicly, is my new atom-x86 binpkg repo.

In the mail today, I got the Efika MX Open Client. My first impressions are pretty good. No noise and no moving parts, it should last for a long time. It comes with Ubuntu 9.10 minimal on it out of the box. That HDMI output makes it the best text console I have ever seen on my 40” 1080p LCD TV! Seriously though, on my TODO: Analyze the possibilities for a HTPC.

I’ve used a custom ~/.screenrc file for at least a year now. I find that this snippet helps improve the usability for me. #Custom Stuff caption always "%{= wb}$USER @ %H %-Lw%{= r}%50%n* %t%{-}%+Lw%< %-=<< (%c.%s)" activity "%c activity - %n%f %t" bell "%c bell - %n%f %t^G" vbell_msg " *beep* " startup_message off defscrollback 500 multiuser off # Always start screen with utf8 enabled. (screen -U) defutf8 on Output

As Linux-Mag points out ([Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked][1]) using gcc optimizations for “omg, teh speed” is not all that practical. Sure, I’ll add some compiler flags here and there as long as I am compiling everything anyway but I don’t consider that a feature of Gentoo Linux. I actually prefer Gentoo for the package management and customization via USE flags (even with the headaches that they cause sometimes). [1]: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574/

I had this genius idea about using sshfs with rtorrent. I thought that this use case would fit best in situations where you have good bandwidth but not much diskspace, such as my linode VPS (review). So, I’ll attempt to share my findings in this regard. If you are not familiar with rtorrent. You just need to know that it is a powerful, lightweight bittorrent client. It has a “watch” feature that watches a directory for new torrents, and obviously it can put downloaded files in a specified location.

I recently had a bit of downtime on my linode. If you are wondering what a ‘linode’ is, check out my review or the website. And a big thank you to the folks that used my [referral code][3] when they got setup with linode themselves, you guys rock! So, about my recent 1⁄2 day downtime. It was self-inflicted because I wanted to move to a different datacenter. I moved my linode from Newark, NJ to Dallas, TX.

Searched high and low to find this silly little info. Finally found it [here][1]. # define a pattern for the host url finding # %% => % sign # %0 => domain name + tld # %1 => tld # %2 => domain name without tld # %3 => subdomain 1 name # %4 => subdomain 2 name # Set default vhost server location here evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%0/htdocs" # If we don't have a %3, default to htdocs $HTTP["host"] =~ "^[^.]+\.[^.]+$" { evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%2.%1/htdocs/" } # If we don't have a %4, find the subdomain $HTTP["host"] =~ "^[^.]+\.[^.]+\.[^.]+$" { evhost.path-pattern = "/www/%2.%1/subdomains/%3/" } # If we have a %4, find the subdomain2.subdomain1.

We are cleaning up the XFCE ebuilds via a new eclass. The current eclasses do not make maintenance any easier, like they should. Some other things on the TODO list include: Remove xfce-4.4 from the tree. 4.6.1 has long since been stable. Caveats: We promised mips that they could have a ~month to keyword 4.6.1. [Gentoo Prefix][2] can’t easily use 4.6.1 due to the xorg-server dependency. Rename plugins to match what upstream calls them.

This is a follow up to my initial linode post. Linode is a VPS provider. Linode stands for “Linux Node.” They offer relatively up to date initial Gentoo installations, among other distros. Overall Grade: 9.5⁄10 (because no one is ever perfect) Performance: This is probably the one area that everyone is concerned about from VPS providers. Linode provides linodes on pretty beefy hardware, 4 CPUs/host: %% cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "model name"<br /> model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5420 @ 2.50GHz With the Linode 360 plan, there are 40 guests on [each host][3].

Today marks the [1 year anniversary][1] of joining the Gentoo developer community. Quickly, a few things stand out: 3954 commits Mentored 2 new recruits. Christian, hacking on the Sunrise project and portage tools. Mounir, promptly shaped up the voip herd of packages and joined the ppc team. [1]: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/msg_90c8271e1c69ce3e478bfcc057fb6fc9.xml

I recently moved from using pidgin to using bitlbee (net-im/bitlbee). Bitlebee is sweet because it allows me to access “traditional IM” via [irssi][4] in a screen session from anywhere that I am via my co-located server. Of course, you can use any irc client that you are familiar with. As more and more of my friends move away from traditional IM, I don’t feel a need to pay as much attention to the various networks.

