Mood: Excited

Well, as always I am impressed with the Open Source community. I have recently learned that Gentoo Linux has completed negotiations with Exherbo Linux and will be performing a merger between the two open source projects in the near future. See this link: [mailstation.de] for details.

I am greatly pleased that these two projects, one a stalwart linux distribution and the other a great innovator are joining forces and look forward to working to make the merge as smooth as possible.

(A member of the Exherbo Council and the Gentoo Linux project)

A Manifesto for the council

As you may (or may not) know, I(tanderson/gentoofan23) am running for the Gentoo Council. Like all good kiddies I’ve written up a manifesto which is present on my devspace: here. I explain my vision and hopefully give some people an idea of what I would do on the council. You should of course know by now(if you’ve been a good boy and read -dev, -council, or -dev-announce) that I’ve been the secretary for the council for the past 8 months or so, and I’ve done a lot of the footwork(following up on council decisions and documenting them in developer documentation) so I have a fair idea how the council should operate.

Thanks for reading, and see you around. 🙂

Gentoo & Distributed Development

Reading around the blogosphere I ran across http://ciaranm.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/distributed-distribution-development-and-why-git-and-or-funtoo-is-not-it/

I found the development of his point very interesting and I certainly agree with his ultimate point. One thing I would like to add is that I feel the monolithic and massive nature of gentoo-x86 is dragging things down…it’s so huge pretty much anything is difficult other than maintenance.

Announcing `Access`

Yes I know, horrible name. Move along 😉

I originally wrote this project for school, but it’s real use stemmed out of a need I saw in linux firewall software. There is all the software in the world to control what IP addresses can access what networks etc. but there is no real software to limit the amount of time a given user can spend online(Linus Torvalds tried, see below for details). Enter access.

“Access” is a multiuser management system to limit any given person’s allowed time to be on the Internet per day(in theory the “Internet” could be any network, but in practicality it will usually be the Internet). Each user has a set amount of time per day and they can use it at their discretion. If however, they exceed the amount of time given per day they are automatically logged out and blocked from the Internet.

There are 4 main parts to Access:

access.cgi:

The only user visible part of the system. Here the user can enter his username, password, and whether he wants to log in or log out or see how much time he has left.

admin.cgi:

The admin can log in here and edit  user passwords, block users and edit how much time per day is allowed for the user

forcelogout.bash:

Logs users out who have exceeded the amount of time per day they are allowed.

restoreaccesstimes.bash:

Restores the leftover time for every user to the allowed time per day(should be run at midnight).

Now, Linus noted in his weblog that he had done a similar thing for his kids. This system, however, differs in that it only needs to be run on one computer for the entire network(the firewall computer). Furthermore, it is cross-platform(Linus’ code only worked on linux 2.6 kernels) so a windows or macintosh computer can use the system as well.

All the code is available at(GPL-2 license):  http://dev.gentoo.org/~gentoofan23/access

If anyone finds problems or has used my software, please email me at gentoofan23@gentoo.org

Mythzoneminder

I’ve just committed a new plugin for mythtv — mythzoneminder. It allows you to view your CCTV cameras that zoneminder has configured through mythtv. It’s currently masked, due to security issues in zoneminder(slight touch of irony there). Soon a new version of zoneminder will be released which is not vulnerable and you’ll be able to get your zoneminder goodness in mythtv. Enjoy!

~Thomas~

My Christmas present to the Gentoo community

After testing with Markus, I’ve stabilized linux 2.6.27 for amd64. Markus has stabilized it for x86. A few notes:

1) You’ll likely need to upgrade nvidia-drivers, because we needed to stabilize new versions of that

2) openafs 1.4.8 and qc-usb-messenger went stable with it as well, so upgrade that.

3) I fixed up lirc-0.8.3-r2 so it now has compatibility with 2.6.27.

So that’s my Christmas present to Gentoo users.Have fun with it!

Hello world!

So, I guess this is my inaguaral post on WordPress. Expect to post all sorts of crazy things about Gentoo, Paludis, Kde, and other Krazy things.