robert’s rant room

Fortunately, sping said almost everything there is to say about LinuxTag. But there’s one important part missing: We finally made a peace treaty with what many call Gentoo’s arch nemesis (no pun intended?): Ubuntu.

While Ubuntu lost the “just works on your notebook” unique selling point a while ago (thanks to freedesktop et. al.), we could convince Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth to sign our Gentoo slogan “It’s all about choice” — so maybe in a year from now, you might see USE flags in Ubuntu as well. Don’t believe it? Here’s proof.

On a more serious note, I really like how events like LinuxTag encourage collaboration between distributions. You often meet people that do similar things in a different way, learn about new technology and ideas and (here’s the best part) most people will even want to show you how they integrated something and convince you to do it similarly. Try to get that with an i*hone at some consumer convention.

Oh, and if you read this whole text to get an answer to the question in the title: No. He was a Debian developer years before Gentoo was on the horizon.

LinuxTag is coming, and we’re on board again! All four days, starting Wednesday, June 9th until Saturday, June 12th, Gentoo will be present at the Berlin Fairgrounds.

And this time, we’re celebrating. As this is the fifth time we present our favorite distribution at LinuxTag, we have prepared a great booth for all Gentoo users, developers — and those who want to join the fun. After having visited the events in Karlsruhe in 2003 and 2004, we are regular visitors at the Berlin LinuxTag since 2008. Besides our usual activities (talking, emerging, giving away merchandise), we will have our unique Gentoo T-Shirts, the latest Gentoo DVDs, and the world’s most configurable Gentoo badge compiler.

So pack your bags, come to Berlin, and meet the 10+ Gentoo developers and users that already signed up. And maybe, you’ll join us for the some beer (or Mate tea) after the show or enjoy helping other users at the booth (drop us an email)?

But wait, there’s more! The German non-profit association “Förderverein Gentoo e.V.” will hold a member’s meeting right on the Fairgrounds on Friday (11th), 12:00–14:00 in the workshop room. Not a member yet? You can still become one, even right there and support our work.

Hope to see you all in Berlin!

It’s time for a great summer in Germany again! And what better  opportunity to spend it than with Gentoo friends at LinuxTag?

The largest Linux consumer and developer fair in Europe will be taking place Wednesday, June 24th to Saturday, June 27th.  And of course Gentoo will be there with a booth. Meet some of the developers of your favourite distribution, and satisfy all your ebuild needs, maybe even have us fix  one or the other bug. We even hope to bring some merchandise this time. So if you haven’t registered for a hostel or hotel, you might want to do that now.

You are also more than welcome to contribute to the booth, either by attending as a staff member (free entrance to the show is only one of the many benefits!), or by organising t-shirts, flyers and maybe even cups. Please contact me via email if you’re up for that.

And now back to hacking on my thesis and some security bugs… oh, and NetworkManager 0.7.1 is coming, thanks to Robert Piasek and Gilles Dartiguelongue who have been contributing a lot to the ebuilds while I was slacking.

According to the author the $35 Windows program Folder Lock is “a fast file-security program that can password-protect, lock, hide and encrypt any number of files… Protected files are hidden, undeletable, inaccessible and highly secure”. It even works on “USB Flash Drives, Memory Sticks, CD-RW, floppies and notebooks.”

Now while I still wonder how they protect files from deletion on USB sticks, Charalambous Glafkos found out that the password to encrypt the files is stored in the Windows Registry. For maximum security it is reversed and encrypted with ROT-25.

Don’t use them. Or review the results before clicking “Send”. (via hadess)

Writing a bug report is a hard thing to do. I know. Fortunately, there’s some easy rules to follow when you want to get it fixed and fast! To ease your understanding, I will illustrate them with some real-life examples:

1. Scream. It’s so easy to write upper-case (thanks for caps lock!). And for most people, they’re much easier to read. They’re stupid anyway, so they’re probably used to being screamed at. So start with a nice “OH MY GOD. What went through your head when you did this?”, then go on explaining your problem: “gcc is FUCKING SLOW”.
2. Annoy. If possible, mark the bug with highest priority and severity. You filed it, so you decide on how important it is for others! After you expounded your problems that verbosely, say something personal. This helps: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
3. Show that you’re annoyed. There’s quite some ways to do that. Use your fantasy, remember how you did that when you were a child. “Even Apple and Microsoft would be ashamed of fucking up this badly.” or “What a great distro you have there. Debian would be proud of you.”
4. When people ask questions, insult them. Really, they shouldn’t try to reproduce the bug anyway. Why would they want to have the bug themselves, instead of just fixing it! “I’ll give you personally ten bucks if this helps you debug the issue. … I dare you to tell me how the emerge –info helps you. Do it publicly, please, so the humiliation is greater. “
5. Threaten. If not everyone will know how important your bug is to you until here, you should make that clear again: “But apparently Gentoo is not interested in fixing bugs. … Don’t bother. I’ll switch distros.”
6. Propose bad solutions. This is actually hard. You have to distinguish your solution from the way it is right now (”This whole construct is braindead.”) Remember not to ask or think about the reasons why it’s the way it is right now.
7. Point fingers. “This is so unbelievable that I will blog about it, too.”

Sadly for the example, following these steps didn’t fix the bug. Another report did.