Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

My upstream contact at 2X - Raphael - would like to hear from anyone interested in continuing the work I started on bringing the 2X Linux Terminal Server to Gentoo.

If that sounds like you, please contact him directly via raphael at 2x dot com.

I’ve left Gentoo this evening. I have resigned both as a Trustee, and as a developer, with immediate effect. I wish everyone all the best.

There are great people already in place to pick up most of the projects and packages that I’ve been involved with over the last three and a half years. The NX packages and the Seeds project are the only two major ones where there’s currently no-one in place to hand them to. It’s no longer up to me what will happen to both of these inside Gentoo.

I have taken a full backup of the Seeds project. After a short break to recharge my batteries, I’ll move downstream (so to speak) and continue to develop the LAMP Server seed as an independent project outside of Gentoo.

I’ve stopped downloading email sent to my Gentoo email address. All email sent there will now go unread. If you want to get hold of me, I can be reached via my Gmail account - stuart dot herbert at gmail.com. This blog will disappear from Planet Gentoo soon (as is right and proper), but I’ll continue to post news about the Seeds project on my personal blog after my short break.

I’ve only done very basic testing, but so far I’m not seeing any problems at all with trying to run the Perl components (nxnode, and nxserver) from the 2X Linux Terminal Server as normal, interpreted Perl scripts.

I’m currently working on a patch for the server/nxnode component so that it will create and install nxnode and nxserver as interpreted scripts. Mostly, it’s just a case of stripping out all the steps used for compiling the scripts, and trying to install the dedicated Perl interpreter.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time to fill out the src_install() function of the ebuild … and then we’ll have something we can start testing for real.

… is don’t use SeaMonkey to try and write long blog posts

When you port a package to Gentoo, the “normal” course of action - and the one that I teach when I’m mentoring - is to do what upstream does as closely as possible. But for the 2X Linux Terminal Server, I’m thinking of breaking that advice, just this once.

I have the bundled copy of Perl building, but I’m not sure it’s practical to use it. We’ll basically end up duplicating dev-lang/perl, and that’s more maintenance than I can take on.

The only reason I can think of for using the bundled Perl is that the perlcc installed as part of our “system” Perl 5.8.8 is currently broken. It can’t compile nxnode (I haven’t managed to try nxserver yet); when you try, it reports that it can’t resolve POSIX::SIGHUP et al. I knocked up a tiny test script to print POSIX:SIGHUP, and that works fine when run via the Perl interpreter. Try to compile it, however, and perlcc segfaults.

My knowledge of Perl is not what it used to be, but for the moment, my take on it is that we can’t rely on perlcc. But, do we need to?

Now that the code is GPL’d, I’m wondering if there is any practical reason to compile these scripts any more? (Raphael or any Perl wizards - can you think of a reason why we still need to compile these scripts?)

Unless there’s a compelling reason otherwise, I think the way forward is to patch server/nxnode to create and install normal Perl scripts to be interpreted by the “system” copy of Perl. That’s what I’m going to work on this week, unless someone can point out why it’s a bad idea.

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Gentoo

For folks who take Gentoo too seriously (me included), there’s always the Uncyclopedia entry on Gentoo to keep things in perspective.

The client compiles. The server mostly compiles. “All” that’s left to sort out is the sizable wad of Perl that makes up nxnode.

It might just be easier (at least for now) to build a dedicated Perl library & modules for 2X … which is exactly what the commercial NXServer does. I might have to do it anyway - according to the build script, the commercial NXServer builds its own copy of Perl w/ threads enabled.

I’ll have a play with it this evening.

I’m very interested in building up an archive of links to stories about folks having success with Gentoo in academic, educational and commercial situations. I think it’s a real shame that we don’t have this already. Nothing sells like success, and it’s time we started to get the word out more.

Send me links to your success stories up on the web, and I’ll publish regular summaries of them here on my blog (which is syndicated on Planet Gentoo). You can send them to stuart at gentoo.org. If I keep getting enough submissions, I’ll also write weekly summaries for the Gentoo Weekly News.

To get the ball rolling, I came across a video on YouTube about a school lab using Gentoo on their lab computers. (I’m sorry, I don’t know which school this is). The teacher in the interview talks about how Gentoo allows his class to stay on the cutting edge, because he doesn’t have to wait months for other distros to release newer versions of their packages. Take a look

The ebuild for compiling 2X’s GPL’d code is coming along. Even w/ ccache, it takes about ten minutes between compilation failures (and every fix increases that time), but it’s all going in the right direction.

• I’ve ported all of our existing patches over from the NoMachine ebuild to work against 2X’s code.
• I’m part-way through producing the patches necessary to build the code in-situ. So far, it’s just been adjusting paths between the different NX components for libraries and include files.

I’ve gotten as far as building nxclient and nxdesktop, plus required libraries. The next step (tomorrow) will be to do the same patching for the server components.

All this work is on x86. Once everything’s working on there, we’ll then have something to patch up for amd64 and other architectures.

This morning’s work on the ebuild for the 2X Linux Terminal Server has been a mixture of creating a basic ebuild to build the package, and then swearing profusely at trying to get the deps built out of Portage.

And, to cap it off, I can’t even file bugs to let the teams know about their broken packages because of our ongoing Bugzilla problems.

Mornings like this make me wonder why I’m still spending time on Gentoo; and that’s before you throw in other frustrations like the mess that the previous Trustees left the Foundation in. I know I’m not exactly in a calm mood right now, but I’m so annoyed with the (in)actions of the previous Trustees that part of me wishes that we could bar the lot of them from ever being Trustees again on the grounds of maladministration.

The rest of me just wish that folks wouldn’t take up for the post of Trustee unless they really understood that the role first and foremost is about good administration. The folks who want to go on a power trip should stick to being on the Council.