Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’ve just done an upgrade of a web box from Apache 2.0.x to Apache 2.2.8, using Portage 2.1.4.4. Somehow, Apache got built after the modules (PHP, Subversion, etc etc) were upgraded - and not before. This left Apache completely unable to start, because the modules had been linked against Apache 2.0. Grrr.

Gentoo’s new Apache 2.2.8 default config also left behind the mod_ssl config file from Apache 2.0 (for some reason, instead of updating this file, Apache 2.2.8 comes with a mod_ssl file with a different name)

Also had problems with /usr/lib/apache2/logs not existing, and with Apache’s Listen directive being hidden away inside the default vhost, instead of in the main config file where it belongs.

All in all, took me a couple of hours to dig through everything and sort it out. It’s not like Gentoo’s Apache team to fsck things up as badly as this; I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, or else I’ll fork these packages and maintain them myself.

Give or take a couple of weeks, it’s been 12 months since I resigned from Gentoo.  At the time, I said that I was looking to continue my work on the Seeds project “downstream” of Gentoo.  I’m now ready to do that.

Seed Linux, hosted on Google Code, is the official successor to Gentoo Seeds project that I started during my time at Gentoo.  At the moment, there’s an embryonic overlay and wiki, and a handy script to build a Seed Linux Xen VM from scratch (tested on CentOS 5) - and four basic seeds for x86:

• portage-server is a simple local rsync server seed for the Portage tree, to save your Seeds having to sync their trees from the Net all the time.
• file-server is a very simple Samba server for running on a home or office file server.
• lamp-server is a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP 5, MySQL) stack, perfect for running a blog on.  It also supports mod_python and Ruby on Rails, but I plan on releasing a separate LAMR stack in the future (an optimised LAMP stack makes for poor LAMR performance, and vice versa).
• devbox is an empty seed, useful for developing other seeds

I’m also working on a basic home-gateway seed (email/anti-spam/internal DNS/VPN gateway), but that isn’t ready to commit just yet.

The whole idea behind the Seeds is to do what Gentoo has never managed - to provide out-of-the-box working solutions to specific problems.  To do that, I need somewhere I can host pre-compiled Seeds for users to download. If anyone can provide suitable diskspace and bandwidth (or knows anyone who can), I’d love to hear from you!

When I recently bought my new MacBook Pro, I also picked up a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac from the same store. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

I downloaded the latest beta of Parallels, only to find that the license key that came in the retail copy of Parallels wasn’t recognised by the beta. More than a bit puzzled (the instructions for the beta state that you can re-use your existing license key), I contacted Parallels’ support team for help.

It turns out that the retail copy of Parallels that I bought isn’t supported by Parallels at all. Not the customer service I was looking for. I have to go through the UK reseller for support.

Why do I have the feeling that this is going to turn into a saga?

Don’t make my mistake - if you want to get yourself a copy of Parallels, make sure you download it from their website. Don’t waste your money on a boxed copy from a store.

Contrary to what this week’s Gentoo Weekly News says, please don’t contact me about the removal of the nxserver packages from Portage. That section of GWN appears to be auto-generated by a script, and not checked by a human prior to publication.

Please send all queries to nx@gentoo.org instead. I believe Stefan (genstef) has taken over the NX packages.

I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who’s contacted me since I retired, offering words of support and understanding. I’ve made many great friends over the last three years, and enjoyed great working relationships with many more folks, and I hope we all keep in touch in the future.

I have no intention of talking about my retirement in public, so please stop asking me to. I’ve left Gentoo. My involvement with it is now history as far as I am concerned. I can’t stop you talking about why I left, but whatever concerns you want to raise about Gentoo, please make sure they’re your personal concerns instead of whatever you believe it was that finally made me decide to quit. Just leave me out of it, please.

A few folks have been in touch to call me a “coward” for leaving. I despise each and every one of you for that (which I’m sure is hardly news to you). You only make me wonder how you can look at yourselves in the mirror each morning.

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.