[69 total ]
Posted
4 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Eric “sandalle” Sandall has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.23 has now been officially released!
“As usual, users of stable merely need to run ’sorcery system-update’. Spells listed on the 0.23 release
... [More]
wiki were tested and qualified to have no known defects of “gating” severity at the time of this release. The tarballs [...] [Less]
Posted
4 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Juan Carlos “Jucato” Torres posted a note to the sm-discuss mailinglist today to inform us of a “surgery” he practice on a SVG version of the logo that Paul “novaburst” Beel provided for us some time back. Message follows.
Greetings
... [More]
mages!
Paul “novaburst” Beel previously commissioned an artist to create a new, vectorized Quoth for our logo. [...] [Less]
Posted
5 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer, the Cauldron Lead, writes to inform us that the latest test ISO (and from some versions ago) includes man pages, as opposed to the previous generation ones.
Just a friendly reminder about the new ISOs:
... [More]
manpages are actually provided on the ISOs (this includes 0.10.0-test1). If you are not sure how to do [...] [Less]
Posted
8 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has released version 0.10.0-test1 of the next-generation ISO for Source Mage.
On his post to the mailinglist:
I finally got all the bits working that are absolutely necessary for this release. I’m sure
... [More]
that there will still be plenty of bugs, but I will need you guys to test the ISO to find them. [...] [Less]
Posted
8 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Sorry for the delay on this one! Paul is on vacations and I was facing technical difficulties here.
This month was the Sorcery Lead component vote, Jaka “lynx” Kranjc was nominated, seconded and accepted… since no other nominations were
... [More]
done, he kept the Sorcery Lead position. The process was managed by our Project Lead, Jeremy “emrys” [...] [Less]
Posted
22 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has officially started his term as Cauldron Lead (previously held by Karsten “BearPerson” Behrmann) and to go with it, he has posted to the sm-discuss mailing list that he has a working test ISO, but is
... [More]
minimally tested.
“I have been struggling with a few udev issues as the ISO system transitions from [...] [Less]
Posted
24 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Grimoire lead Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz has just posted to the mailing list that stable-rc 0.23 has been cut in the repositories and tarballs are being propagated to the mirrors. Announcement follows.
“Hi everyone,
stable-rc 0.23 is
... [More]
cut and ready for testing. There’s the usual wiki page for those who want to help testing.
The release is on [...] [Less]
Posted
26 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Some of you may have noticed that Mage Power looks different, but for those of you that didn’t, we have migrated Mage Power successfully to a WordPress install hosted on a dedicated server machine owned by Odin (a long-time Source Mage user). Thanks go to Andraz “ruskie” Levstik (our games grimoire maintainer) for arranging this [...]
Posted
26 days
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Jaka “lynx” Kranjc sent us this helpful bit of information on working with Git and our grimoires, mostly for developers.
I noticed a long drought on magepower, so here are some git tips (mostly) for developers:
You can see the contents of
... [More]
files in other branches or tags without checkout-ing them first:
navaden@lynxlynx main-grim 0 $ git show [...] [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Elisamuel Resto)
Hey there!
I want to draw attention to the Personal Grimoires wiki page, where some of our developers (and users) have listed their personal grimoires. This may prove useful, for instance, if certain spell you want is not in the main
... [More]
grimoires, but it might be in one of the personal grimoires. Even if the spells are outdated, you will not have to do all the work to create the spells, since they are already written.
Also, for a while now I've been hand-packing a xorg-modular tarball (our official "testing" tarball has not been updated since the grimoire got inserted into a branch for later merging into the main grimoires) and signing them with my personal GPG key (18615F19) for verification. They are all available at here on Simply Sam (my personal blog/website).
Have a sorcerous day! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Hey there!
