Announcing the Gentoo Wiki Project
5 Apr 10 at 18:44 | 
gentoo, wiki | 
22
After the mostly positive feedback on the recent wiki discussion, we have now gone ahead, formed a preliminary team consisting of both users and developers, and put up a project page. All constructive feedback on this new project is welcome.
We’d also like to invite any users and developers, who are willing to help to make this a success, to join us. At this point we are especially looking for people who can help with:
- the initial setup and configuration of a MediaWiki instance
- the design of a custom Gentoo theme for MediaWiki (including graphics and CSS)
- the internal organization of the wiki
- moderation
I’ll make sure to let you know when we open to the public!
Refocussing my responsibilities within Gentoo
18 Mar 10 at 16:19 | gentoo, personal | 2
Today I removed myself from most of the herds and projects within Gentoo that I was (more or less) involved in. I can’t pretend I am really an active maintainer in all those herds and lately I have been noticing I am spreading myself too thin. I regularly get “pinged” or mailed concerning packages that I only tangentially am interested in or know of. In an attempt to prevent burn-out and demotivation, I have decided to refocus my activities and responsibilities within Gentoo on those things I am really interested in: Qt and related non-KDE packages, and a few miscellaneous ones (most importantly openbox and poppler).
This also means I stepped down as lead developer of the LXDE project within Gentoo, and have appointed Victor Ostorga, who has been doing some excellent work, as my successor. I am happy to have brought this lightweight desktop to my favorite distro, and I’m sure Victor will manage just fine without me (hopefully with some help from others).
All in all I should have some time freed up to do a few other things. Once again I am trying to find a position as English language teacher in China, and I want to take some time to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese. I’ve also been bitching about KDE bloat for long enough now, and complaining there is no lighter Qt4 alternative, so I want to see what I can do about that, taking the opportunity to delve deeper into programming.
Qt 4.7 live ebuilds
16 Mar 10 at 19:12 | gentoo, overlay, qt | 2
Recently a new branch was formed in the Qt source repository for the upcoming Qt 4.7 release. The release is expected “mid 2010”. It will carry some exciting new technologies, especially the Qt Declarative UI, using QML (the new Qt Meta-object Language) and Qt Quick (Qt User Interface Creation Kit), as well as some improvements in the multimedia module.
If you want to test the “live” code of this new version in development on Gentoo, we now have ebuilds available in our qting-edge overlay. (Just keep in mind Qt 4.7 is currently incompatible with KDE4, if you happen to use that.) And we also have updated ebuilds for the upcoming Qt Creator 2.0 version.
I’m curious what new Qt application development this will spur.
Poppler reunification
24 Jan 10 at 01:49 | gentoo | 18
Since we have eapi-2 use dependencies now (and have had them for a while…), there is no longer any need to split the poppler package (a popular PDF library). As first major step in the reunification of the split poppler packages, I just committed a new ‘monolithic’ ebuild, app-text/poppler-0.12.3, to our testing branch in portage. This ebuild was developed by Maciej Mrozowski from our KDE team, and uses the cmake buildsystem, which is actually preferred by upstream.
You should have no problem migrating to the new monolithic poppler, as portage should be able to solve the blockers automatically. As a second step we will adjust the dependencies in packages that need poppler, to no longer depend on the virtual ebuilds, but on app-text/poppler directly, with the correct useflag dependencies. This work will be done gradually over the coming days.
Version 0.12.3 is also our stable candidate, and a stable request will be filed soon. Then all old versions of poppler and the split packages, as well as the virtuals, will be removed for security reasons. Feel free to come by #gentoo-kde on Freenode if you have any questions.
LXDE 0.5.0 update
23 Jan 10 at 22:00 | gentoo, lxde | 7
Hello there! Long time no see, I know. (At least on this blog.) For our LXDE users out there, I want to point you to the fact that Victor Ostorga has provided us with some updated packages, and we now have lxde-meta-0.5.0 in portage, in the testing branch. So go ahead and test these updated packages out, and report any bugs you find!
LXDE updates
4 Aug 09 at 21:30 | gentoo, lxde, updates | 7
Lately we updated some of the LXDE packages in Gentoo, and tonight I added a few more. We have now a practically complete LXDE desktop on Gentoo. So if you feel like trying the most lightweight desktop environment, consider to emerge lxde-meta. If you come across any bugs or other issues, please let us know. Bugs should be reported at bugs.gentoo.org. Support questions are welcome in the #gentoo and #gentoo-desktop IRC channels on Freenode, or #lxde on OFTC. You can also go to the forums.
The current version, lxde-meta-0.4.2 and its dependencies, is considered our stable candidate, so we’d like to straighten out any issues there may exist. Also, some documentation would be welcome. So if you want to contribute a “How to configure and use LXDE on Gentoo” guide, we’d be very thankful. Or if you want to help maintaining LXDE in portage, we could always use more people. So contact me if you’re interested in a herd tester or developer position.
We also have an overlay with live ebuilds, but it is basically unmaintained. So I cannot recommend you use it, unless you want to test and update the ebuilds. If you’re on bitbucket, send me a pull request. We used to have several user contributors, but I guess they are too busy with other things now — as am I. Currently my focus for LXDE (whenever I have time for it) is to get the packages up-to-date with the latest released versions and get what we have now tested and marked stable.
So have you tried LXDE yet? What are your thoughts? And are you willing to contribute?
How to re-enable backspace as back key in Firefox 3.5
3 Aug 09 at 10:59 | browser, firefox, howto | 4
While Firefox 3.5 has some good improvements, it’s not all good. We geeks are quite disappointed by the decision to disable the backspace key. In previous versions backspace would take you back a page in history. Which is great when you are on the keyboard already — no need to grab the mouse. But in 3.5 this has been disabled.
Fortunately, this is a setting that you can change. Here’s how:
- Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar.
- In the Filter search field type backspace — this should bring up the browser.backspace_action preference.
- Right-click on the value (defaults to 2) and select Modify.
- In the pop-up window change the value to 0 (that’s zero) and accept.
- Enjoy your backspace key to go back a page in history again.
For more information see the mozillazine knowledge base page on about:config.
Why DRM on news is a bad idea
2 Aug 09 at 11:31 | freedom, opinion | Add your comment
As Techdirt writes:
This has been said before (multiple times) but you don’t rescue your business model by “protecting” against what people want to do. You don’t rescue your business model by wasting resources trying to hold back what people want to do. You rescue your business by providing more value and figuring out a way to monetize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only hastens failure.
I’ve been saying that all along, but the old media don’t get it. If they refuse to evolve, they will go extinct, like dinosaurs.
Why I won’t buy a Kindle
22 Jul 09 at 21:03 | freedom | Add your comment
If you didn’t know why DRM is bad, this story on Slate will tell you. If I ever buy an ebook reader gadget, it will only be one on which I really own the files, and have full control.
One small step for a man
21 Jul 09 at 16:40 | open source | Add your comment
But a giant leap for Microsoft!
The Redmond giant that we all love to hate has surprised many Free Software enthusiasts by releasing “20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers. Microsoft says its first open source Linux code contribution is designed to speed the performance of the operating system when it’s run in a Hyper-V virtual machine.” (source: DesktopLinux.com) See also the article by our resident kernel developer GregKH.
So much for the “cancerous” license… Anyway, I’m happy they are starting to see the light.
