rlazo's blog - Gentoo

Gentoo Brainstorm - born [maybe not so] dead

nospam@example.com (Rodrigo Lazo) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:19:18 +0100

EDIT 03/07/2008: Seems like the idea is not so unpopular after all. See this thread on gentoo.users mailing list

Edit 03/10/2008: Now there is a forum thread to discuss the idea. Thank you Dan

Gentoo is lacking man-power. If you ask any developer he/she will tell you that more developers would be great to help finishing all the task lying around. Where do you look if you want more developers? In the community and users of course! Gentoo needs new and interesting ways of involve more and more the users with the development process to find users willing to go to the next level and become developers.

Ubuntu has this site called: "ubuntu brainstorm" where users can propose ideas to be voted by other users and improve their ideas up to a feasible level. I think that Gentoo could use something like this. As with ubuntu's site we will be getting ideas like "Push Logitech to make Linux software for theire harmony remote controls". It's not a bad idea, but it's not something any distro could do (after all is the user who buys from X who should push for proper support, not the distro, because is the customer who was the power do to so). As with any brainstorm you will get a mixed bag of good and not so good ideas

Does this really help? I definitly think so. If the idea is good enough and popular enough, the developers could push the original reporter to create a more detailed view of the idea until you get a "blueprint" feasible of implementantion. What happens next? Somebody willing to help may step up, or even the proposer could try to implement it... you get new, motivated people working.

This idea was proposed as bug 212527 and Mike Doty's answer was WONTFIX:"we're not ubuntu. We have plenty of places for users to provide input, this isn't needed. nor do we have any source for it."

I know we are not ubuntu. Does it mean that we couldn't use any idea from them for the sake of "not being ubuntu"? As with the "plenty of places for user to provide input" I think Mike refers to mailing lists, forums, irc channels and bugzilla. All this places are good ways of input but none of them are specific for the task. What we get from a special site is an easier and centralized way of dealing with the ideas. This also mean that if an idea and a bug report are related they should link each other.

kvm and gentoo

nospam@example.com (Rodrigo Lazo) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:36:55 +0100

I own a AMD64 machine that includes hardware virtualization and since day 1 I wanted to take advantage of this. I tried Xen back then (almost a year ago) but it didn't convinced me, it seemed too much work for something I won't on a daily base. Then I read somewhere about kvm and how it got merged into the main kernel so quickly, how simple it was because it relies on hardware virtualization and kernel's internals for so much of the work, I got hooked.

Back then I used kvm-20 and while it worked it had a few glitches (video performance, random crashes on windows guest, erratic networking, etc.) . But fast-forwarding to 2008, kvm-62 fixes the last issue I had, video performance. Drawing grub's menu used to take around two or three seconds, but now it's instantaneous and works like charm. There's a great guide to install kvm on Gentoo here. If you have a CPU that features hardware virtualization and you want to run several instances of your favorite distro (and who doesn't?) I recommend you to give a try kvm-62

First Week and a half ...

nospam@example.com (Rodrigo Lazo) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 04:20:36 +0200

A week and a half has been since the Summer of Code officially began. I'm feeling more and more part of this and I'm as excited as when I was elected a month or so ago. But... we need to get down to business :)

All this time I've been working on two fronts. One is the database; basically defining how to create the relationships between jobs, its metadata and the target clients; the scheduling schema is going to use a crontab-like string as is by far the best way to do it and also is a well known syntax for the users. The database modifications weren't taken lightly as everything is going to be based on the database so they were very well talked with codeman and agaffney. If everything goes as it should *wink* the database schema shouldn't be modified from now on.

On the other side I've been working on the client and server side of the app. I've been using pychecker to review the code. It's easy to make mistakes if you are used to use a compiler to check your code :). On the server side I've added support to command-line arguments. I'm trying to check the client-server connection before doing any other work, and for some reason the SSL authentication is throwing me an error if the server and the client are on different machines; but if they run on the same they work... weird. Once that is over I'll focus on fix all the functions I broke with the modification to the database.

On a side note I finally have everything ready to work, the kvm virtual machines are working flawlessly and with the extra Gigabyte of RAM I just bought there's not a single delay while working with several virtual machines. Great!

Application accepted!

nospam@example.com (Rodrigo Lazo) — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 05:00:25 +0200

My Summer of Code application has been accepted! When I first saw it I couldn't believe it. I have been accepted to work for the Gentoo Foundation. My proposal is "SCIRE's job subsystem implementation for both the frontend and backend."
Continue reading "Application accepted!"