Mage Power

Stable Grimoire version 0.20 has been released!

2008-04-19T11:31:00.002-04:00

Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.20 has now been officially released!

As usual, users of stable merely need to run 'sorcery system-update'.
Spells listed on the 0.20 release wiki were tested and qualified to
have no known defects of "gating" severity at the time of this release.
The tarballs have been signed and uploaded to our server.

To download the grimoire manually, get
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.20.tar.bz2.

GPG signatures are available at
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.20.tar.bz2.asc.

I would like to thank Eric Sandall (sandalle) and Mathieu Lonjaret
(lejatorn) for searching the base system spells for bugs and testing them.

Check out the version 0.20 wiki page for more details.

Source Mage European Meeting

2008-04-16T21:35:00.002-04:00

Do you like mages, Linux and hacking? There is still some heavy discussion on the mailing list about the Source Mage GNU/Linux European Meeting. The good news is, if you are interested in finding out more, there is now a wiki page dedicated to it. This would be very cool to attend, so check out the European Meeting wiki to see ongoing updates to the event.

News (4-7-2008)

2008-04-07T23:29:00.002-04:00

Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has asked for some checking to be done on the latest Stable release, version Stable-0.20. He states the new release will be on schedule, but would like other people to test spells to make sure it is stable.

Arwed von Merkatz aka Alley_Cat has just been voted the new Grimoire Lead Developer. Congratulations to Arwed!

Many Source Mage developers have been discussing a European Meeting. They are still discussing a date, but they think the location will be somewhere in Germany. If you are interested, you can follow the discussion on the Source Mage discuss mailing list.

Ismael Luceno has been writing a new spell called Spellfoster. In Ismael's words, "Spellfoster is inspired by debfoster, a Debian tool that makes removal of unwanted applications a trivial task. We have "dispel" and "gaze orphans", but from what Eric Sandall and Ismael explained Spellfoster puts a dialog around orphans which are not held, making an easy to use list. It sounds interesting, keep up the good work Ismael!

We have a new developer! Long time user Jeremy "Belxjander" Sutherland has joined the circle of Mages. He is interested in working on Cauldron, Init scripts, Grimoire and more. Welcome Jeremy!

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has sent me some nice git tips. I will be posting them soon.

Sorcery Usability Study Results

2008-04-01T22:20:00.002-04:00

Today, our own Jaka "lynx" Kranjc sent out a revolutionary e-mail. This one could change the course of Source Mage GNU/Linux forever.

"Fresh users keep confusing sorcery commands up and some of the experienced users occasionally complain about that too. So me and my friend S. A. (a HCI student) have made an usability study on how to improve the situation. We realised that the simplest thing to do would be to shorten the command names, so they consume less biomemory, save you from RSI and give you more time for other unimportant stuff.

Implementation notes
The proposed fix is to implement wrapper scripts (since aliases don't work everywhere) with the mentioned user-friendly names. The scripts would be put into /sbin, so they'd work even if you had /usr mounted on an unreachable network share or otherwise unavailable. When your system is in dire need of assistance, it is really annoying if things you are used to working with don't work anymore (a double annoyance).

So here is the sorted initial list of the shortcuts and what they woud run:
cc - cast --queue (who can spell queue anyway?)
cp - cleanse --prune
dd - dispel --downgrade
gs - gaze search
gv - gaze version
sg - sorcery upgrade
sh - sorcery hold
sq - sorcery -q
su - scribe update

As you can see, the list contains only the most frequently used (sub)commands, so feel free to suggest more. I also do realise that 'su' could be thought of as 'sorcery update', but since the latter is used less often, scribe has precedence. Maybe 'sup' or 'soup' would do?

The code is already in my repository, I'm just waiting for your comments, mages, so I can finalize it to perfection."

Unfortunately, this met with some criticism. ;)
But possibly some new ideas?

flux_control says:
"In my opinion these are a very bad idea. They will confuse users more (because the meaning behind them will be hidden), and worse, they will confuse the user's system (try doing a "cp X Y" when cleanse is renamed..or compile something with cast --queue? :-P). In my opinion it's better to keep the sorcery/cleanse/etc., but clean up the name space for consistency. As an example, dispel -d doesn't dispel (well,
OK, it does, but it also casts, which is the important part). This should be moved to cast -d in my opinion. Also, having all the different cast/gaze/cleanse/scribe commands accessible via sorcery (like sorcery cast $SPELL) would help, because then users really only need to remember one command: sorcery. If they forget what to do with it, RTFM :) If someone wants the short commands, then they can make their own aliases or wrapper scripts."

Ladislav Hagara says:
"I also do not like this idea. It is very confusing. Moreover most of your shortcuts are regular names of Unix commands.

For new users I would created links started with smgl- (smgl-cast; smgl-dispel; smgl-scribe; ...) so if user does not know the right command he/she just writes smgl- and presses TAB and can see all sorcery commands.

Users can use bash-completion."

Sandalle says:
"That may not be a bad feature to have added: symlinks of smgl- to ."

Swoolley says:
"man sorcery
see also section"

Sandalle says:
"Yeah, just thinking of those who like TAB completion or are new, have RTFM'd, but can't remember the exact command."

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc says:
"> Users can use bash-completion.
This can go in with the boring namespace. So for every command there'd be a sm- or smgl-$command and a smgl-$(boring $command) (like smgl-uninstall). Not sure if this should be part of sorcery though, as it is trivial to implement in a spell and less trivial in sorcery.

The shortcuts can be done the same way and then the spell added to basesystem."

This Week in SMGL (March 25th 2008)

2008-03-25T21:35:00.004-04:00

I have been extremely busy lately and Mage Power has suffered because of it. I hope to get back on track now. Hold on to your wizard hat, here we go!

The Cauldron Team has been working on the new Source Mage GNU/Linux ISO once again. They really need everyone possible to test this. Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer had this to say:

"There is a new ISO release! You can find the goodness at
New Test ISO

Please go and test this as soon as you are able. We in Cauldron are working hard to get a new stable (everyone knows we need one), but we need YOU to test the ISOs in order to get them stable. The more hardware it gets tested on, the better.

If you find anything wrong with it, don't be shy - file some bugs on our bugzilla at http://bugs.sourcemage.org. You can also complain to me on IRC or via email, but please still file the bugs, as that is really the best way for us Cauldron devs to keep track of things."

To some up the changes for this release, Flux also had this to say:
"It's a bugfix. It should resolve all the bugs with the previous ISO release in February, as well as a few that BearPerson and I caught that no one actually saw when testing it. I think a few new features crept in."

So download the new ISO and help test! It's for the greater good!

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has just released a new stable and test Sorcery!
"Stable Sorcery 1.13.8 has been released! It is mostly a bugfix release. Notable changes include the no-check-certificate source hint and a more informative error message on source hash mismatch."

"Test Sorcery 1.14.0 has finally been released! Two years in the making, it contains lots of new features, changes and bugfixes. These release notes are best viewed on the wiki at Sorcery_1.14.0_Release_Notes
Due to its size, the ChangeLog is not included in this mail. You can read it on the mentioned wiki page or from the tarball.

IMPORTANT: To use staging, you first need to install castfs.

This release also marks a new devel-development stream, so if you want to work on any (new) features, the time is right. Bugzilla, users and me are full of ideas. There are already a few smaller projects submitted to bugzilla, but most need a bit more work and polish. In any case, there's plenty of fun stuff to work on (fun as in pink ponies, not bsdm) and I'd gladly mentor any* of it.

My plan for 1.15 includes (more or less) what is filed on bugzilla under that version - notably improved ressurect - and miscellaneous improvements like the gaze time set of functions and better messaging. I also feel a need, a need for speed!

Go forth and testify."

Wow, with a new ISO and new Sorcery, Source Mage users are receiving some good stuff! Keep up the good work Mages!

In other news, you might have noticed http://www.sourcemage.org has removed the old Drupal site and is now running a wiki instead. News will be displayed right here on Mage Power. If you have any Source Mage news, please do not hesitate to contact novaburst on the #sourcemage irc channel or e-mail me at pbeel(AT)magepower(DOT)org.

