Documentation status report
I've been smashing documentation bugs left and right since getting back from vacation, as well as searching out old documents and project pages and fixing 'em up.
Most of the updates have been to the installation & Portage handbooks, but there are many changes to the other documentation, including the desktop guides for graphics cards, and my Xfce guide. There's even a new doc on Logcheck, written by one of our developers.
Here's a brief summary of what I've done in the last week:
New documentation:
- Logcheck guide: Thanks to phajdan.jr. bug 322223
Handbook updates:
- Change ccache recommendation; it's really only for developers: bug 327945
- Use layman rather than gensync for working with Portage overlays: bug 305047
- Add another note on IA32 emulation in the kernel for (non-)multilib users: bug 326691
- Fix file verification process for the Alpha, AMD64, ARM, HPPA, IA64, and x86 handbooks: bug 283402. This was an old one: when we went to the weekly media autobuilds, Release Engineering signed the files with a new GPG key, and changed how the files were signed. All the handbooks need to be updated, as they still have the old keys and instructions from the previous release.
- Update installation instructions for the autobuilds. Completed Alpha, AMD64, ARM, HPPA, IA64, and x86: bug 283402, bug 292726, bug 260403. Still need to do PPC, PPC64, Sparc, and possibly MIPS, if they have sufficiently recent media.
- Use -march=core2 for recent Intel EM64T chips, rather than the old -march=nocona. Fix MCE section of kernel config. Add new Atom processor type: bug 323381
- Update Grub documentation links. Upstream removed all grub legacy instructions in favor of grub2, which won't be stable any time soon. Fixed the handbooks and other docs to use the offsite Grub Wiki: bug 328679
- Fix a missing fstab. Gave ARM the same generic fstab example as the other arches: bug 328095
- category/package move for
chkrootkit
Desktop doc updates:
- Xfce guide: Change USE flags for opera; no longer needs qt-static. bug 328087
- nVidia guide: Use new driver installation methods. Add links to xorg-server guide to get X configured before dealing with nVidia-specific issues. Update kernel and module info. bug 307481
- ATI FAQ: General cleanups. Add R800 (Evergreen) info. Remove old GATOS project text. Update Catalyst availability section.
Other doc updates:
- FAQ: Update Grub documentation link. Update gcc -march info for x86 and AMD64. Fix internal GuideXML code. bug 328679
- Quickinstall guides (x86, LVM2+RAID): Fix ccache recommendation. bug 327945
- LDAP guide: use more recent 2.3 configuration file shipped with the ebuild. bug 325497
- SHOUTcast guide: Miscellaneous typo fixes. bug 323401
- IPv6 guide: update
net-dns/totdinfo now that it's stable. Fix GuideXML and minor text issues throughout. bug 326771. This doc presents an ongoing problem, because it recommends a package it shouldn't. I sent an email to the gentoo-dev mailing list asking for help with this one. - AMD64 FAQ: Update Flash installation info. Adobe decided to drop 64-bit versions (again) beginning in version 10.1, and our developers had to mask 10.0 for security reasons. This means that there is no Adobe Flash for non-multilib profile users. And nspluginwrapper is (once again) too unstable, so 32-bit Flash with a 64-bit browser is not recommended. Probably will have to install
firefox-binor some other 32-bit browser. Stupid Adobe. - UTF-8 guide: Fix wrong category for the Xfce terminal, leftover from when it was moved out of xfce-extra. bug 328977
- Fix metadoc index for retired developers and add logcheck guide entry
Project page updates:
- Overlays userguide: Extensive GuideXML, grammar, etc. rewrites to make the guide more readable and more helpful. Add more instructions for things like keywording packages per the Portage handbook. Add SCM homepage links. This series of updates was prompted by bug 305047, the gensync to layman change.
- GUIs: Update retired developers
- PR: Add note stating that PR does not offer user support, and list available support resources. Hopefully this will cut down on the amount of support requests the PR team receives in our inbox every month.
Website updates:
- IRC: Add the Qt project channel, #gentoo-qt. bug 328665
One of my fellow developers, jkt, has been helping out a bit in the last couple of weeks, closing bug 301840 and bug 325885. This was especially important when I was on vacation and then out sick. I'm always happy when someone besides me steps up and gets our docs into shape. Thanks, Jan!
