Mindless Techie

For those of you whom haven’t subscribed to the gentoo-nfp mailing list, Alec Warner (aka antarus) just sent an informative email that explains a little more about what is going on with the foundation status. He also requests for suggestions on how to proceed regarding the foundation status.

There are a number of folks working on this issue; this thread is an
attempt to move conversations off of gentoo-core (internal only) and
onto gentoo-ftp (a more public list).

Renat is currently working on getting our expired New Mexico filings
so he can show them to some lawyers he knows in order to get some
recent advice on how we could proceed.

See [1] for more info.

There has been talk internally about whether accepting Daniel’s offer
is a good idea. I think the only conclusion we can really draw at
this point is that the timeframe alloted is currently too short to
make a good choice in the matter. Some people want to vote, others
want more details regarding Daniel’s plans, etc.

I believe there are a group of folks working to formulate the
necessary communique to Daniel to get their concerns addressed (I’m
not going to list them here or leak the contents of the request but I
will say it is going on).

A number of folks have volunteered to get the Foundation back in order
should Daniel not grant a time extension or should the existing
Trustees reject his request.

I want to try to make the point of this thread clear; I’m trying to
keep the general community informed about the internal progress of
what is going on. I’d appreciate useful feedback about how we could
proceed on the matter.

The intention of this list is to be about the non-profit foundation;
if you have problems with the distribution itself or other technical
matters, please direct them to gentoo-dev or gentoo-project.

Thanks,

-Alec

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205905

There’s a poll in the Gentoo forums regarding Daniel Robbins offer today to help get Gentoo Linux back on it’s feet. Gentoo is in serious need of a leader that is not afraid to take action. Please follow the link and vote yes.

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I just saw that Daniel posted an offer to help Gentoo in it’s time of need.  I really hope that the trustees and council agree and choose to help.

Finally, some news on the dev list about the GWN.  You need to read through quite a few posts to get the whole story.

Wolf31o2 sparked the conversation with a rather grim update on the GWN status and why he hasn’t put any time into the GWN lately.

The GWN is currently in a permanent state of hiatus. I have nointentions on spending another minute working on the GWN. While many,many improvements have been made in the processes for getting theautomated data, getting articles has been pulling teeth, at best. Thiswas taking me upwards of 12 hours a week, which was impacting the time Ihad available to work on things like releases and my day job. As such,the GWN is abandoned and will likely stay that way until someone stepsup and decides they’re ready and willing to give up their lives to workon this publication. Yes, I think switching to a monthly newsletterwould *help* the problem, but it still won’t resolve it. The GWN needsarticles more than anything, and few people are submitting anything.

I certainly agree and understand his frustration.  Getting users to submit articles is difficult at best. The average Gentoo user doesn’t seem too interested in spending time creating and submitting articles to the GWN.

There were several replies from various dev’s offering to submit information at least on a monthly basis.  Anant volunteered to get the project back on track if the GWN becomes a monthly newsletter (GMN).  He says he’s willing to put 12-15 hours/month on the project.  I don’t think he realizes that it will probably take a lot more time than that to do things properly.

I’m glad someone stepped forward; however, I still think there are many problems that need to be addressed.

• Lack of articles.  We still need to find a way to get Gentoo users excited enough about the distribution to volunteer a little bit of time and submit some stories.
• The entire GWN team needs to revived.  A roll call needs to be done to find out who is still willing to volunteer time on the project and what specifically they are willing to do.  It’s fine to hope that some content comes in from random users, but there has to be at least a few people who have dedicated some time to rounding up fresh information and articles.
• Don’t start calling it GMN.  Heck, why is there even a need to commit to a monthly release?  Why not just release a new GWN when it’s ready.  Sometimes that could be a week or two between releases, or maybe six weeks.  That’s why I really like the idea of changing the name to Gentoo World News and keeping the GWN acronym.  The name doesn’t commit the publication to a release schedule.

I have a lot more to say on the subject, but I’m running short on time, so I guess I’ll stop rambling on now. 

Technorati Tags: Gentoo,GWN,newsletter

This is more or less a follow-up to my previous blog post Good ole Gentoo. Where art thou? Anyone can just complain about the status of things, so I thought I would provide a little help with finding out more about Gentoo and what’s going on with the distro.
So, you’re a long time Gentoo user getting tired of the old stale web page that shows a 2 month old GWN as the latest news. What to do? Well, you can make your voice heard in the forums. Lots of other folks have had the same concern lately. There has been some talk about changing the name of the GWN in the forums, as well as questions of whether Gentoo is even practical.
Ok, you’ve voiced your opinion, now what? Find out what’s going on in Gentoo yourself by using the huge amount of resources that are available.