The release of Xfce-4.6.1 was announced approximately 36 hours ago on the xfce-announce mailing list. It is my pleasure to say that it is now in the Gentoo tree as well. You can find a shiny 4.6.1 bugfix release upon your next –sync. Due to the number of bugfixes by the Xfce team upstream, the Gentoo Xfce team has decided to remove 4.6.0 related ebuilds and focus on bringing 4.6.1 to the stable tree.

Let me start out this post by making it clear. You should really upgrade your Gentoo installation on a regular basis. If not, you might run into some problems. This post attempts to help out someone that is trying to bring an unmaintained installation up to date. Under most circumstances it is probably easier to reinstall after a certain point. These instructions have been created by an active contributor to Gentoo, Nick Fortino, to take a 2006.1 installation and update it to a current stable system.

I was pretty upset after reading that the last status update on the Skype Linux client was back in January. Since I was using Skype on Windows all week last week, I didn’t know how bad it was on Linux until I got back home. What a bummer that all Linux gets is v2.0, while Windows gets v4.0. In particular, I needed the SMS feature. So, now Gentoo has this feature via plugin now too.

I have been thinking for awhile now and can’t convince myself of an answer. Does the lack of yearly releases help or hurt Gentoo? I enjoy Gentoo because I never have to re-install my host. The “rolling release” model is great, a model shared by nearly all(?) source-based distros. However, with our new automated weekly stages – which I think are a great idea, we lose a few things. In no particular order, we lose: PR – new ‘releases’ generate a buzz on the distro sites and blog-o-sphere around the world.

If you have rss feeds to my old WP hosted blog, you may want to check them now and update if needed. That blog is closed for comments and I’ll rid google of it after it fully picks up this site. (Over 20,000 hits over there, thanks!) My new home is located on a Gentoo VPS from a provider called [Linode][3]. I have nothing but good things to say about Linode right now.

Since there isn’t anything extremely relevant in google when searching for “gentoo quickcam pro 9000” – I hope this helps someone. I solicited advice from the community for a webcam a couple months back and my girlfriend used the comments to buy me this model for Christmas. It works great, so thanks for recommending it people. =) As Marcus Hanwell [wrote][2] some 7 months ago, it is easy to setup. To set this cam up, make sure you have a recent kernel (>=2.6.26 – don’t quote me on exact version.

I knew the general concept of this word but it was thrown around today so I decided to research it. Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as the bicycle shed example, and by the expression colour of the bikeshed) is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. source Made famous in software development by Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD dev) *“The really, really short answer is that you should not.

Thank you very much. I will test when I get home. Quick developer responsiveness like this makes me feel that Gentoo is a high-quality and well maintained distribution. It also makes me feel part of it. Thank you for doing this for a community distribution. – Gentoo user (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249390#c3) Just wanted to say thanks myself to all the Gentoo Users out there that are participating in this “community distro” as well.

*I do not wish to support this in ANY way, shape, or form. Use it how you wish, but do not expect help with it. Sorry. Well, I quit using VirtualBox for my virtualization needs. I am now using kernel based virtualization, or kvm. Kvm offers many advantages, in my opinion, the key being the simplicity and ease of use. I did not like the VBox abstraction. kvm’s core code is *in* the kernel, userspace tools are in a package.

Dear lazyweb, In your experiences, what has been the best webcam to use with Gentoo? I would like to use skype or some other video messaging app to talk to my girlfriend studying abroad next semester but I haven’t used (or setup) a webcam before. Thanks all.

Hi, News item: The kerberos USE flag has been removed from the default desktop profiles. If you relied on this use flag (unlikely) then you should add it to make.conf again. There was discussion about this flag and its validity when the e2fsprogs-libs upgrade was happening on the stable tree. Anyway, it is now removed. Read more [here][1]. [1]: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_dff704cd21b8b72dca61a4f16363502f.xml

Better but not great. As I previously wrote about how much iwl3945 sucked. The .27 kernel seems like there has been many iwl improvements. When I say, “seems” – that is what I mean. I mean that it seems like there is improvements, and the changelogs show alot of iwl activity. So, my current experiences with iwl3945 still show some “troubles” with being on B networks. But this time, mixed networks work better and G networks work flawlessly.