So that's about it. There are still plenty of open documentation bugs, but the list has shrunk significantly. My biggest project now is to finish the rest of the handbooks for the weekly autobuild instructions. The rest of our open bugs will require just as many hours and days to fix, as large portions of our handbooks and guides will need to be rewritten. Hopefully I can at least get the autobuild updates done in the next few days.
Final exams, diplom thesis and thunar-volman
I guess it’s time for an update.
This week I passed the last of four final exams in computer science and human-computer interaction at my university. Not only am I pleased that nine months of learning are over; I am also blessed with excellent grades. And while my understand of good grades is similar to that of money (nice to have it but nothing to focus on and/or brag with), I have to admit that this time I’m at least a little proud of myself. Five years at the university are slowly coming to an end, the first friends are leaving town and it will soon be time to take the next big step in life.
I cannot leave this city before writing another thesis, however. Thus, I am currently looking for a Diplom thesis at the university or at companies related to open source technologies. If you happen work for such a company with interesting thesis ideas or opportunities, please let me know. The thesis is supposed to take about 6 months, ideally starting early in September. After that it’s time to pack my stuff and look for an employer. I’m hoping for a position in open source software development. Areas I’m particularly interested in include Linux, mobile computing, desktop-related technologies as well as renewable energy, environment protection and open government. I’m here to make a difference.
On to something else. A few weeks ago I was offered sponsoring in order to work on thunar-volman for a few days. I accepted the offer, so for the entire next week from 2010-07-19 to 2010-07-26 (including the weekend) I’ll do some sponsored work on porting Thunar and thunar-volman to udev and GIO! The goal is to finish all major features (storage devices, cameras etc.).
Yesterday I did some warm-up hacking on tumbler to verify that if I’m still up to the task. The results: a new ffmpegthumbnailer-based video thumbnailer plugin (written by Lionel Le Folgoc), a new PDF/PostScript thumbnailer plugin based on poppler-glib and a new tumbler release (0.1.2). The master branch contains another commit adding arbitrary URI support to the PDF/PostScript thumbnailer but for that you’ll have to wait until the next release.
That’s it for now, I’ll be a lot more active next week. Take care everyone!
Don’t produce Gzipped tarballs
A quick note so I can delete it from my desktop. In order to produce only a Bzip2 tarball with the Autotools, specially when running make distcheck, set the automake init call with these parameters:AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([no-dist-gzip dist-bzip2])
By the way I wonder if it's worth dumping bzip2 against xz.
Xfce4 Display Settings status
As promised, here comes the post about recent changes in Xfce4 Display Settings. For those who do not know, Xfce4 Display Settings is the dialog which allows you to set the screen resolution, refresh rate, to activate external monitors, etc.In Xfce 4.6, it only had one problem: it was totally useless and not working.
Then came mr_pouit, who decided it was time to clean that mess! He started to dig in the xrandr code to understand how the kryptic Randr API works and to bring that sweet magic to Xfce. So what do we have at the moment?
The new dialog is at the moment almost similar to the old one, except that every thing should work correctly and that it is rocking simple to use! We also added some goodies such as timed confirmation for critical changes and a simple dialog which can be called with the media keys or with Win + P to quickly configure an external output.
But there is more to come! First, we are still working on fixing bugs, simplifying the code to make it rocking stable and awesome like Barney's suit. Then, we are planning a lot of UI improvements, the biggest one being a graphical way of setting the screens' layout : it will allow the user to set the relative positions of external monitors. We hope to have that done in the next two weeks, but it could take a little more time. And yes, that'll mean that 4.8 TODO list will have lost one item 
Yes, Xfce 4.8 is delayed!
I've seen a lot of people on IRC lately asking why 4.8 was not released on the 12th of June as scheduled. Well, the schedule could not be respected and we currently have no scheduled release date. There is still a lot of work to do and we lost several key contributors and we obviously did not gain new ones...
So if you want to see Xfce 4.8 out, come and help us! We need help to implement the 4.8 features (have a look at the bottom of schedule page, there are links to the goals of each module) and to fix bugs.
A good way to get started is to choose some bugs on the Xfce bugzilla and to submit patches, come and bug us on #xfce to get your patches reviewed (it may take a while but that's definitely useful!). We need a lot more contributors if we want to get things moving forward!
