Hi all!

Four months have passed since last update, I shall shortly summarize what happened during this time:

• A lot of updates to the server: kernel -> 2.6.32 + grsec, glibc 2.11, gcc 4.4
• Now running on ~amd64 gentoo
• Removal of a lot of cruft from the server: unused users, applications, databases, configuration files etc
• Shifted all partitions to XFS filesystem to allow much lesser fragmentation and much more reliability (compared to ext3); I personally don't really care if one or two temporary files get zero-ed out upon power failure (which is extremely unlikely to happen anyway)
• Set up an automatic fully incremental backup script for the whole system based on app-backup/rdiff-backup; I will release it in few days, time needed to study a little and remove the internal references to the paths. Its name is "rdiff2ftp" because once done, it shifts everything to the FTP backup service granted by OVH
• Now running the BOINC platform to support @home distributed computing programs, specifically: SETI@home and MilkyWay@home; they are both sharing the same single-core processor
• Re-design the setup of the directories served by Apache webserver, which allows for much easier management of Joomla and does, in general, improve security
• Blogs were shut down, no word was ever written here anyway due to lack of interest and time; if I'll ever need to open up one again, I know it can be easily done
• Added the link for the official forum thread for the liveCDs in the dedicated section
• Added the PayPal donation button to the site

This summary covers everything that's been done to the server. If you ever noticed some slowdowns or out-of-service conditions, one of these tasks was being executed.

Now, some information about the next release: as stated in the official thread@gentoo forums, there is currently no reiser4 patch for 2.6.32 kernel available and I'm waiting for the rebuild time to diff it from zen-sources (hopefully working). If I'm unable to diff it I will stick with 2.6.31, though I would regret to leave out the indipendent block-device queueing introduced in 2.6.32 series. That would be a great performance boost for the disk operations usually done from a liveCD.
Likewhoa contacted me for testing his JustBOOT liveCD generator script, I will test it without a doubt during the building of the release.
I'm also planning to wait some more time for the release: about the 15th of March should be a reasonable date. The fact is that next week university exams begin and I'll be forced to stay away from the machines for a while. This will also provide some more time to debug and test the reiser4 code in zen-sources, which should allow for a smoother diff/transaction.

Cheers,
Fabio Scaccabarozzi

HI all!

Working on the liveCDs last week seemed to be quite less problematic than usual.
I'm happy to annouce a full rewrite of the mkstage script (called mkstage2). It is much more reliable and much less complicated, I've also splitted the source files to little separate scripts which work on much lesser data.

As some of you may have noticed, liveCDs have been uploaded yesterday. Now, lets get to the stages: since there's automatic rebuild available, it makes no sense releasing the stages along with the liveCDs. Stages are rebuilt every month and can be found in the FTP stages directory. As of now, a full rebuild is in progress, so to have fresh stages. Once the new ones will be ready, the older ones (stored with the installCDs) will be deleted, since they only take up space.

As anticipated in the official thread, acx and acx-firmware support has been dropped due to the lack of updated releases. For the very same reason, madwifi-ng is still left out.

The feature bumps in this release include:

• GCC 4.4.1
• Glibc 2.10.1
• linux-headers-2.6.30-r1
• 2.6.31 kernel + reiser4

Cheers,
Fabio Scaccabarozzi

Hi all!

First of all sorry for the long absence, it's been a very busy month.
Anyway, I've got a bunch of news:

• Worked on automatic stage rebuilding, all should work as expected. You will find the stages in experimental FTP directory (now building new stages for i686, later for amd64). Please note that those releases include GCC 4.4.x (currently 4.4.1) without graphite deps (that's because I can't tune USE flags during stage1/2/3). They will be built every three weeks and the process gets niced to avoid server slowdowns. You can find the script I'm using in the mkstage FTP directory.
• General server updates and review
• Created barnyard2 ebuild, available in the main overlay and also submitted to bugzilla
• Migrated a number of outdated ebuilds to the outdated overlay
• Updated some ebuild descriptions

Now, lets come to the CDs: I know kernel 2.6.30 has been released and has also seen 3 minor revisions, but I'm waiting for GCC 4.4.x to become at least unstable (drop the hardmask). There are a good number of packages that exhibit problems with GCC 4.4.x, as you can see from the GCC 4.4 porting bug. A lot of those bugs have been addressed, but still a few need to be fixed before it can be marked unstable. I hope that for the end of September it will be possible to drop the hardmask, so to be able to release a new version. Meanwhile, you can stick onto the auto-stages and old CDs (that don't lack any vital functionality regarding 2.6.29->2.6.30 bump).

Cheers,
Fabio Scaccabarozzi