Hey all, I just put preload into portage. I found this one by researching readahead stuff. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. This is a cool little app that I have been running all day now. The short story is that it scans /proc every 20 seconds and will maintain its own “database” of files to keep loaded in memory. The long story is: The author’s whitepaper on preload. And more details can be found [here][2].

(In response to my own post, here) I tried out sReadahead this morning. That experience was very disappointing initial testing. I will describe the process here: Download the source, from moblin.org and compile it. Install readahead-list, created by our own Robbat2 Use the file lists from readahead-list and pass it to sreadahead’s generate_fileset command cd /etc ; generate_filelist /etc/readahead-list/runlevel-boot (I actually tried to concatenate both runlevel-boot and runlevel-default with no additional results.) Shove sreadahead in the readahead-list init scripts reboot End result: No improvement in boot time with either readahead-list or sReadahead.

Hmm, there is alot of buzz around the fastboot craze and now hitting the proverbial 5 second boot. This is turning out to be a fun thing to follow. Linus doesn’t like the fastboot [patches][4] but developers are adopting some of the patches that these guys have created (see lwn article, X devs offered to help, etc). Anyway, many kudos to Intel for supporting the open source community, Powertop, latencytop, X, kernel..cool.

Switch to baselayout-2 and openrc..the speed up is noticeable. Especially if you enable rc_parallel="YES" in /etc/rc.conf. Anyway, others have wrote about it already, including a bootchartd of before and after here. Anyway, this should be hitting stable soonish and when it does be sure to read the migration guide because some things have indeed changed. For me, I count to 10 slowly and my laptop is at the xdm prompt…very cool and good job [Roy][3]!

In response to Bugday and my willingness to help, I want to help users that contribute. I won’t be around for Bugday and I am normally not available on the weekends. So, here is what I am willing to do.. On any maintainer-needed bug, if you fix the issue, feel free to CC me (darkside (at) gentoo.org) on it. You should say something like “darkside: I fixed this and tested it, please commit” and I will review it and commit it.

As jaervosz wrote the other day, the iwl3945 driver has some serious issues with it. I think I have it narrowed down to what conditions cause the problem. Problem: When downloading large files for non-trivial amounts of time, the download speed drops to <80 K/s. This is unacceptable, the whole pipe is limited to that by the way. I am not sure what exactly causes this but I have narrowed down the conditions to which it happens.

Quick tip: Problem: When installing Gentoo, Xfce4 on my new amd64 laptop, the fonts were extremely goofy compared to my old installation on x86. Meaning that terminal fonts looked ok, but gtk based fonts were large and small. I couldn’t figure this out and finally found a solution on XUbuntu’s blog post. I will reiterate it here for my future reference and maybe help someone else with this same problem. Solution: In ~/.config/xfce4, append to the Xft.xrdb file (or create the file): Xft.dpi: 96.

Yesterday, zmedico wrote about building multiple packages in parallel with Portage-2.2_rc2. In Gentoo Prefix, we had a sneak peak to this feature, so I have had some time to play with it on my dual-quad core box. Some timing results that you may like: emerge -e system (excluding sys-devel/gcc) As a baseline: With --jobs=1 and MAKEOPTS=16, load-average=9:<br /> real 77m54.290s<br /> user 41m46.086s<br /> sys 29m14.598s Because I was skeptical of what --jobs could really do, I decided to start with small number of parallel jobs: With --jobs=3, MAKEOPTS=16, load-average=9:<br /> real 61m30.181s<br /> user 42m23.398s<br /> sys 32m32.009s While that was running, I noticed a very significant amount of time where my cores were idle, thanks to the handy little xfce-extra/xfce4-cpugraph widget.

Ok, I normally would not write about a version bump…but I like this one =) Everyone’s most favorite utility to decipher slang on the internet has been updated. I took over maintainer-ship of this package because I noticed that the homepage of this ebuild pointed to a very non-descrip place and I wanted to find out who actually wrote this thing. I found out that it was a NetBSD utility and even better, it gets updated regularly.

I spent a few tries on this as I have never used VirtualBox before. I think this may be randomly documented on the web but I am putting this here for archive purposes (myself) and in case other stumble upon this. Step 1: Create a VM in Virtual box and set the type as Gentoo Linux. I think anyone can handle this because there is a pretty nice wizard that helps you out.