In a post that will follow shortly, I will discuss a merrier topic: the new awesome work of the mighty mr_pouit (his only vice being that he maintains Xubuntu :D) on the display settings dialog (the dialog to set the screen resolution, frequency...). Stay tuned! (Yes, this means we are still active :D)
Major changes in the Xfce Task Manager going 1.0
It's done. The task manager application available in Xfce for quite some years is now available with major changes. It has been rewritten from scratch, with GtkBuilder UI definitions and GObjects, everything is fresh and clean. The application has support for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and OpenSolaris.Let's start by visual changes:
- The buttons at the bottom are gone, the progress bars at the top are vanished, say hello to a toolbar with buttons and monitors.
- You read well, monitors are in, they show a graph of the CPU and memory usage by time.
- A status bar is visible at the bottom, it displays a general information about the system usage.
- Icons are displayed beneath the task names.
Let's continue with less visual:
- Tasks that start are displayed with a green background for a short delay and tasks that terminate with a red background.
- Tasks which state is changing are temporarily displayed with a yellow background. This covers tasks changing their state from idle to running, vice versa and etc.
- The tree views context menu contains the same actions as before, sending signals to the task and changing the priority. They have been polished however, for example the continue and stop signals aren't shown altogether anymore, and there are only five priorities to set ranging from Very low to Very high.
- The tree view columns can be reordered as you wish.
- An optional status icon can be activated allowing you to hide the application.
- It is possible to display percentage values with more precision.
- And finally, the default refresh rate is 750ms and it can be switched from 500ms up to 10s.
And the result is as follows:
The application is fully translated into fifteen languages!
Go to project webpage.
June Xfce desktop
This month's Xfce desktop was inspired by old Japan.
icons: Feel of Japan
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: axiomd
background: The Great Wave off Kanagawa
cursor: Obsidian xcursors
The icon set is very pretty, with lots of creative touches. It can be a little hard to tell what an icon represents, but the more time I spend with this set, the easier it is to recognize items. Sadly, this set only had one release, and it's still incomplete.
The gtk+ theme Simplistica (from April's desktop) returns for June's desktop. Its colors add an old-time feel to the desktop. The blue menu rollovers even match up with the wave colors of the background image.
The window manager theme is the darker variant of axiom, a simple, elegant theme. Its deep hue provides richly contrasts the sandy, woody tones of the gtk+ theme, and suggests dark, stormy skies to match the waves of the background image.
The wallpaper is a famous woodblock print by Hokusai, from the series 36 Views of Mount Fuji, and a simple Google search turns up any resolution you could want. The Great Wave is one of my favorite works. It was on my February calendar, and now it's on my desktop. The image isn't quite the rustic picture of ancient Japan that I'd like - that would take a couple of weeks to locate - but it's still pleasing. Sakura, from last month's desktop, is another good choice, but variety is the spice of life. The Great Wave goes well with my SLiM login theme, Wave.
I picked the mouse cursor theme because it reminds me of wet ink on rice paper, and it has occasional blue animations that match the wave colors. It's available in Portage; you can install it by running emerge obsidian-xcursors.
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the foreground. An Xfce terminal shows an update to Gnumeric being compiled in the background.
Running in the panel are an assortment of application launchers, including customized dropdown menus for frequently used programs.
In the panel, I changed the default Xfce menu button (the blue X on the far left) to use a different icon; look in /usr/share/pixmaps for the four menu icons shipped with Xfce. Right click the menu button to change the icon. Since you have to supply the full path, it means that when you change icon themes, any menu icon included will not automatically be applied to the menu button. You'll have to change it manually every time you change your theme.
After the launchers and taskbar, the notification area holds the tray icons for Claws Mail and Pidgin. Then a genmon applet that runs my lastsync.sh Portage script. After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and local weather.
May Xfce desktop
This month's mostly warm, occasionally cool and windy weather inspired me to create a working environment that called to mind the pleasant days of springtime. The wallpaper is suitably natural, with pale blossoms and soft shadowed reflections at the water's edge.
icons: Crashbit
gtk+: Lila-Xfce
xfwm4: axiom
background: sakura
cursor: gentoo-xcursors
The gtk+ colors were chosen to complement the lavender cherry tree blossoms. While Xfce includes a gtk+ theme with matching colors, Xfce-Cadmium, one of the Lila themes had better-looking widgets. Cadmium is still a good choice, as are Lila-Simple and Lila-Industrial.