Dale E. Edmons (linuxfan) has stated his interest in maintaining the "castfs" spell. Castfs is a fuse-based file system that monitors changes on a staged installation environment to then merge with the system (which actually helps Sorcery in tracking what was installed better than InstallWatch). Plus, Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has just added a new castfs repo at http://repo.or.cz/w/castfs.git.

Bertrand Juglas has kindly created a French version of the Source Mage wiki. Here is his e-mail to the mailing list.
"Hello, http://www.sourcemage.org/SourceMageWikiFrench is now created and will list all french wiki pages and all wiki pages needing french translation.
This page was already linked on the homepage http://www.sourcemage.org so now we have the links for French and Japanese which exists, that's why I've put Japanese just after French.
Hope that will begin a new French effort in the Source Mage community."
Thank you Bertrand!

In conclusion, nominations for a new Grimoire Team Lead are under way. Sadly, Eric Sandall will not be able to continue as Grimoire Lead for now. He mentioned he is very busy at the moment, but will continue to work with the project of course.

Until next time Mages, keep casting those spells!

This Week in SMGL (Feb. 8th 2008)

2008-02-07T20:44:00.000-05:00

There is a lot of things happening, so I didn't want to wait until next week to post a new "This Week in SMGL". One improvement I have recently made to Mage Power is a redirect on the domain name that enables everyone to get to the site by either http://www.magepower.org or http://magepower.org. This should have been done a long time ago, but I wasn't experienced with GoDaddy's DNS tools. So anyway, enjoy!

Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall has announced a new stable branch that needs to be tested. This is version Stable-0.18 and can be found at it's own wiki page.

Eric Sandall has also recently tested the new GCC version 4.2.3. The new GCC was released on Feb. 1st. He stated he was finished with testing and almost ready to release it.

We have three new developers! Yes, I said three! Ivan Lezhnjov, Jr. (a.k.a. ilj) has volunteered to join the Grimoire team as a General Developer. Also joining the Grimoire team is Dale E. Edmons aka Linuxfan! A lost developer has returned to us this year. You have probably seen his commits lately as coming from Lubomir Blaha, otherwise heard from as Tritol. Welcome to Source Mage new developers!

The SMGL Cauldron has been bubbling with activity lately! Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer has been mixing up a mean stew. Flux was nice enough to send me a preview of what is new in the next release of the ISO.

Here's an idea/preview of what's new for the devel ISO. All of the bugs noted with the previous devel release (Jan. 20, 2008) have been fixed and integrated into the new ISO. This also includes some new feature requests.

There was an issue where some of the kernel modules available on the ISO itself were not installed to the new system. This is resolved, and now the two kernels (and their modules) are the same.

There is a new keyboard layout/mapping selection script, accessible using only numbers (so you aren't required to type in qwerty in order to change to e.g. dvorak). The command to access the selection script is 539 (/usr/bin/539).

There is a new chroot setup script to make setting up and shutting down chroots easier. By default, it displays output of the commands it runs so that users can know how it is preparing/terminating the chroot, but the output can be disabled by passing -q as an option. The chroot command itself is called smgl-chroot.

The installer itself got a bit of a face-lift. It now prints some useful information to the user prompt (PS1), showing the current step in the installation, the next step, and the number of the current step out of the total number of steps. It also tells the user how to access help for the installer in the prompt.

There is a new help command (the name of the command is 'help') which displays a list of available commands in the installer and what the commands do.

The grub instructions have both been made more accurate/correct as well as simplified (the user no longer needs to copy the i386-image directory; it's already installed in the correct place).

Information about how to activate framebuffer modes in the ISO has been added to the boot screen. The functionality was available in the previous ISO release, but the documentation of the presence of the framebuffer availability was missing.

A new sample fstab has been created. This new sample is much easier for those who are less familiar with manually hacking together a fstab, and also includes a sample for using LABEL= which, perhaps, not so many users are aware of.

The previous use of the branch command has been deprecated in favor of using the simpler jump command for the bootloader choice. Now, at the bootloader step, to get to either lilo or grub, just enter "jump lilo" or "jump grub".

There is a new command which lists all of the editors available on the ISO so that the user knows what choices are available. Currently we only provide nano and elvis (a vi-clone).

There were general updates/cleanups to the installer step documentation. There is still documentation which needs to be updated though, all of which pertains to configuration of the newly installed system and does not block the install itself.

Issues that occurred from the use of the basesystem chroot have been cleaned up (eth0 being mapped to eth5 for example).

The user is reminded to unmount all of their new filesystems before rebooting the machine.

The next ISO release (to follow this one) will include a new manpage with instructions on "where to go from here", i.e. updating sorcery and what they can do with their newly installed system, as well as a modified /etc/motd which will tell them to read that manpage. The manpage will be made available as a spell that the user can then dispel from their system, and they will be instructed on how to modify the motd file as well.

The Cauldron component on http://bugs.sourcemage.org (Product: Install) is down to a scant 50 open bugs. Anyone who tests the upcoming devel ISO release will strongly be encouraged to file bugs against the ISO for any issues they have with it. The release should come this Friday or Saturday, depending on the results of my tests (the ISO is being packaged today, but then I will put it through initial testing).

flux

That's it for this week, but be sure to check back here at Mage Power for all of the up to date Source Mage GNU/Linux news!

New SMGL Test ISO

2008-01-21T09:17:00.001-05:00

Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer has announced there is a new test ISO available. This one includes a few bugfixes from the one uploaded a few days ago. They need as many testers as possible, so please download and send your feedback to the SM-Discuss mailing list.

URL for ISO download:
http://stash.bearperson.de/smgl/devel.iso.bz2

The md5 url:
http://stash.bearperson.de/smgl/devel.iso.bz2.md5

New 0.17 Stable Grimoire Released!

2008-01-15T22:32:00.001-05:00

Today, Grimoire Lead, Eric Sandall released Grimoire Stable-0.17. The announcement follows.

Stable grimoire version 0.17[0] has been released!

As usual, users of stable merely need to run 'sorcery system-update'. Spells listed on the 0.17 release wiki were tested and qualified to have no known defects of "gating" severity at the time of this release. The tarballs have been signed and uploaded to our server and will be propogating out to the mirrors within six hours.

To download the grimoire manually, get
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.17.tar.bz2.

GPG signatures are available at
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.17.tar.bz2.asc.

I would like to thank David Kowis (dkowis) and Remko van der Vossen (wich) for helping test spells.

New Sorcery 1.13.7 Released!

2008-01-11T22:36:00.000-05:00

Sorcery Lead Jaka "lynx" Kranjc announced a brand new version of Sorcery today! You don't know what Sorcery is? Read this. The announcement follows.

I'm happy to announce that stable Sorcery 1.13.7 has been released! It is mostly a bugfix release. Notable changes include the fix for the config_query_list item mapping problem, a working url_ftp_verify and the inclusion of the is_depends_enabled function.
Now don't go updating sorcery just yet, the tarball hasn't reached the
mirrors.

