I've not written about Gentoo for quite sometime, and that's primarily because I was too lazy to update my dev blog. Since Livejournal has been doing tag based rss feeds for a while now, I thought I'll get it updated at the planet and should hopefully write a bit more ;)

The method we've been using to handle new mirror bugs has been quite sub-optimal these past few years ;) Basically, we get a bug for a new mirror...and we run a few scripts to check if it's okay, then we let the mirror sit for a while before running the same set of checks and the repeats prolly one more time and if the results are favourable, the mirror is added into rotation. This is the process for both rsync (gentoo-portage aka the portage tree) and distfiles (source tarballs) mirrors. The point where the process umm failed was between checks, since there are quite a few things going on, mostly real life related. And so some of our mirrors have had to wait months before they were approved as official mirrors.

That's not a nice situation to have and I'd like to apologize for the delays that have happened in the past. We've made some changes that will really help processing new mirror bugs way faster than before and leave us free to work on bad mirror/other mirror related bugs.

Last weekend, thanks to a poke by robbat2, I hacked up a little script that automates our mirror checking and drops us an email with the results. All it needs is information from a simple tab de-limited file which has information about the bug, mirror address/IP, type of mirror etc. This really takes out the need for us to attend to new mirror bugs, since all that's needed it adding one line to a file and then the rest is taken care of.

The second change is that we now have an upper limit of 2 weeks to close off new mirror bugs. If a mirror is in sync and doing fine, we aim to finish processing the mirror and adding it into our list of mirrors within this timeframe. To this end we'll mark the due date on the subject of the bug to help us keep track of it.

I'd like to thank our mirrors/mirror admins/sponsors for standing by Gentoo and helping out. Thanks a ton folks and keep em coming! :)

The other small thing that robbat2 and me wanted to get out of the way, was to update our infra server list, which we've completed bar a few machines. So yay for that as well!

Short chat in #gentoo-doc on freenode...


<@fox2mike> rane: ping
<@rane> what's up?
<@fox2mike> if I'm lucky
<@fox2mike> I'll be seeing Sharapova at the Australian Open
<@fox2mike> I'm leaving for Australia in 2 days :p
<@rane> oh damn
<@rane> i hope you plane breaks
<@rane> :-)


And a few days ago...


fox2mike/Gaim: and then, I'm going to the australian open
Sandy: wow
fox2mike/Gaim: thursday - both morning and evening sessions
Sandy: dont stare too much
fox2mike/Gaim: sat - ladies final
fox2mike/Gaim: :D
fox2mike/Gaim: I'll try maga
fox2mike/Gaim: I promise I will try :p
Sandy: hope sharapova loses in first round
Sandy: and the williams sisters enter the finals
Sandy: :P
fox2mike/Gaim: F*CK you


Yup. Feel the luvvvvvvv!

Well, back in 1994, when I got my first ever Creative Multimedia set..it was a big deal. Having a 2x CDROM Drive was an even bigger deal. Along with that pack, came a set of nice games (didn't realise they were nice until quite a few years later). One of the CDs was a combo pack of Syndicate, an awesome strategy + rule the world sort of game based in the future, Strike Commander, about which I've written before, Wing Commander II : Vengeance of the Kilrathi which was a space based game and finally a Diablo style game called Ultima III.

Cutting a long story short, I actually managed to finish WC2 & Strike Commander (somewhere in 1997-98-99) and Syndicate in May 2000 (I know because I've actually written this down in the game manual. I have got to be nuts.).

The other day, on #gentoo-dev (freenode), someone brought up Syndicate. I think it was robbat2 and a couple of us joined in....and well..ferringb pointed me to dosbox. And the rest as they say is history.

I dug out my 12 year old Creative CD, copied stuff off it and am now playing Syndicate (sadly Strike Commander won't work for some silly reason) and have plans to play WC2 again. Finally I can play Transport Tycoon without having to reboot. Finally I got my hands on Fire and Ice for which I've roamed the Internet since 1998 (and then forgot about it till today), after I lost my only working copy.

In this age of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2....I'm quite content playing good old DOS games. It makes for a nice change. Amazing to see the amount of work that went into these games as far back as 1991 (Origin brought out WC2 in 1991) and SC as well as Syndicate were 1993 releases.

fugney, I know you're not the violent types, but you should take a look at Syndicate. And surely Transport Tycoon (I guess you would have, already).

Off to play now, and then catch up on Germany Vs Italy.

Felt bored, and was helping test NetworkManager on Gentoo.