The icon set is an older version of Crashbit. The window manager theme "axiom" was chosen because it picks up the neutral background colors. Most themes are designed to pick up one of the primary colors, but that made things too purplish. The Lila project offers a couple of xfwm4 themes, but both are too harsh for this desktop.
The final piece of the theme is the mouse cursor. Normally I just use the Vanilla DMZ cursor theme, but I thought I'd try out a cursor set created specifically for Gentoo, which you can install by running emerge gentoo-xcursors. It even comes with an animated Znurt for "working" operations. The light on his head pulses rapidly while you wait. Cute, very cute. The Lila project also has a few cursor themes, but I decided to stick with the Gentoo theme, because of Znurt.
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
It's a pleasantly warm background, medium contrast, so it's easy on my eyes at all times. Plus, the water complements my SLiM theme, Wave.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. An Xfce Terminal displays the working directory for my LogJam fork. (Ebuilds in the overnight overlay.)
The weather plugin is running in the panel, displaying the local forecast, just after the very flexible Orage clock and my lastsync.sh script in the genmon plugin.
Also visible: the Xfce Task Manager and Decibel Audio Player. Decibel is running in Playlist mode, playing the album Raja by Planet Boelex. The album is beautiful, relaxing, entrancing. It's freely available at Soft Phase.
Building a home NAS
Problem
I need to get a NAS. A small one, due to physical space constraints. Yet it still needs to hold 3 or 4 drives. Cheap, too. Ideally I'd spend $150, but I can do more if need be. Total cost must be less than $400.
The single media storage drive in my desktop workstation has run out of room, and the box itself has become increasingly unreliable due to overheating and flaky parts. So before the thing dies and takes my drive with it, I should stick it in a separate box, along with two other drives, and thus put all my home media needs in one easily accessible place. I need to get a NAS that can hold at least 3-4 drives.
Options
There are two ways of doing that:
1. Buying a NAS device.
Synology, Buffalo, QNAP, and others make 2-to-4 drive NAS boxes with decent firmware and web interfaces, and are guaranteed Linux/Mac compatible, which is good for all my machines. The downside is that they typically cost $300 - $500 new, which is more than I want to pay. I've checked eBay, but NASes from these vendors and others are purchased very quickly, as there's a thriving resale market. Even used, the devices command a very high price. QNAP, which seems to have the best NAS devices (according to Small Net Builder, would be my first choice based on firmware features and reputation, but the few 4-bay NASes on eBay are still too expensive, and they're sold within just a couple of hours or days.
2. Building my own NAS device.
In theory, this could be much cheaper than purchasing a NAS from a vendor. The downside is that I have to buy the components, assemble them, hope they all work, find a decent NAS operating system, hope it installs, configure it, and hope it works, and then carefully administer updates and other things I don't want to be bothered with.
That's why I was so set on getting a small QNAP or DiskStation -- the firmware and web UI are already in place, and easy-to-use. I just want to put in the drives and set my sharing services. Paying a slightly higher price in exchange for less hair pulling seemed like a worthy trade. On the other hand, choosing my own NAS OS means support for certain things all the vendor-supplied NAS OSes lack, like better filesystem support, or running all kinds of sharing services without being limited to what's in the firmware, for example UPnP/DLNA.
That brings me to the next part:
Requirements
These things will determine what kind of NAS I purchase or assemble, and what operating system I install.
Media serving
1. UPnP: The UPnP server needs to support streaming to normal UPnP clients and an Xbox 360. There's an ION-based HTPC (Zotac MAG) and an Xbox 360 in the living room, attached to the home network.
Right now the HTPC has XBMC installed, but it's so frustrating to configure I may switch to Boxee or some other more user-friendly HTPC OS. Still, at least it does UPnP, which the easiest way to stream something from the desktop workstation, without having to setup Samba or NFS.
Currently, I run uShare from my desktop workstation whenever we want to watch something in the living room. The workstation has all the media files. However, to access them from the HTPC or the Xbox 360, I have to close all networked programs, turn off iptables, and then start the uShare service on the desktop. Not ideal.