Here is the ChangeLog:
2008-01-11 Jaka Kranjc
* 1.13.7 Release

2007-11-30 Jaka Kranjc
* libdepends: finally satisfactorily fixed the sorcery rebuild pausing for hours #13735

2007-11-23 Jaka Kranjc
* sorcery: rewrote show_installed_spell and fixed remove_pkgs - removing spells from the sorcery menu works again
* mirrors/SOURCEFORGE: updated list from #13504
* scribe: fixed error message when swapping nonexsistant grimoires #13253
* gaze: fixed matching of spell and short during gaze search #9433

2007-11-14 Jaka Kranjc
* excluded: removed /var/yp - the one spell that uses it, installs config files there #11831

2007-10-30 Jaka Kranjc
* libdepends: fixed some more quoting regressions since stable. Should eliminate some bad provider query defaults

2007-08-11 Jaka Kranjc
* libcodex: moved the load_libcompat call before the sourcing of DETAILS in codex_set_current_spell. This way fallbacks can be used there as well, which will among other things help a bit with #13883
* libdepends: fixed a regression in private_add_depends; probably fixes #13735

2007-08-09 Jaka Kranjc
* url_handlers/url_http: fix url_ftp_verify to not pass a deprecated wget option. Now it works again. #13001

2006-08-18 Andrew Stitt
* libstate, libapi: add is_depends_enabled, bug 12949

2006-08-13 Paul Mahon
* cast: shorten screen names (fixes bug #12133)

2006-08-12 Andrew Stitt
* mirrors/KDE: remove dead mirrors, bug 12978

2006-08-06 Andrew Stitt
* mirrors/KDE: fix typo in poland mirror

2006-07-29 Andrew Stitt
* libdepends: integrate fix for bug 12233, spells with regexps in names do not always become the default provider

2006-07-29 Andrew Stitt
* libstate: fix bug 12904, get_depends_options is broken with spellnames containing regexp characters. Patch from Jaka Kranjc

This Week in SMGL (Jan. 8th 2008)

2008-01-08T21:17:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year Mages!
Welcome to another issue of "This Week in SMGL". The holidays slowed things down here on Mage Power, but things are picking back up again.

A large update was made to our Python spell lately by Vlad "Enqlave" Glagolev. A name change has been made after a thorough debate on the SM-Discuss mailing list. Many different suggestions were made, but in the end, a simple "Python" won out. Here is a break down of the changes written by Enqlave.

python: fix the huge bug in spell: when you have a lot of python modules installed (in /usr/libpython2.5/site-packages dir), and want to recast python, it will recompile every module in that dir recursively, while adding every compiled (.pyc) and object (.pyo) files. So package of python becomes bigger with any new pythonic module/app. And if we want to recast python (remember -- every module in site-packages must be reinstalled after python), then we need to dispel all pythonic modules first, then cast python, then cast all those modules. We MUST do it not only after minor version upgrade -- but EVERYTIME we want to recast python, to keep it clear an proper.

Well, you should UPDATE your python spell now.
And yes.. a little history.. A week ago I found this bug, but I thought it was some "feature" and forgot about it. After updating some pythonic spells I wanted to recast python and noticed, that time for packaging it was a bit longer. Then I tried another python module -- then recasted python again. It was bigger than the time before. `gaze install python' answered the question. All this time we had such a real bug: python compiles every module and saves it in its install log and in the package. That's because our system doesn't use FAKE installations to the fake dir (for example like in OpenBSD ports system), so then we must expect such problems.. and here you are.. Pythonic one :)

This commit does:
- If you recast/update-to-a-new-version/recompile python -- all spells which has some of theirs files in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages dir, will be recasted.
- first of all it dispells every such spell with adding `cast_self' trigger to it
- then it casts python
- finally it casts these spells

Well, I had ~50 pythonic modules @ my lappy box. after dispelling some unneeded i tried `cast -c python' while having these ones:
* 4suite
* bzr
* cherrypy
* flup
* libgsf
* libxslt
* pycairo
* pygtk2
* pysqlite
* pyxml
* sonata
* wesnoth
* blender
* bzr-gtk
* exo
* genshi
* libxml2
* pil
* pygobject
* pygtksourceview
* setuptools
* vte
* wxpython

With the huge spells like wesnoth (yes, it was compiled with python support :) and wxpython, it took ~55-60 mins on my 2.0GiHz/1GiB centrino duo lappy.

And, yes: comments/suggestions are welcomed!

---------------------------------------------------------------

Enqlave also made a large update to our perl-cpan section. If you want to check out the commit log, you can find it here. Enqlave mentioned there were 825 files changed, 1506 insertions(+), 1111 deletions(-); the build system for the whole perl-cpan section was renewed. Perl has updated to 5.10.0.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the latest update from Treeve Jelbert on KDE4.

I, and some others, have sometimes encountered problems when building kdebase4 and kdeutils4 on a system which also has qt3 installed.

It seems to be caused by qt4 generating an include list which puts /usr/include in front of everything else.

This means that sometimes a qt3 file is found before the correct qt4 include file, as all the qt3 stuff is in /usr/include and not somewhere like /usr/include/qt

I have reported this to the kde project.

apart from manually editing
/usr/src/kdebase-3.97.0/build/apps/konsole/src/
konsolepart_automoc.cpp.files
and
/usr/src/kdeutils-3.97.0/build/kregexpeditor/
kregexpeditorgui_automoc.cpp.files

At present, I do not have an easy solution to this. Possibly change qt-x11 to install elsewhere, but that probably needs changes to lots of other spells.

Ideally, the kde project will adjust the order in which the include files are searched, but I don't know how to do that.

On systems without qt3, everything builds and works fairly well.

Regards, Treeve

Treeve also mentioned a correction to the above statement. It is kdelibs3 which installs some header files in /usr/include. Some of these files have the same names as those from kdelibs4, which are in /opt/include.
He then said he made a change to the default build for kde3 and now all the kde4 spells compile. Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) and Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has been testing these spells and verifies this.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Jeremy Blosser has opened up nominations for the Source Mage GNU/Linux Project Lead position.

Nominations for Project Lead are now open, until Wed Jan 09 07:00:00 UTC.

Please send all signed nominations to sm-discuss@lists.ibiblio.org as per http://www.sourcemage.org/VotingPolicy

I will ask someone else to run the subsequent vote if it proves appropriate.

So far Jeremy has been nominated again to lead the project. Nominations are near closed.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall has officially announced work to begin on the stable-rc-0.17 branch.
Stable-rc-0.17 branch is ready, the wiki page at http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Stable-0.17 is up, and the x86 chroot has been uploaded.
I hope you saved up some free time for the latest round in stable fix'n!

---------------------------------------------------------------

Last, but certainly not least, a recent announcement has been made by an SMGL developer.
Sadly, long time developer David Brown has announced he is leaving the distribution. He mentioned he has lost the passion and has other priorities at this time. He will be missed. We wish David the best of luck! Thanks for all of your hard work David.

This Week in SMGL (Dec. 11th 2007)

2007-12-11T22:19:00.000-05:00

Christmas will be here very soon and the mages are busy in the workshop. Stable Grimoire 0.16 is being worked on. Pol "public" Vinogradov is shepherding this one. Please go to the official page to read the details.

Another busy project is the migrating from xorg/xfree86* monolithic to xorg-modular. You can find out more information about xorg modular in a previous post on Mage Power.

Source Mage GNU/Linux and the Mage Power interview with Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall was recently mentioned in DistroWatch Weekly. If you haven't been reading DW Weekly, Ladislav Bodnar does a great job of writing an issue every week, so be sure to check it out.

There has been an exciting buzz around the cauldron about a new Source Mage GNU/Linux ISO. Cauldron Lead Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann and Justin "Flux_control" Boffemmyer have been working on a brand new ISO! I had some questions about the new ISO, so I asked Flux to elaborate on the effort.

"The present status of the ISO is as follows.

It is marked as devel both for lack of testing as well as lack of end-user installation interface features. The present interface is much simpler than in previous ISOs. It simply drops the user into a shell after booting the cd and printing a general information/help message. Each step in the installation process is done completely manually by the user.

However, there is a list of steps to cover, as well as a way to track which step you are on, go to the next step, and display some information/help for what is to be done for the present step and how to go about doing it.

Insofar as the current installation procedure is not meant for users who are unfamiliar with SMGL, it works fairly well, except that the configuration step (setting up fstab, lilo.conf, etc.) is pretty sparse and needs to get filled in.

Pretty much everything else is looking good so far, and the ISO has produced some working systems already.

There is a minor issue with NIC drivers missing from the ISO, but I have fixed that in a newer version of the devel ISO (which hasn't yet been released into the wild).

The devel ISO has the following features: lvm2, raid, 2.6.22 kernel, udev+coldplug to autodetect hardware, both lilo and grub, IDE, SCSI, and SATA disks are all supported (pretty much any kind of hardware which is not extremely experimental for the 2.6.22 kernel should be supported, aside from the glitch with the NIC drivers as I mentioned above), and it was built using basesystem-0.13.tar.bz2 (which is already a little out-dated, but this will be updated in the future).

