Free Software Linux

Here’s what I’ve been up to: http://www.funtoo.org has been redesigned. It now has more of a portal design to get you to the latest Funtoo, Funtoo+OpenVZ and Gentoo builds. I hope you like it :) In the Funtoo Portage tree, I’ve added a new build of OpenRC, a new udev ebuild (133 with some OpenRC-compatibility and other fixes), and I’m keeping Portage 2.2_rc* unmasked. The Gentoo Portage tree has masked 2.2_rc* to try to get more testing of the upcoming 2.1* release, which is fine, but we’re doing to stick with the development branch.

Hey, I’ve just updated the Metro wiki with info on how to use Metro to perform Custom Builds. Armed with this info, you will be able to create your own customized versions of Gentoo. You can use everything from a customized Portage tree, to customized global and local USE variables and keywords, and custom package lists. Dive in and let me know how Metro custom builds work for you! Post your feedback in the blog comments below. Note: If you already have Metro installed, just run “git pull” in the /root/git/metro directory to automatically download all the latest Metro updates.

I’ve just released version 1.1 of Metro and updated the QuickStart Guide to reflect this new version. Currently, the only way to install Metro is to use git – see the improved QuickStart Guide for more information. Here’s a list of all the improvements to Metro:

A lot of people have asked me recently “What is the goal of Funtoo? What are you trying to do?” For those who are trying to understand the inspiration behind Funtoo, this video should make it clear: OK, OK, here’s an explanation of what Funtoo is about. We are focusing on providing the infrastructure Gentoo needs to move to a more distributed, collaborative model. This includes a git-based Portage tree as well as the Metro build engine.

Hi everyone – Metro, my Gentoo automated build engine, has been released. I’ve written up a QuickStart guide to guide you through the process of installing and using Metro for the first time. I still have a lot of documentation to write, which I’ll be doing over the next week, but for now the QuickStart guide should allow those anxious to begin playing with Metro to get their feet wet with this new tool. Enjoy! -Daniel

Marlon Cabrera Oliveira has released BeBop Linux, a customized set of amd64 stage tarballs based on the Funtoo stage tarballs. Here’s some info on his project – some specs, a screenshot, and a short interview below. First, the technical details. There are two versions: a basic system version and a startkde version, featuring:

In this video, Linus explains the important vision behind distributed development (using git.) If you are new to git, or want to understand the future direction of the Portage tree, this is the video to watch.

Some quick updates: Per request on this blog, I am now building ~pentium4 Funtoo (unstable) stages which can be downloaded here. For the past few weeks, all my stage3’s have been about 15MB smaller than they were before due to the fact that I only build the en_US ISO-8859-1 and en_US UTF-8 locales by default. If you need to add any additional locales, edit the /etc/locale.gen file appropriately and then run the “locale-gen” command as root. Starting with the October 1st ~x86 build, all Funtoo (unstable) stage3 builds now include dhcpcd and git. Gentoo stage3’s that I build do not contain any extra packages.

Gentoo seems to be having problems with .”1” releases – 2007.1 was cancelled and now 2008.1 has been cancelled. The Gentoo project has also announced a desire to move to a more “back to basics approach” where they are doing weekly builds of Gentoo stages. Good idea. As many of you know, I am already building fresh stages for x86, i686, athlon-xp, pentium4, core32, amd64, core64, ~x86 and ~amd64 as well as OpenVZ templates at http://www.funtoo.org/linux.

Today, I spent some time looking at better ways to organize the Portage tree in git, and I'm interested in getting feedback on what I've done. Please take a look at my new portage-new git repository. This new repository contains both the main gentoo.org tree in the "master" branch, and the funtoo.org tree in the "funtoo.org" branch. This seems to be a much better way to organize things, for the following reasons:

For those of you interested to learn more about the Funtoo Portage tree, I have written a nice tutorial which you can view at http://github.com/funtoo/portage/wikis/home. This tutorial explains how to use git, how to use the Funtoo Portage tree for development, and how to easily fork the tree for your own collaborative projects.

I now have the official Gentoo Portage tree as well as my slightly tweaked Funtoo Portage tree hosted at GitHub. The "portage" repository is the Funtoo one, whereas the "portage-gentoo.org" tree is the canonical Gentoo tree.

Gentoo unstable or “tilde” (~x86, ~amd64) stages are now available for download at the following locations: http://www.funtoo.org/linux/~x86 http://www.funtoo.org/linux/~amd64 I also have unstable OpenVZ templates available for download at: http://www.funtoo.org/linux/openvz/~x86 http://www.funtoo.org/linux/openvz/~amd64

Hey all – I updated my private fork of Catalyst to support “unstable” (aka “tilde”, ie ~x86, ~amd64) builds of Gentoo. Everything from the catalyst side seems to be working, but no unstable stages are available yet as I’m hitting some bugs in the core toolchain. We (me and Gentoo devs on bugs.gentoo.org) are working to try to resolve these bugs. The current one relates to coreutils-6.12’s /bin/touch using a potentially unsupported system call. Once all the issues are resolved, I should have some nice “unstable” stages for all of you. :) For my version of catalyst, I am using the following naming convention for unstable stages:

As many of you know, I build up-to-date official Gentoo Linux stage tarballs twice a week for a variety of platforms. I've just converted my build system over to using the just-released Gentoo Linux 2008.0 system profile. This has been a fairly easy transition. Everything built from the 8th of July onwards should be using the new 2008.0 profile. Here's an outline of all the different builds I have available for download:

• x86
• i686
• athlon-xp
• pentium4