I want to draw attention to the Personal Grimoires wiki page, where some of our developers (and users) have listed their personal grimoires. This may prove useful, for instance, if certain spell you want is not in the main grimoires, but it might be in one of the personal grimoires. Even if the spells [...]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
Elisamuel Restohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/0118324070515...@blogger.com
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
here!
https://www.fundable.com/groupactions/grou...
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.
https://www.fundable.com/groupactions/grou...
Thanks for donating!
--
David Kowis [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
Here is the official release notice from Eric Sandall (src: http://lists.ibiblio.org/piperm...).
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
... [More]
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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/hotplug/udev.git..."
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! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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"
... [More]
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 a 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.
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 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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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 [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
Today, Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall released Grimoire Stable-0.17. The announcement follows.
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
... [More]
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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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 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)."
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! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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 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 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,
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! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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." [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Paul J. Beel)
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
... [More]
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. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Elisamuel Resto)
Arwed "alley_cat" von Merkatz has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.22 has now been officially released!
As usual, users of stable merely need to run 'sorcery system-update'. Spells listed on the 0.22 release
... [More]
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-0.22.tar.bz2.
GPG signatures are available at
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or
http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.22.tar.bz2.asc.
Thanks go to Eric Sandall and Martin Spitzbarth for providing the chroot tarballs, and to the whole team for providing a pretty bug free base system :)
Check out the version 0.22 wiki page for more details. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
Elisamuel Resto
Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.22 has now been officially released!
As usual, users of stable merely need to run ’sorcery system-update’. Spells listed on the 0.22 release
... [More]
wiki were tested and qualified to have no known defects of “gating” severity at the time of this release. The [...] [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
Elisamuel Restohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/0118324070515...@blogger.com
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Elisamuel Resto)
Hello everyone!
Firstly, allow me to introduce myself (for those of you that don't know me): I am Elisamuel Resto aka ryuji, developer for Source Mage (like Paul) and the maintainer of the php-pear section of our grimoire among other things. I
... [More]
have been with the project since January 2007 and now volunteered to help Paul with Mage Power.
Now, I would like to share some information to bring you up to date. This is a somewhat lengthy post, you have been warned.
Last post on Mage Power was the release of stable 0.20 grimoire that was shepherded by myself. Right now, stable 0.22 is slated for release tomorrow 06/12/2008 after being delayed due to a important update doing the initial commit freeze. This release is being shepherded by Arwed "alley_cat" von Merkatz.
On some other news, Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer was promoted to Lead Developer and subsequently nominated and elected by a small margin as the Cauldron Lead. Congratulations, Justin!
Eric "sandalle" Sandall posted to the list giving the final warning on the developers list cleanup, to which I personally helped Eric gather information from all the listed developers. Since it was posted, the deadline was met and right now all that is left to do is request the accounts for removal to our current Project Lead, Jeremy "emrys" Blosser, or, in case he is unable to, David "dkowis" Kowis (the Project Lead's current assistant). Thanks go to Eric for his effort.
Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer posted on the sm-discuss mailing list that from 06/11/2008 to around 06/22/2008 he was going to be unavailable, and that he was attempting to release updated 0.10.0 devel version of our install ISO, but this was trampled due to the compile taking longer than expected. He commented on a later reply that he will attempt to finish it while he is away from home, but noted to not count on it.
Andraž "ruskie" Levstik, who has been handling the voting for Justin's General Lead position and the Cauldron Lead elections, noted that some of the current general leads have been failing to vote in the past two vote calls. As suggested by another developer, I take this opportunity to bring to attention our policy, which states that general lead developers who are not marked as away and fail to participate in the voting processes for two consecutive months or longer (provided that there have been at least two vote calls in the interim) are automatically removed from Lead Developer position without vote or veto.
Lastly, for those people interested in encryption of paritions/filesystems, Vlad "Enqlave" Glagolev has added the loop-aes spell and other needed changes in the grimoires. All feedback is welcome.
Thanks for your attention and until next time!
Elisamuel Resto
ryuji@sourcemage.org [Less]