The installation procedure needs to be worked on a bit more, but after that it should be somewhat "stable". Then I plan on reducing the size of the ISO (possibly using busybox to replace a lot of the binaries on the ISO?).

Also, we could use more testers I think, since I only know of 2 people who tested it besides myself and BearPerson. Other than that, just general tightening down of the ISO and install system so that it only includes the bare essentials and nothing else, and general bug-squashing, along with bringing everything up-to-date with the current stable grimoire.

Oh, and all of this is presently only for the i486 ISO. Other platforms will be coming in the future. I think that's about all that I have to report so far."

The devel ISO is residing on BearPerson's server at the moment. If you are a developer and would like to test it, please let me, BearPerson or Flux know and we can provide you with the link.

I think everyone agrees that it will be really nice to have a new stable ISO. Mage Power will keep you posted on the progress.

Eric Sandall Interview

2007-11-26T22:00:00.000-05:00

Hello Eric, thanks for taking the time to do this interview for Mage Power.
Hi Paul, thank you for letting me have this opportunity. :)

Would you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Linux?
I became interested in Linux back in 1995 (or so) while I was in high school with my trusty Intel 386 SX (custom built, of course ;)). Microsoft Windows 3.11 (for Workgroups!) was meh and I wanted to try OS/2 Warp, but could only find a demo version. Back then I only had a 2400 baud modem, so downloading took a while. I bought Debian 1.0 from CheapBytes and fell in love with that as soon as I started playing with it. Sure, it was a PITA to figure out how Linux worked, what partitions were, etc., but the most fun was video, especially when X gave you a warning that incorrect frequencies *could* fry your monitor and/or video card.

As I understand it, Source Mage GNU/Linux was forked from a distribution named Sorcerer. What initially led you to become a developer for the Sorcerer distribution?
After using Debian and RedHat (had a nice GUI installer compared to Debian's) for a while and a year into college I was tired of all the "broken" dependencies (you know, you need libgtk+-2.4.5.3-32 for GNOME, but GIMP needs libgtk+2.4.5.2-42, which conflict) which binary distributions have. I went looking for something new. The first distribution I found was Sorcerer GNU/Linux (SGL) by Kyle Sallee, who did all of the work. After a few months of using SGL I started submitting updates and, eventually, got CVS commit access as my work turned out to be not too crappy. ;) Later on, shortly before SGL was wiped from the Internet, Kyle asked for help and I formed the Grimoire Auditing Group (GAG ;)) and recruited others to help clean up our spells, though it only lasted until the end of SGL.

Could you explain how Source Mage GNU/Linux was started and what your role was at the time?
While SGL was still going well, Chuck S. Mead decided that he wanted it to go in another direction, which Kyle did not agree with, and so Chuck forked SGL into Lunar Penguin (now Lunar Linux). I believe it took a week or so, but eventually Kyle got so fed up with the fork that he wiped all of the SGL files from the Internet in March 2002, so we could no longer get updates, check the website, anything. Ryan Abrams (who became our first Project Lead) and Eric Schabell (who became our first Grimoire Lead) got together and put up the grimoire, ISO, etc. (each SGL install had all the files needed to re-host, except for CVS history, which some of us had anyways) on a server one of them had (IIRC, this was back in 2002 some time). I thought SGL was dead, so I volunteered to help out this group by working on the grimoire as I had done in SGL.

How was the name Source Mage decided upon?
I'll leave out the why as that's another rant. ;) For the name, Ryan asked for a list of names the users and developers liked and once we had a nice long list, we voted on which one we liked the most and Source Mage GNU/Linux (we purposefully kept the GNU/Linux part) was "born".

What kind of memories do you have of the very early days of SMGL?
Lots and lots of fun work. :) There was always more work to do than there was workers (similar to now), but everything was still "new". It was as though we had landed on foreign soil with familiar tools and said, "Make do". So we did. I had a lot of conversations that looked like I was talking to myself, but that's because there were three Eric's. I was One of Three, Eric Schabell Two of Three (I think I got One of Three because I started that naming scheme, not that I was the first Eric in SMGL), and Eric Womack was Three of Three. Later on Eric Laberge joined and he became Four of Three (though I believe we changed it to Four of Four soon after).

You were the Project Lead for SMGL for many years. What led you to that position?
Mostly necessity as we needed someone to be the Head Wizard and do all the boring "paperwork". While I enjoyed being the PL, I only accepted the position because no one else volunteered. I would much rather do grimoire work.

What is your current role in SMGL?
I'm currently the Grimoire Lead, where I try to organize all the grimoire developers into a cohesive unit. This is my favourite job in SMGL, and I'm glad to be back in it. :)

Would you please explain what the Grimoire is?
A grimoire is a complete container of spells, their sections, and supporting scripts (such as account management) necessary for the spells to function. We have multiple official grimoires: z-rejected for binary-only and non-OSI licenses, games for the majority of games, test is the up-to-date grimoire where packages are first released for wide testing, stable-rc is where we have a snapshot of test to prepare for a new stable release, and the stable grimoire has some testing done to it to verify packages work and is the most bug-free release. There is no one grimoire, but rather multiple grimoires each providing a different selection. A few unofficial grimoires are maintained by various developers with packages they are working on and one hosted on the SMGL servers is xorg-modular, where we're working on integrating the newest X.org release process into our main grimoire.

How do you like the Grimoire Lead position compared to the Project Lead position?
I would say the Grimoire Lead position is my favourite. As the GL I get to fix spells and organize package improvements that everyone may feel. I am not the most organized person, so less management is good for me.

The current tagline for SMGL is "Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic". On some of the older artwork I have seen the tagline "Have a sorcerous day!".
Was this ever an official tagline for the distribution?
The "Have a sorcerous day!" is from the Sorcerer GNU/Linux days. The tagline was changed as we moved to separate ourselves from the non-GNU Sorcerer Linux formed after the split.

The raven has become a beloved symbol for SMGL. Do you remember how the raven started his reign?
When we were trying to decide the name for SMGL, "Raven" was one of the options that many people liked a lot, but "Source Mage" had more support. So when SMGL won the name the Raven was proposed for our logo. Long story short, the Raven won and was named "Quoth".

What projects are you currently working on for Source Mage?
Currently I'm working, as I have time, on getting the latest OpenOffice to compile (such a PITA to work with) as well as getting GCJ to provide JAVA, but that will have to wait until 4.3 is released, most likely.

What advice could you give other developers who want to start contributing to Source Mage?
Come join us in #sourcemage and ask any questions you may have, we're there to help. Submitting patches via Bugzilla which fix bugs will be much appreciated, but if you'd rather submit the patch yourself, ask the appropriate team for access and, depending on the team, we'll hook you up. :)

Does Source Mage offer any advantages over other source based Linux distributions?
I haven't used another source-based distro in a long time with the exception of Gentoo on my SPARC, but that was years ago when I set that up and haven't really used the Gentoo part of it in a while. From what I recall our main advantage is in simplicity: everything is in BASH, which many Linux admins are familiar with (and if not, they should be ;)). We also offer more choices up front with our config_query* functions and Sorcery's libdepends, whereas other distros require you to know beforehand what you want and to modify or set environment variables. Our tools also seem much simpler and easy to use (want to rebuild every package? `sorcery rebuild`) when compared to others I've seen.

What do you enjoy most about contributing to Source Mage?
Seeing others benefit from the work I do and, different from work, seeing my work available for others within six hours (through normal tarballs, or immediately if they use git) to use. Also fixing bugs people find and having them fixed in quick order, with a hearty thanks for the quick work.

Do you have a favorite Window Manager?
My current favorite is Enlightenment DR17, but now and then it breaks and I fall back to KDE (quite the opposite ;)). I've tried just about every window manager out there, but only like the prior two plus, XFCE, GNOME, and Fluxbox, depending on my mood.

