Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

The expo was quite interesting but far more corporate than FOSDEM. I was disappointed at the high prices of the tickets to see any of the talks - I think it was about £75 per session which is too much for us lowly developers... They didn't provide any kind of network access to us either, so we were cut off from the world and unable to fetch anything we didn't have mirrored on disk already.

We got set up with a dual xeon box loaned to us by James (edit_21) for the duration of the show along with a 15" TFT screen. I brought along my new toy - the Acer Ferrari 4005. I did manage to break it a little by recompiling everything with GCC 4.0.2... It actually works really well apart from the sucky ATI binaries which fail to load because they are binary and I am forced to wait until ATI choose to recompile their drivers (assuming they can) using GCC 4. As a result 3D performance was poor, and the silky smooth cube demo I was going to put on it ground to a jerky holt! The ComputaShop kindly printed the large G logo and donated the CD-Rs and printed labels for us to use at the show too.

Once the portage xorg-x11 ebuild contains the patch for the open source drivers to work on my ATI X700 PCI-E graphics card I think I am going to abandon the binary drivers unless I need them for opengl (I hardly use that stuff anyway). When I do I should probably be working! I learnt something new whilst at the expo too - cokehabit actually does something productive for Gentoo! He is one of the contributors to the GWN, and I have a wonderful picture of this colourful Gentoo user at the expo

 
Nick Veitch, editor of Linux Format (had my subscriber copy with me at the expo) presented us with the two awards we won earlier this year (best support resource and best distro), but I missed him and so couldn't get him to sign my GPG key I was truly disappointed, and didn't spot him again. The awards will be cared for in Sheffield with me taking home the best distro certificate, and Tom (tomk) taking home the best support resource certificate (he is one of the forum admins after all).

We also had some GPG key signing action, extending our web of trust from the European devs at FOSDEM over to the UK devs (and lcars, our random dev from a long way away). It was great to meet up with so many UK devs, and some of our users too. I met up with Matthew and Pete from Bytemark Hosting too, they provided my Gentoo UML host for the last couple of years until I outgrew it and got a dedicated host. I somehow ended up with them and Gareth (oddjobz) - we managed to end up in a curry house a little worse for wear on Wednesday night after the Lonix event. It was a great night out where much was discussed and debated even if it wasn't quite as coherently considered as it could have been...

Spoke to some of the KDE developers too and found them to be very interesting. They were using Kubuntu I believe to show off their latest wears, and had some interesting discussions with them about the upcoming 3.5 release which we at Gentoo have spent considerable time working on. I had the split ebuilds installed and running on my laptop throughout the conference too.

On the last day we also met Mark Spencer, the creator of Asterisk who had given a talk at the conference (unfortunately didn't get to see any of the talks due to the price for tickets). He took us out for a beer, and some of our devs/users even stayed on a little longer for a meal. I am sure they had a great time whilst I had to leave to catch my train... Giving me time to type up this post in a better state than I would have been had I stayed on.

UPDATE: My photos from the expo are here.

Just about to set off to catch the train down to London. Looking forward to meeting lots of developers and users at the UK Linux Expo. Shame I can't afford to attend any of the talks, but it should be good fun anyway. I think there is a Lonix social event on Wednesday night too. Must dash or I will miss my train!

I have had my newish system up and running for most of the weekend now. I noticed when doing lots of compilation/work on the system that I sometimes ended up with 10 characters where I had only typed one, and gained 10 minutes of time in less than an hour with ntpd running! After some searching around I came across this kernel bug entry detailing my exact problem and a solution to it. Just adding the notsc option to the grub entry for my SMP kernel solved this problem immediately. Just thought it might help others who are having similar issues until the patch makes it into gentoo-sources and/or the mainline kernel.

Hopefully kde-base/kdebase-kioslaves-3.4.2-r1 is now working with the new hal/dbus/pmount. This should allow the Gnome herd to unmask the latest Gnome ebuilds and still allow KDE users to take advantage of the improved removeable storage handling offered in KDE 3.4. The patch comes from the kubuntu breezy ebuilds so I would like to thank them for the patch!

It is currently masked so I would like to ask any interested users to test the new ebuild with the currently masked sys-apps/dbus-0.36.2, sys-apps/hal-0.5.4 and sys-apps/pmount-0.9.3-r3. The big problem is with the API changes made in the HAL library, and the fact that the old and new versions cannot be slotted. I would appreciate any success/failure reports of kde-base/kdebase-kioslaves-3.4.2-r1 to bug 105553. Thanks!

The KDE 3.5 betas work with the new versions anyway, but they are still in beta right now. They are working very well for anyone interested in trying them out. I have been using them since alpha1 as my main desktop on my laptop!

Got my new system up and running yesterday. I would like to thank Mastercard and NatWest for helping my to purchase a new PSU, motherboard, graphics card and AMD Althlon64 X2 3800+! I haven't worked out all the fine details of how I will pay them back just yet, but I do have a beautiful new system up and running!

Thanks to Gentoo it took virtually no effort at all. Flashed the BIOS to the latest version, plugged in my old hard drive. Everything booted but a few things weren't working so I just recompiled the kernel with SMP support, PCI express support and the forcedeth module for the different network interdace. Rebooted and it was all working great. I do have this really weird issue where it seems to reboot on a cold boot after entering run level 3, then on a second boot everything boots fine.

The system has clock issues too - it gains time at quite an incredible rate. I have even found ntpd having trouble keeping up when it is under load! Hopefully I will get some time to do a little work during the rest of the weekend. I am really hoping for some better luck when it comes to computer hardware too - I can't afford to replace anything else! The dual core processors seem pretty responsive so far too running on the gentoo-sources-2.6.13-r2. There is just the clock issue and the random reboot on cold start.