A quick follow-up to the last post...

So you're stuck somewhere and badly need to help your dad with something on the computer at home. I've been in this situation quite a bit and well, I've usually ended up trying to troubleshoot over the phone with minimal success. Enter x11vnc. Here's a quick guide on getting it working on Gentoo.

remote denotes the box I'm using to reach my desktop on the machine home.

1. emerge x11vnc tightvnc. Substituting tightvnc with vnc will do as well, but I like some security, which is made slightly easier using tightvnc.


2. Run vncpasswd in your home directory. This creates a /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd and you will have to enter a password not longer than 8 characters in length, which I found a little surprising. Oh well.
   
3. On home, run x11vnc -rfbauth /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd -display :0. Adjust display as required (0 or 1..)


4. From remote run vncviewer home and enter the password you setup when prompted. Voila, you're in and seeing the desktop now.

A couple of points:

• For VNC to work correctly, home has to have the X Display active. From what I've seen, when I vnc into home with X running but I'm on the console, the vnc display is all distorted.


• By default, VNC traffic is not secure. It is advisable to tunnel it over ssh if you're using it from an insecure network/across the internet. With tightvnc it becomes very simple. All you need to do is vncviewer -via remote home and tightvnc sets up the ssh tunnel automatically.

Missed Barcamp, but had a relaxing weekend for the most part. Schumi showed Alonso who the boss is and I'm extremely happy for him :)

trinity is currently a Dell Inspiron 4100 and yeah, I'm kind of attached to that name, so all my work boxen (the ones I use) have always been and probably will be named trinity in a salute of sorts to Carrie Ann-Moss aka the real Trinity (Matrix). Heh. Clicky for a screenie, maybe I'll post some photos later.

Work in the new place has so far been a learning experience of sorts, which is good. I've picked up more Java related stuff in the last 2 weeks that I've done in the last 2 years (prolly because I never had to/tried). Overall coolness. Yay.

louiswu, I now have Software Suspend working flawlessly on the laptop. Took like about 30 mins to setup, the maximum time being moving my stuff around to create a large enough swap space. Tested once with only command-line and once with X and works like a beauty :) w000t!

Oh, I almost forgot. I now have Wireless at home. Grabbed a Linksys WRT45G (yeah I know, I can't put OpenWRT or similar stuff on it, but hey, it works ™) and a D-Link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card to go with it. Wireless is quite addictive and well, mom's quite happy I'm not drawing cables all over the place. Getting the card to work with Gentoo was a walk in the park with net-wireless/madwifi-driver and net-wireless/wpa_supplicant. Thanks to Joshua Jackson for the recommendation (of sorts) for the card ;) Feels nice to be walking around the place and remaining connected.

Quite a delayed entry...but better late than never. ti22 & myself reached the Yashwantpur Railway station at around 1930 on the 17th Night. The train (Yashwantpur - Cannanore Express) left about 5 minutes reached, pulled a passenger train stunt on us (by going pretty slowly through most of the journey) and chugged into Calicut 30 minutes late at 0845 the next day.

We caught a cab and headed to NITC, which was a good 22 Kms away from the city. Had enough time to freshen up and grab a quick breakfast after which we headed to the main hall. Found premshree & t3rmin4t0r there (who was compiling pnet on a borrowed lappie. Hehe). Pradeepto's talk was going on and t3 was up next, followed by yours truly.

The talk went well, had a few questions in the end like How Portage handles dependencies and GLSA's as well as Daniel Robbins and Microsoft...and a couple of others I don't remember. The slides are up at http://dev.gentoo.org/~fox2mike/talks/

Had lunch and then attended/participated in bluesmoon's talk as well as the BoF that followed. We then decided to catch the sunset and headed back all the way to the city and missed most of the sunset. Had a filling dinner followed by watching Coupling in the company of t3, pradeepto and ash while checking mail & catching up with people over IM/IRC. Coupling is fun and I'm now officially in love with Susan's British accent! :)

Day 2 started off with me reaching the halls in time to see most of kalyan's talk and spent the rest hanging around talking to people etc. say_yes04 wanted to demo Xgl and Pradeepto suggested Kororaa's Gentoo based Xgl LiveCD. So while those two went out to the labs to start the download, the volunteers helped us lay our hands on a cool P4 HT box with an nVidia FX5200 (256 MB) and about 786 MB of system RAM. While shres gave his talk, t3 and myself fiddled to get xgl up and running smoothly.