How did you develop your programming skills?
Mostly practice. My first programming class was my freshmen year of college, but the class seemed to go fairly slowly so I decided to write a video game in C to learn the language. That was fun. :) Next semester we worked on C++, but the presentation for templates was confusing, so I re-wrote my game in C++ using templates to learn those. We also used a GUI in my C class called SRGP (Some Rotten Graphics Program we called it, I have no idea what it really stood
for) which lead me to learning OpenGL on my own by writing a planetarium in C/OpenGL. So most of my knowledge came from self-guided projects, while school just got me interested in them.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
I know C, C++, BASH, HTML and some x86 assembly, MS Visual Basic, Sed, Python, PHP, PERL, Awk, C#. My favourite so far is C#, though I'm still learning it.

In your opinion, what could greatly improve Source Mage at this point?
A bug free path from downloading the ISO to having GNOME and/or KDE running on x86 and x86_64 (our two most popular platforms). This, of course, will require a lot of work and testing, but is fairly close (I fixed the issues I found with my recent x86_64 install on a work machine).

Source Mage is about 5 years old. Why hasn't there been a 1.0 release?
Because most people (including myself) prefer to work on what we use, and all that's left for 1.0 apparently does not have many developers using it (e.g. LVM on the ISO and many of the packages with bugs in the grimoire). The main issue is motivating people to work on issues that do not affect them.

To make a push towards a 1.0 release of Source Mage, what do you think needs to be completed?
All that's really left from our 1.0 RoadMap are less open bugs against the grimoire and some ISO/Installer work. The grimoire team needs to have a focus on fixing open bugs, which I plan on setting out to do as I find the time. The ISO team is looking for volunteers to help as it's only Karsten (BearPerson) doing much of the work at the moment and he's fairly busy (like many of us).
Editor's note: Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer has recently joined the ISO team and is providing help.

How many computers do you own and what are their names?
I have 6 computers:
jet: An Athlon-XP for gaming ;)
thunk: My main laptop, an IBM ThinkPad R40
moby: Used to be my main laptop, but it runs too hot, a Dell Inspiron 4000
rover: My first laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3000 (barely works now)
sparky: A fun toy. ;) A Sun UltraSPARC 5
cerberus: The machine behind sandall.us, an Athlon-MP (with one processor burned out, so not SMP :()

What other things do you enjoy besides computers?
Hanging out with friends, playing tennis, bicycling around town, camping (tent, not camper), and Adrienne's cooking :).

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
I've enjoyed working on SMGL (in one incarnation or another ;)) for six years and look forward to continuing to improve SMGL with help from our industrious developers around the world.

Thank you Eric!

Thank you for helping out with Mage Power, Paul. :)

-sandalle

This Week in SMGL (Nov. 19th 2007)

2007-11-19T20:38:00.000-05:00

Welcome to another edition of This Week in SMGL. I want to mention that this week is Thanksgiving in the States. Mage Power will be posting another interview next week. This time, Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall will be interviewed.

Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has been busy writing documents again. He has been working on describing Sorcery and Cast recently. Next on his list is dispel. If you are new to Source Mage, the documents provide a good explanation of each component.

A new ISO has been built for testing by Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer. This is great news! It is very good to see new action happening on the ISO front. Flux has passed it on to Cauldron Lead BearPerson now. More to come when information becomes available!

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc sent in some news that I would like to include to finish off this week's activity.
"My last week was pretty fruitful. Most of the action concentrated in the middle of the week and on the grimoire QA - I fixed a bunch of bugs and resolved all the pending integrations. As a result, a new minor stable was released and the next stable will be more true to it's name. The standard stable-rc testing procedure followed, but only Eric Sandall, George Sherwood and Mathieu Lonjaret helped, which is a shame. Not only is the Grimoire team the biggest, but also this stable-rc ritual is pretty trivial and requires more involvement only when bugfixing. The initial and constant part is just about checking if spells on the list have any known (severe) bugs and doing a sorcery rebuild with the stable-rc (chroot saves). Fixing any of the known bugs is of course much welcome, but that initial part is as important.

Sorcery and Quill received some minor attention too. The latter just a bugfix, the former a few more. Among others, confmeld now has a man page and some more investigation was done on the "transaction commit failed" bug."

This concludes this week's edition. See you next week and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

This Week in SMGL (Nov. 12th 2007)

2007-11-12T20:39:00.000-05:00

Last week was a busy week kicked off by Juuso "iuso" Alasuutari and topped off by the latest Source Mage developers meeting. Juuso wrote a new patch that has the potential to make a SMGL developer's life easier.
Here is the message from Juuso.

"I've written a patch for pkg-config which adds the option to log to a Unix socket. That means you can capture info about what packages a configure script is looking for -- without ever having to modify the scripts. You simply fire up a program that listens on a socket, set the PKG_CONFIG_LOG_SOCKET variable to point to that socket, and voilá: pkg-config will report the packages and versions requested from it.

Add to that some logic for matching pkg-config package names with spell names, and you get a program that tells you what spells a source package is hungry for.

I've uploaded a tarball with the patch plus an example program to demonstrate the feature. I'll highly appreciate any feedback. Get it at: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~a445063/pkg-config-logsocket.tar.bz2"

One of the new Source Mage developers welcomed last week was Enqlave. Here is the message sent by Sandalle.
"I would like to welcome a long-time SMGL user (since 2003) into the developer fold. You may know him from ages ago as Stelz, or perhaps more recently as Enqlave, or innocuous stealth, or the taken Codex on IRC. Those whom really know him say he is Vlad Glagolev, but we know his True Name. ;) Somehow we have managed to dupe him into helping out with our packages and he has even volunteered to focus on the python-devel and xfce sections, but we know he won't stay locked in those for long.
Please welcome our newest member to the Valley, Enqlave!"

Another new developer was also announced last week by Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann.
"As I mentioned in the meeting, we have a new wizard grabbing a cauldron to help with the cooking of our ISOs. You'll probably know him as flux_control on IRC, or just plain flux. Someone managed to convince him to brave the insanity-producing vapors of the kitchen, to see if our Ancient Recipes (now with new flavor!) still work as they used to, and to stir the old fires up to a warm yellow glow again.

So please join me in a warm welcome to flux_control as he wanders the Valley to add his power to the Circle of Mages :)"

Sandalle also generated a new Grimoire stable-rc-0.15 to test. Here is the official message from him.
"The stable-rc-0.15 branch is ready and the Wiki is up at http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Stable-0.15 for our eager developers to start checking for bugs. I will generate the tarballs (x86 and x86_64) and put them on the wiki once they're up.
The stable-rc tarball has been updated on the server and will be working its way out to the mirrors."

Martin "mar_s" Spitzbarth has been working on a spell for the new ATI fglrx driver. He is making progress and has pushed the spell to a devel branch. He added some information about the spell to his web site.

Juuso "iuso" Alasuutari sent out a message about a Udev change coming.
"Udev's toolset (udevinfo, udevmonitor, udevsettle, udevstart, udevtest, and udevtrigger) will be merged into a single binary in the next release [0], our init scripts need to be changed then.
[0]
Source here"

Treeve Jelbert sent out an update on his KDE4 progress.
"I have just spent some time testing kde-3.95.2 in a clean amd64 partition, everything builds and mosts things that I need are ok, current problems:

*can't add printer
*any use of javascript crashes konqueror
*sometimes need ot force reload of a page in the browser

On my normal amd32 system I have problems building some packages, probably because of some obscure conflicts with kde3/qt3. Both systems now use xorg-modular."

Since David "dmlb2000" Brown had great luck and positive response from testers for glibc 2.7. He integrated it to the devel-glibc test branch Friday.

Project Lead Jeremy "Emrys" Blosser sent out a Lead Developer Vote for Paul Beel.
"We have a motion/second/acceptance of a Lead Developer Vote for Paul Beel aka novaburst. Please send your signed 'yes', 'no', or 'abstain' vote to me privately by Sun Nov 18 18:45 UTC. Lead Developers must vote, General Developers may vote.
http://www.sourcemage.org/VotingPolicy"

Finally, a developer meeting was held on 11-11-2007. There is a summary posted by Mage Power right below this post. If you want to read the entire log, you can read it here.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK. SAME MAGE-TIME, SAME MAGE-CHANNEL!