• Use the forums
  • This should really go without saying. If you’re a Gentoo user and you don’t use the forums, you’re not really a true Gentoo user. The forums are the just about the best source out there. Whether you’re looking for information on fixing a problem or just chatting about politics, the forums has it all.
• Look in the planet
  • Planet Gentoo is a collection of rss feeds from various Gentoo developer blogs. There’s lots of good information on there about various Gentoo related topics.
• Look in the universe
  • I’ve noticed lately that there are less and less posts on Planet Gentoo. It turns out, the main planet page only shows blog posts specifically in the Gentoo category. There’s another section of the planet that includes all posts from the developers. I’ve found that quite often there is very good information in these other posts. Sometime there is quite important information that doesn’t make it in the main planet feed because it’s not just Gentoo specific.
• Look at Larry’s Planet
  • Planet Larry is a collection of rss feeds from Gentoo users (not developers). I have my feed on there and there are lots of other users blogs on there as well. This is a great place to find out what other Gentoo users are talking about.
• Find an interesting mailing list
  • Gentoo has lots of mailing lists for just about every topic you can think of. So… if you are a Gentoo server admin, subscribing to the gentoo-server list would keep your inbox up to date with the latest discussions about running Gentoo on your server.
• Get on IRC
  • Just like the mailing lists, there are lots of IRC channels for just about every topic and project. If you stuck on something and your hoping to get some quick help, IRC is the place to do it. The #gentoo channel usually has about 1000 users on at any given time.
• RTFM
  • Well, this should really be RTFD, but you get the point. Gentoo has tons of documentation. There are docs for each project and each project usually has many docs related to the project. For instance, if you curious about how the Gentoo release process works, take a look at the releng documentation.

Of course, there’s lots of other ways to get information about Gentoo, these are just a few that I use regularly. Occasionally, I find some good stuff just by googling for Gentoo.
Hope this helps some of the frustrated users out there.

I just realized the Windows Live Writer works with other blogs, such as WordPress, etc.  I thought it only supported MS blogging services.  This is very cool.  It seems to be a nice blog editor.

I wonder if it will copy and upload this mythtv picture to my server or steal the bandwidth from gentoo-wiki?

This didn’t work on my personal wordpress install, I wonder if it will publish to my wordpress.com blog?

Can I republish this edit without dupes?

Well, I guess I can only publish images copied from IE and not firefox?

Yeah, this sucks.  I can only copy and paste from IE.  Better than nothing I guess.

List of the 50 best opensource applications for Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Fluxbuntu.

I hate when people limit the title of their articles about Linux to only include Ubuntu*. Still, this is a pretty good list of apps for design.

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Well, my internet has been out for about a day now.  This really sucks.  Last night, I wasn’t quite sure what to do without the internet.  I spent most of my night trying to see how many open wireless AP’s were around in my area.
Hmm, what to do tonight.

Tags: other

I remember when I first started using Gentoo (back in the Gentoo 1.4 days), the community activity was just amazing. Each and every day or week, there was always something new and exciting going on in the Gentoo community. I looked forward to the GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter) coming out each week, so I could try to catch up on what I might have missed or not even realized was happening. Sure, the other Linux users would say, “Gentoo, that’s for ricers.”, but at least Gentoo was still regularly mentioned in a fairly positive manner.

Fast forward to today. What happened to my beloved Gentoo? I’m not necessarily referring to the distro… not yet anyway. What happened to the Gentoo community and the thriving young developer community?

The exciting buzzing Gentoo community seems to have fizzled out. Surely, they haven’t all switched to Ubuntu have they? The number of posts in the Gentoo forums seems to have steadily decreased lately. The #gentoo irc channel doesn’t have half the users it used to. Gentoo Planet used to contain dozens of posts every day from different all of the different developers. Now, sometimes a day goes by without even one post. Worst of all, the front page of Gentoo shows a two month old GWN as being the latest news.

Surely my beloved Gentoo isn’t destined to die a slow painful death, is it?

a guide no one has ever used.
Does Microsoft seriously think ANYONE would ever follow this guide? All I have to say is, “Nice try Microsoft.”.

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