Doug Goldstein

So this post might be a bit late for the holiday season for everyone. But the worst thing people do is just buy an item and not shop around for it first. Let’s say you wanted an Xbox 360 this holiday season, many people went to the stores and bought them since they were very available in retails stores this season. However, at some places they were sold out. People hopped on Ebay and started buying them in droves. Suddenly the prices on Ebay were greater then the retail prices. Well had people searched around a little bit, they would have found sites like NewEgg selling them for $10 less then retail or even Overstock.com that had them for $80 less then retail for a while.

Save yourself a couple of bucks and check out sites like Slick Deals. Where other users of the site post Hot Deals and they get populated to the main page. Or Fat Wallet where they set you up with a cash back percentage and also have a list of Hot Deals, but generally I find Slick Deals to be a bit more up to date then Fat Wallet with their Hot Deals. And lastly a site like EBates where they hook you up with a cash back percentage at MANY retailers websites, similar to Fat Wallet. But usually they provide a higher percentage and they include more stores then Fat Wallet does. Also if you sign up for EBates now, they’ll give you a $5 cash back bonus if someone refers you. And yes, the referrer does get a kickback as well, if you want to use my referral, here it is.

Why am I posting this? Because a bunch of people in #gentoo-dev were bashing me for listing a bunch of Xbox 360s for $389.99 Buy It Now’s on Ebay and then when people bought them and paid me, I’d turn around and buy them off Overstock.com and shipped it directly to the buyer. Basically drop shipping, no possible loss to me and I never had to leave my house for this and it took all of 5 minutes.

Filed under: Financial, General
1 Comment

Can we just officially say every single Gentoo developer is part of a “leadership” position? After reading Diego’s post on the planet, I’ve come to realize that a lot of us do find this terrible corporate / Congressional Committee system of overlapping priorities and overlapping goals. Look at how Release Engineering fought Seeds. Why do we need so much organization? Are we about the organization and the titles that people get from being on these committees? Or are we about the code?

I say we’re about the code. It’s time to trim some of this fat off. Take some simple organizational structure like Debian has and adopt it. Who is the voice and face of Gentoo? Larry the Cow? I’d like one person every year elected to be the voice of Gentoo. None of these silly requirements, “you have to be this tall to vote..” (Texas Governor) or was that “you have to be a developer for a year to vote..”. These knew devs are passionate about Gentoo and want to get involved, let them. And let them not get burnt out by our insurmountable mountain of bureaucratic tape that some of our past developers have.

Filed under: General, Linux
2 Comments

So this week’s GWN was published with info about D-Bus, however no one ever mentioned anything to me about it. The first and only notice of it I received in e-mail was on 12/12 but this is from 12/11. For those that say it was published 12/13, Ok fine. But I was already off the computer by the 12/12 notice and didn’t receive it until 12/13 and I did reply back with some fixes which did not make it to print. I can’t speak for when steev saw the GWN, but as far as I’m concerned neither of us knew in time to catch this.
So here we go with the list:

1. sys-apps/dbus-1.0.1-r2 was released with more then just ~amd64. It was released as ~arch to all arches that had were on sys-apps/dbus-0.62-r1. Which was every arch except m68k, mips, ppc-macos, sparc-fbsd, and x86-fbsd. However x86-fbsd was added since D-Bus now supports FreeBSD properly in the 1.0.x series. mips has since been added as well.
2. A security issue was published on 12/12 about D-Bus and consequently 1.0.2 was released. The 1.0.1 ebuilds were removed and only 1.0.2 is available so the article was already out of date before it’s official publishing. The security fix has also been backported to sys-apps/dbus-0.62-r2, which most arches have marked stable.
3. Do not emerge all the binding packages, every package out there is suppose to depend on the specific binding package that you need. If it does not, there was a bug created for this, bug #154521.
4. There was no “radical” shift in the API. APIs that have been marked deprecated since 0.30 were finally removed for the release. Applications that were 100% API proper with 0.62 will work 100%. Only problem comes with applications that were not coded properly, yes HAL is one of those apps. The exception being Mono based apps where the bindings are different, however most packages that are being maintained upstream have been updated to use the new bindings. Bugs have been created in Bugzilla in all these instances, however most Gentoo maintainers have not corrected the issue.
5. Learn to run revdep-rebuild when the einfo/elog/ewarn tells you to run it. Also, read the possible parameters you can pass to revdep-rebuild. -x allows for new versions of pre-existing packages. Some packages might have rev-bumps for the new D-Bus and you’ll need to pull those new versions down. Also, some USE flags might have changed. Use the -v option. And lastly, toss a -a on there so you can review what it’s about to do. All in all, revdep-rebuild -avx is probably what you’re looking for.
6. Yes, for GNOME users there are a lot of packages to recompile. This is because gnome-vfs depends on D-Bus and most GNOME applications link in gnome-vfs. This is what makes –as-needed so attractive. That and getting GNOME to stop linking in D-Bus when the application that’s linking it in doesn’t even use D-Bus, it uses gnome-vfs.

And lastly as a final wrap up, D-Bus 1.0.x will be the new and only supported version shortly after the New Year, once the 1.0.x has been cooking in the Portage tree for 30 days.

Filed under: General, Gentopia, Linux
No Comments