SMGL Developer Meeting (Nov. 11th, 2007)

2007-11-11T23:39:00.000-05:00

Here is the summary from the latest Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer Meeting. It was held in the #sourcemage-admin irc channel.

Everyone gathered around the SMGL crystal ball and the discussion began. The first order of business revolved around the Cauldron Team. If you are new to Source Mage, the Cauldron involves the ISO. Cauldron Lead Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann stated they were scaling back to simpler installer schemes until they can get a regular release schedule started again. The current ISO generation system is too complicated.

BearPerson introduced a new developer, Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer. Flux has been getting accustomed to the current Cauldron setup and working on rolling out a test ISO. Flux said he may have a new test ISO ready this week if things go as planned.

The Cauldron Team will focus on i486 and others as that's the basic install, but they will do their best to get an x64 ISO out as well once they get things going again. The version of the ISO has not yet been determined.

Several developers offered to test a x64 version of the ISO. BearPerson said once they move ahead he will post a mailing list announcement about x64 development, so anyone willing to help will be able to volunteer then.

The next discussion centered around the Grimoire. The Grimoire is our collection of spells or software. Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall started by mentioning the current influx of new developers. With the newest being Vlad "Enqlave" Glagolev. Enqlave has been a SMGL user for about 4 years, but decided to join us as a developer.

Eric said his free time lately has been lacking and this has caused the new stable grimoire releases to suffer. He mentioned that timelines are slipping, the developer list is not being purged according to policy and bugs are being submitted faster than they are being fixed. Developers stated that maybe the project was growing quickly as of late and that the bug count is pretty stable and not too far out of hand.

Ruskie said he would contact the idle developers to check their status to help with determining inactivity. Sandalle will fix the timelines by looking for volunteers much sooner, as in right after the prior release at the latest. As for the bug list, he will be going through it to find outstanding bugs and point them out or at least give feedback on the bugs so the user knows we're aware of it. He wants the bug count to decrease and not increase. Jaka "lynx" Kranjc volunteered to help Sandalle with the bugs, because he already has a good understanding of their status. Lynx said for stable we need to revert/fix this hal/hal-info bug, some integrations remain. Lynx will become the gatekeeper for this to facilitate things.

General grimoire developers are still needed. The current influx is welcome and more are definitely needed. Project Lead Jeremy "emrys" Blosser said all things considered he is still happy with how stable grimoire releases have been relative to other things.

Sandalle also stated he would like to find more developers to take over a section, as some sections seem to get ignored. While general devs pick up a few here and there, the section developers primary task is to check for bugs in that section and get them fixed. But the main need for section devs is not updates per-se, but bug triage. Feel free to send Sandalle an e-mail if you'd like a section.

Lynx added he would like to express some awe at our diligent grimoire updaters, especially Treeve Jelbert, Ladislav "lace" Hagara and George "p3pilot" Sherwood!

Lastly, Bugzilla needs updated. Emrys will update things like Bugzilla when he moves it to the other datacenter if not before. The move will happen when Emrys has the time to make the move.

Next on the list was Sorcery. Sorcery is our package management system. Sorcery Lead Jaka "lynx" Kranjc reported devel received a few fixes, but not in the blocker category. The focus is still on the new stable and the weird regression blocking it. He is investigating it further. Once this is fixed, version 1.14 of Sorcery will get all of the attention. Also, user Anmaster cleaned up half of the bashdoc pipeline and it now produces valid xhtml with css support. So the goal of having the APIs somewhere on the web site is closer.

Emrys then asked to hear from the Tome side of things. Currently there is no Tome Lead developer, but work has been taking place. Tome is our documentation and web site area. Developers like Ruskie have been moving the data from the Drupal side of things to the MoinMoin wiki. Ruskie said user Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has been helping with that. Most of the project related things(policy, developers etc...) have been transferred to the wiki under the SourceMage/ hierachy, but we still need to transfer the docs and any other possible pages that are around. Other than that he urges people to look over drupal pages and see if they can move one or two pages. That would help the whole effort much more easily.

Emrys then reported about his projects. Mainly, stability, delegation and mail lists. For delegation he needs to get the script done so component leads can add their own own git repositories. He has started this already, by adding Ruskie's licenses repository and making the script as he goes, so stuff doesn't get missed. The other thing he needs to do with git is move some repos around so we can add the p4 history ones back in without spamming the list. The mailing list stuff he mentioned is a priority for him because it's the big block keeping him from catching back up with things. The developers determined the section aliases could be dropped to help with this.

Emrys had this to say about the server move. "I'm still planning to piggyback building this new server on some similar stuff I'm doing at work. Which is taking a break for the LISA conference this week but will be happening the week after that. Once it's done at work I can spend a weekend day doing it for us and then schedule some services downtime to move things as they're ready. I don't intend to move Drupal. There's a decent chance I can make time during the move to set up fudforums though. I do intend to get things like bugzilla and moinmoin updated on the move. On the ML front, do we have anyone completely wedded to the idea of using mailman? It's not fun from an admin perspective, there are much better options for automation and integration with other stuff. I want to move us to one of those that mostly uses email for administration, still with web archives of course, but provide a web interface at least for some admin."

Ruskie reminded Emrys there is a vote pending for a lead developer status for Paul "novaburst" Beel. Emrys went ahead and sent the e-mail about this to the mailing list. It was also determined that Tome Lead nominations needed to happen. Emrys will do nominations for Tome Lead next week.

To finish the meeting a rather large discussion involved the direction of the web site. The wiki needs access control. In the end, it was decided that we would do it by using git to handle the backend of the wiki. David Kowis confirmed the move by posting this on the official site: The next server we'll be migrating too will no longer have drupal on it. Reason: no one maintains it. And it's more than we need. We'll simply lean on Mage Power! for all our news-y-ish things. We haven't come up with a forums replacement yet. We'll migrate to using the wiki for everything.

That concludes the meeting notes. It was an informative meeting and well attended. Great job Mages!

This Week in SMGL (Nov. 5th 2007)

2007-11-05T20:53:00.000-05:00

When I first posted the new "This Week in SMGL" a couple weeks ago, I mentioned it would usually be posted on Sunday. Well, I lied. It seems to work better for me on Monday, what can I say. Hold on to your wizard hat, here we go!

Source Mage Developer David "dmlb2000" Brown has placed glibc 2.7 in devel. Many developers have been busy testing it. David has put a lot of work into this. Thanks David!

Project Lead Jeremy Blosser has scheduled the next Source Mage Developer meeting for November 11th at 1700/UTC. The meeting will be held on the #sourcemage-admin irc channel.

Andraž "ruskie" Levstik and Ethan "eekee" Grammatikidis have kicked off the migration of the official Source Mage web site. It is moving away from Drupal and moving to MoinMoin Wiki. You can see it forming here. Eekee did a great job on the new theme.

Treeve Jelbert has been working hard on KDE4! Here is his message to the sm-discuss mailing list last week.

"kde4 in test is now at version 3.95.0

I have built all of the spells, on an amd32 with xorg-6.9.0 and on amd64 with
xorg-modular.

I had problems with two spells on my old xorg setup, which may be related to
my xorg configuration.

Most of the programs appear in my normal kde3 menu and can be run from there,
otherwise start them manually from /opt/bin.

For the more adventurous, you can try to run a full kde4 desktop.

1. create a user who belongs to the group kde4
2. disable the init script kdm
3. enable the init script kdm4
4. change the default displaymanager in /etc/sysconfig/facilities
5. after restarting at level 5, it should now be possible to login to the new
user and encounter the strange new world of kde4. Lots of right clicking may
be useful.

The first time login may be rather slow, as it builds lots of new data caches.

At present kde4 is configured to keep the desktop data in ~/.kde4
(see /etc/profile.d/kde4.sh). This means that if you use the same user for
both kde3 and kde4, the desktop settings can be completely different. It
also means that your existing email is safe in the other desktop.

It is also possible to run a kde4 desktop on top of your normal desktop, but I
shall explain that another time.

The next release is due in about 3 weeks."

David Kowis stated the SMGL Server Fundable was a huge success! Sqweek wrote this nice little poem to commemorate the achievement.