2. MPD: Once the NAS is set up, I figure it's a smart idea to just use streaming players, since there won't be any local playback, except for audio CDs on the workstation. All other music will be on the NAS hard drives.
3. iTunes: We do have a Mac on the network, so I probably need iTunes server support via something like Firefly. That way no matter what's connected, it can still receive media streams.
File serving
1. Samba: The universal file sharing protocol. NFS is too unreliable. Samba can be used by anything and everything. The HTPC needs always-on access to the NAS. Same for the workstation and laptops -- they need to transfer content to and from the NAS.
The downside in Linux, at least, is needing to setup transparent Samba mounts for Xfce. It took me quite awhile to figure out how to setup Thunar, FuseSMB, FUSE, gvfs, and Gigolo. That's far, far too much effort, but at least it works when I needed to send stuff to the HTPC's hard drive over the network. Thunar is not a network-aware file manager, nor are there any plans to make it that way.
2. rsync: Useful for backups, as well as other things, I'm sure.
Filesytems
Right now, all my media is on ReiserFS, ext3, and vfat drives. I have two spare drives formatted with ReiserFS but nothing's on 'em, so I can always reformat if necessary. Whatever NAS or NAS OS I choose, it needs to support these filesystems, preferably read and write. I really don't want to have to swap files around when installing, simply because the OS doesn't support a certain filesystem.
Interface
1. Web GUI: The most important: an easy-to-use, preinstalled web user interface. I don't have the first clue on how to install and configure one myself, and I don't want to learn. It needs to already be there. Setting up a NAS should be mostly painless, so it should already provide easy configuration for Samba, access controls, media serving protocols, scheduled backups, and other bits.
2. SSH: I've discovered that with my HTPC and routers, SSH access is sometimes a lot quicker than going through a web GUI. In the case of the XBMC HTPC, sometimes it's ,em>required for upgrades and troubleshooting. There probably aren't many NAS OSes that don't offer SSH access, but it is something to check.
Which one?
If I buy a NAS, I'm at the mercy of the manufacturer for firmware updates, bug fixes, and new features. If I build my own, then the problem is which OS do I choose?
I probably won't choose Gentoo, given that nothing is ready ahead of time. Plus compiling on a low-power NAS box isn't fun. Stock Debian is right out: again, nothing's setup for serving or the web UI.
FreeNAS is often mentioned, but it has subpar filesystem support, and as a BSD, its nomenclature is quite different from Linux. Hardware support is another issue: it doesn't support as much common hardware (such as NICs) as Linux does, based on a survey of low-power Atom and ARM platforms.
Full-on server operating systems, like Ubuntu Server, seem rather bloated, and most of them aren't setup for the NAS role; they're made to be web servers, not media servers for small home networks.
The rest of the server OSes I've come across are designed as firewalls, gateways, or domain controllers, and only offer FTP access -- there's no real file sharing.
* * *
So, what are your thoughts on cheap home NAS devices? Have you built your own? Which OS did you use? What'd you pay for it? Did you buy a vendor-made NAS? Which one and why?
Lemme know!
Late April Xfce desktop
It's only been two weeks since my last awesome desktop, but already I've found a new look. Where mid-April's look was grungy, stormy, and dark-toned, my newest desktop is sleek, airy, and light. It exudes a reserved warmth; perfect for the approaching summer. Lots of light wood, airy spaces, pale blue skies, and soft shadows.
icons: Simplistica
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Shards
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
The downside to such a beautifully bright environment is that it's too bright when using the computer in dim light. 'Specially late at night or early in the morning. Dark themes with lower contrast are a bit easier on the eyes in those cases.
The Simplistica icon set is comprehensive and well-designed: It's intuitive and it has more icons than even Tango, at least on my machine. Every icon looks good, though I wish there were a few more mimetype icons, for example .txt and .xml. Something like the appearance of the .zip and .tar icons.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. Check out those icons.
The weather plugin is running, displaying the local forecast.
That image editor is Fotoxx. When you need to make quick touchups or corrections to pictures, give Fotoxx a shot. It's way faster than The Gimp, and easier to use. There's an ebuild available in my overlay, though I need to update the ebuild for the 10.x releases.
Also visible is xfrun4, a popup application launcher that remembers your most recent commands. It's pretty nifty; I like its autocomplete feature.