Wow. Kudos to the Kororaa guys for coming up with the cool idea of getting Xgl onto a LiveCD :) Clicky for a small sample of how Xgl looks...

We had just enough time to get back to Calicut and catch our train which was leaving at 1930. Landed up in B'lore on time and life continued as normal.

Had quite a bit of fun that weekend though :) And a big thanks to NITC & the volunteers for the facilities provided during our stay.

Rest of the snaps are up at http://flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/tags/fossnitc06

I'll be giving a talk at NITC on Gentoo Linux as part of their FOSS.NITC event.

Looking forward to a fun weekend :)

PS: ti22 is coming along with me and I'll meet up with the usual bunch of suspects at the event :)

One fine night on #gentoo-doc, irc.freenode.net...


22:36:17 <@fox2mike> Groningen
22:36:28 <@fox2mike> is that pronounced Gro nin gen ?
22:38:03 < rane> we still didn't agree how to pronounce Gentoo...
22:38:13 < rane> and wonder how to say Groningen? :)
22:39:18 <@neysx> Gentoo pronunciation is explained in the faq, groningen: depends on where you live
22:39:35 < rane> we should provide an mp3 with it

22:40:39 < rane> so, who's got a good voice and microphone? :)
22:42:47 <@fox2mike> I have a mic
22:43:09 <@fox2mike> quick way to correctly record sound?
22:43:27 < nightmorph> in gnome, there's the sound recorder utility
22:43:45 <@fox2mike> nightmorph: brilliant :)
22:47:46 <@fox2mike> ready to cringe on hearing my voice?


That resulted in http://dev.gentoo.org/~fox2mike/misc/gentoo-indian.mp3 (.oggs are up for all these as well)
( Convo again... )
So, http://dev.gentoo.org/~fox2mike/misc/gentoo-american.mp3 and http://dev.gentoo.org/~fox2mike/misc/gentoo-australian.mp3 came into existance...
( More Convo )
Ended with http://dev.gentoo.org/~fox2mike/misc/gentoo-arabia.mp3

Fun.

PS : Welcome ra_ne (rane in the logs above) to LiveJournal :) He's our Polish Lead Translator...
PPS : nightmorph has a little write-up about this here :)
PPPS : I need new userpics.

PJ! PJ!

What is common between FOSS.in/2005 and NASA?

( True, but don't come kill me )

Frankly, I don't know where to start. There have already been countless posts/updates/write-ups on FOSS.in/2005 that I don't think mine will add any value to the existing ones. Anyway, here's my perspective :D

( Pre Day 0 )

Monday morning was fun. louiswu & me were supposed to pick up Seemant from the Airport. The BA flight was supposed to land at 0500 IST, which it did. And well, we were at the airport at about 0615 and couldn't find Seemant anywhere. Spent the next 45 mins or so looking all over the place, calling up his wife in Boston to confirm that he indeed left and then finally heading over to the good BA staff for help. They confirmed that a Mr. Kulleen, Seemant was indeed on the flight and had landed in Bangalore. Crud. So we decide to go take a look again at the Arrivals lounge and there he was...he'd been there all this while and we hadn't looked carefully enough. Yay!

( Days 0,1,2,3,4 )

I'm sure everyone will agree that when we sat down in August, the one thing we all wanted was active participation. I am really, extremely happy that the idea of the BoFs+A specific area for them worked very well. Yes, it needed some pushing and shoving that happened only after Day 2, but it worked. People met, People talked. Unlike the previous years, the venue this time facilitated such discussions.

A round of special thanks to Devdas, Arun/louiswu, Ashish/ti22, Kaustubh/kaustubhhere, Shreyas/say_yes04 and Partha for spending sleepless nights and making sure things were working. You guys are awesome. Arun, Ashish & Partha -- thanks for stepping up when you were needed the most.

Lastly, to the Volunteers of FOSS.in/2005. Great job guys, you can happily pat yourselves on the back for a job well done (apart from forgetting to turn on a few switches ;) but then, we're all human aren't we? :p).

Things were quite hectic, so very few snaps were taken. I'll put them up later tonight.

Okay, with just about T-30 odd hours to go, preps are at a frenzy. Seemant is landing up tomorrow in a couple of hours and well, there's a _lot_ of work to be done :)

Oh, and I need to polish my talk slides. Whoops.

From now on, I may put in most of the Gentoo specific stuff only at the Planet. Don't know if I'll stick to that though ;)

Okay, the long wait is over and LiveJournal finally has tag support. Now if they started tag based rss feeds, getting on the Planet would be a breeze ;)