This was a triumph!
I'm making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS!
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
Source Mage GNU/Linux
We build it from source
Without remorse
For the good of all wizards
Except the ones who fizzled
But there's no sense crying over every segfault
You just keep on scribing 'till you run out of salt!
And the grimoire gets done
And you make a stable one
For the mages who cast all night long

Finally, a designer friend of mine is working on vectorizing the current Source Mage logo shown here. I explained to her we do not want to change the logo, it just needs to be a vector. She is making the raven look like the one in the long logo as well. Plus, she is designing the same type of logo for Mage Power! This is scheduled to be finished before Christmas.

This Week in SMGL (Oct. 29th 2007)

2007-10-29T21:08:00.000-04:00

First, the server woes are being taken care of by Jeremy Blosser as quickly as possible. Hopefully the data center technician will be able to solve the current hardware problems as of today, October 29th. Jeremy already has plans to do some migration to another server and some mirroring for interim outages. So the official Source Mage GNU/Linux web site and git server are in good hands. Jeremy did mention that your donations to the server cause has helped immensely. We thank you for your patience during the recent down times.

Last week, Andraž "ruskie" Levstik merged the xorg-modular repo into a separate branch in the SMGL grimoire tree. Ruskie stated that this is to comply with the schedule that was recently discussed on the #sourcemage-grimoire irc channel that we get xorg-modular into test by the end of the year. Eric Sandall has been working towards this end by making relevant changes to the monolithic spells to deprecate into -modular ones.

He also noted this to developers:

"All further development on xorg-modular is to happen in the devel branch. I'd ask that also any further updates are to it are first made in the devel branch and only after some runtime tests to be put into the main grimoire. Reason being that the xorg devs have a rather bad track record of breaking backwards compatibility since -modular exists. Hence why I would ask for any critical updates(libs, server, devel drivers(noted by odd version numbers(usually 1xx or similar)) be not put into test unless they are well tested beyond the "does it cast" requirement we have."

I asked Ruskie a few general questions about this merge, but instead of posting the questions and answers, I've summarized the discussion.
There is no longer an actual devel grimoire. This is a feature branch of the master tree. If developers want to work on xorg-modular, they would make a local branch based on the remote/devel-xorg-modular branch and work from there.
If you are a user and want to test xorg-modular, Eric Sandall mentioned fixing the grimoire tarball generation scripts to pull from this feature branch and thus still providing a standard xorg-modular.tar.bz2. Mage Power will be sure to let you know when this has been completed.
If you are currently using xorg-modular, you do not need to make any adjustments. The updates to -modular are few and far between and other than running from git there shouldn't be any issues. Those that do use git should be more than capable of figuring out how to get it to work.

The final news from last week is about the install guide that was mentioned in last week's "This Week in SMGL". Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has made additions to his SMGL install guide and placed it on the Source Mage wiki. Thanks goes out to Jucato, we appreciate his work on the guide.

SMGL Web Site Down at times

2007-10-29T08:40:00.001-04:00

Project Lead Jeremy Blosser has sent an e-mail to sm-discuss stating there is a hardware problem that is causing server problems. It is causing issues with the Source Mage GNU/Linux web site and the git server. The codex and other file downloads are not affected. Mage Power will have more details about this posted soon. We just wanted to make sure people knew the developers were aware of the problem and a solution is being formulated.

This Week in SMGL (Oct. 22th 2007)

2007-10-22T22:14:00.000-04:00

This Week in SMGL is back! This actually should have been posted yesterday, but this will get the ball rolling and you should start seeing it posted on Sunday most of the time. This Week in SMGL started as a popular blog entry created by developer Andrew "afrayedknot" Stitt with help from developer Juuso "iuso" Alasuutari on the official Source Mage web site . The weekly blog entry would highlight Source Mage GNU/Linux news from the previous week. Many developers and users have asked for this to make a come back, so here it is!

Last week Mage Power posted it's very first interview. Jaka "lynx" Kranjc was interviewed and it was posted on many of the major Linux news sites. It was a great success. Many other interviews are planned.

A question was posted to the SM-Discuss mailing list asking for a Source Mage Installer howto complete with screen shots. Andraž "ruskie" Levstik informed us that Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) had written an installer howto. It is a very nice howto and you can read it on his web site.

Andraž "ruskie" Levstik nominated Paul "novaburst" Beel for a lead developer position and also for a title of PR Wizard. There is currently no PR component in the organization, so it's mostly an honorary title. It was seconded by Jaka "lynx" Kranjc and accepted by Paul. Voting will begin soon.

Andraž "ruskie" Levstik wrote an initial version specification for the IMP. You can view it here: http://wiki.sourcemage.org/IMP
Ruskie welcomes any needed changes or suggestions. Here is the description from the wiki page. "This work in progress tool will be used to manage init scripts, xinetd scripts and any other service control scripts that we might provide."

Stable Grimoire 0.14 was released. It was posted here on Mage Power. You can read the details here: http://www.sourcemage.org/node/2398

Last but not least, Source Mage has exceeded it's goal to pay for all of the needed internet resources. David Kowis did a great job in explaining all of the needs. Donations are still welcomed and will be put to good use!

Stable Grimoire 0.14 Released

2007-10-17T18:26:00.000-04:00

Stable grimoire version 0.14 has been released!

As usual, users of stable merely need to run 'sorcery system-update'. Spells listed on the 0.14 release wiki were tested and qualified to have no known defects of "gating" severity at the time of this release.

To download the grimoire manually, get http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.14.tar.bz2 .

GPG signatures are available at http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.14.tar.bz2.asc .

I would like to thank Jaka Kranjc (lynx), Martin Spitzbarth (mar_s), and Mathieu Lonjaret (lejatorn) for helping test spells.

Here is the official release notice from Sandalle.
http://www.sourcemage.org/node/2398

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc Interview

2007-10-14T22:01:00.001-04:00

Hello Jaka, thank you for taking the time to do this interview for Mage Power. Would you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Linux?
I'm a student at the Biotechnical Faculty in Ljubljana, Slovenija. The course is dubbed "Forestry with renewable forest resources", which includes a wide variety of topics. A few of them are also IT related (think GIS). Being a geek helps me a lot during my studies, but the connection works the other way too. For example, learning how to differentiate all these critters amongst themselves improved my attention to detail.

Switching to gnu/linux was a natural thing to do. There is an exotic and free OS out there! I just needed to try it and after the second run-in, I was hooked. Part of the reason for that is the fact it exposes all sorts of details of it's and the computer's inner workings. Which was just perfect for satisfying my growing curiosity.

You stated after the second run-in you were hooked. Can you elaborate on that? What distribution were you using at that time?
My first run-in was with Slackware. It came with a bunch of translated howtos from tldp.org, but that was it, as I had no net connection at that time. I don't remember if I just couldn't get the mouse to work or if I couldn't even start X, but after a while I got tired of hacking at it.
Later, the second try was with Mandrake 9.1, which worked just fine and provided a stable platform for me to work and play from. But as I gained experience, I realised that source distributions are the way to go, so I started adventuring on the Gentoo plane. There are plenty of spells to choose from there, but their use is needlessly stressing on the wielder. That provoked my journey to the little known Source Mage plane, where I wander still.

What was it about Source Mage that made you decide to stick with it?
The package manager is featureful, fast and mostly written in bash! As most distributions, contains all the packages I need and I don't like gui configuration tools too much (hard to get right), I judge them by their package managers. That's the real added value for me.
I was already an avid scripter, so Source Mage presented a good opportunity to do something more widely useful. Due to all the clever code involved, Sorcery is also a good learning ground.

Besides all the fascination for the nomenclature, the code and the unpatchedness™, the distribution just turned out to be useable. The warm atmosphere of #sourcemage helped too.

I notice when new users show interest in Source Mage, one of their first questions is, "How does Source Mage compare to Gentoo?". How do you think Source Mage compares to Gentoo?
When I was still a pretty fresh user, I wrote this doc on the topic:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/SourcemageGentooDiffUserPerspective

The points in it are still mostly true, but many are missing. A more proper response was later written by Jeremy Blosser:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/FAQ/Gentoo/Philosophical

How long have you been with Source Mage now?
I've been using Source Mage for a bit over two years now, with the current installation dating back to the Sunday of September the 25th, 16:13:17 CEST 2005 (fetched from /etc/sourcemage-release). My first graspable contribution was a small patch for gaze (bug #10140) later that year.

What is your current role in the Source Mage GNU/Linux project?
I'm the new Sorcery Lead, but I'll also continue with my previous activities - grimoire QA, quill development and the occasional version bump.

What are you currently working on?
Currently I'm busy with w€rk, but right after that, I have these things in queue:

Sorcery:
1. verify #13735, integrate a few fixes and release a new stable Sorcery
2. integrate most of the recent fixes from devel to test, perhaps also runtime/suggested dependency support and release a new test Sorcery
3. fix the blockers for 1.14.0 and release it into test; release a new stable from the old test
4. wreak havoc in the new devel and fix the remaining 1.14 bugs

Grimoire:
I have accumulated a few half-complete commit stashes, including:
* a fix for qt4 not remembering query options (always uses the defaults, deceptively marked as saved)
* which enables adding a subdependency for soprano on qt4 with tools
* a second failed attempt at updating gcl, no version builds for me now
* an update of maxima, which I can't do much about due to a gcl subdependency issue, which requires me to rebuild it ...
* an update of qtiplot, more qmake fun

What motivates you to keep working on Source Mage?
I like to tinker and there are plenty of things to do in different areas, so it rarely gets repetitive or boring. When it does, I just tackle something else.

What do you think needs to be completed in Source Mage to release a 1.0 version?
Heh, the 1.0 thing. If you ask me, Source Mage has been 1.0 material a long time ago, we just don't care about such numbers so much. There is an old 1.0
roadmap hidden somewhere on the site and last I checked it was largely completed.

It also appears that the iso releases dictated the Source Mage "version". And since Cauldron (iso generation) has been the most starved out part of the project, few new isos came out and that resulted in few "version" bumps.

What is a Source Mage version anyway? With new iso releases, there is no need for a reinstall or a risky upgrade like with some major distributions. One just updates sorcery and the spells with the usual tools et voilà, you're as current as a user can be. Some people even have *updated* installs from Sorcerer, the Source Mage parent!

I'd definitely like to see volunteers join the cauldron team and help Karsten and David get the processes running again. New isos create a lot of new buzz, which is critical for increasing and maintaining a steady flow of new people to our community. A bigger community then means a bigger contributor pool, which could mean more isos ...

So if we wanted to do a symbolic 1.0 release, we're all already ready! I think it would be good to make a fresh iso first though, as that would mean a more recent kernel with even more hardware support.

What advice do you have for other developers who want to start contributing to Source Mage?
Reporting bugs is one of the easiest way to contribute, sadly often dismissed as minor. But let's talk of the hacker type, who will also (try to) fix bugs.

The only thing required from a classical contributor is curiousity plus willingness to learn, some zen of coding or preferably all of that. The bar is low, obligations few (and far between if you will) and we are a friendly bunch. Everybody makes mistakes and yelling can't change that. I'm pleasantly surprised how mature everyone is, although some may find the lack of flamewars boring. ;)
What I wanted to say was that we have civil peer review and that nobody will be looked down upon if she asks for help. If she still feels competently deficient, we have a voluntary apprentice-mentorship programme, where everything he or she wants to publish goes through the mentor first, so it is less likely to contain errors when published publicly.

So the best way to start hacking is to fix a bug or three, bump a spell or add a small missing feature (technically all of these are bugs; report them if they don't exist yet). There are even some 60 bugs labeled as quickfix. This means that they're pretty trivial to fix and that the bug comments usually explain exactly what needs to be done. A perfect starting point.

BUT those are only the classical requirements - like with any other project, we also need all sorts of other talents. Graphics artists (logos, backgrounds, banners, t-shirts motives, ...), writers (news, articles, docs, poems, incantations :], translations, ...), demag^WPR people, website people, admins ... Even some (nerdcore) music wouldn't hurt. :D

Another simple way to contribute is to be an active part of the community - talk on IRC/IM, write mails, blogs ... Communication (feedback, support) is an important part of the development process.

In your opinion, is there anything that could greatly improve Source Mage at this point?
Hmm, that's a tough one to answer properly. Source Mage already has all the features one would reasonably expect and there are no outrageous bugs, so there is hardly a single action that could "greatly improve" it (short of sudden paid labour). Not that there aren't any big projects to undertake, but I doubt any will have a titanic impact. At this point we're just maintaining and increasing the added value.

One of the coolest project proposals I've heard so far was David Kowis' prototype of an Adventure-like installer. Imagine all the gamers we could attract! ;D
More seriously, I think the task with the biggest impact would be (again) Cauldron related. Installing a 64-bit system is needlessly complicated now.

What is your favorite Window Manager/Desktop Manager?
kwin/KDE.

What are some of your favorite Linux applications?
In no real order: kmail, konversation, less, konsole, opera, klipper, git, bash, sed, the sorcery suite, the coreutils suite, kile, fortune, kwordquiz, wesnoth, wormux, kwrite, wine, gettext, nano and that's about it. Some of them are just KDE implementations of common tools, so they may not actually be anything special.

Do you think Source Mage is a good choice for a server?
I have no experience with it as a server, but judging by my workstation's stability and the fact that people do use it that way, I guess it is.

What other things do you enjoy besides computers?
I love mountaineering! And this year has been especially fruitful in that regard - I've been on some 20 tours already and there's still two months to go. :)
Connected to the previous is my interest in wildlife, especially rare flora.

I also recently discovered La Canne. It is a sport in the age old tradition of fencing, but not in the lame olympic way. There is a nice presentation video here (disregard the boxing ring):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6893051058764633264
When magic fails, use a sword!

On the thought front, I like all sorts of puzzles, word plays and ambiguities. Got to stay sharp. ;)

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Sorbus aria! It is an African word for 'Humanity to otters'. It also sounds cool when pronounced.

2007 Source Mage Server Fundable!

2007-10-01T22:35:00.000-04:00

Dave Kowis sent this to the SM-Discuss mailing list today. I thought I would post it here as is, because he explains the situation well.

It's your unofficial treasurer here!

Fundable link

It's that time again! Time to help support the distribution with
something tangible. We all greatly appreciate the development work
you've done, whether it's filing bugs, coding sorcery, or keeping up
with your favorite packages. But now we also need your money ;)

Our Project Lead, Jeremy Blosser, is changing jobs (going to a better
one, YAY!) around this time, so it's extremely important that we raise
funds to help offset the costs of hosting the server. Those costs amount
to approximately $1000 a year. I've set our Fundable goal to $860. The
$60 is to cover the Fundable's 7% that they charge. If we can raise more
(I'd like to see the full $1000 in there) that'd be even better!

Spread the word! If you know someone that uses Source Mage and likes it,
see if you can get them to give just $10. That's $10 closer than we
would be otherwise. Put it this way: $10 for the best Linux distribution
ever, that's a pretty good deal ;) It's easy, PayPal or Credit Cards
are accepted.

Fundable link

Thanks for donating!
--
David Kowis

A few tips from Jaka Kranjc

2007-09-23T08:52:00.000-04:00

Jaka "lynx" Kranjc was nice enough to send in some helpful quick tips for readers.

use cleanse --sweep to delete unnecessary sources and binary caches.
Files are kept if any spell/version in any grimoire could use them.

You have no idea why you have package X installed. You don't need it, but
perhaps some other installed package does? Check with
gaze depends X 2

When dispelling, you can also automatically dispel any orphans. Orphans?
Orphans are packages that nobody needs, so if X depends on Y and you dispel
X, Y is an orphan and probably just takes up space.
dispel --orphan ask-yes X
see the dispel man page for further info, there is a lot more to this!

You can quickly downgrade a spell (eg. X at 2.1.1) if you have the cache
tarball of a previous version with:
dispel -d X 2.0.1