Project:Alpha/Status Reports/20060621

Gentoo/Alpha Status Report

Preliminaries
This is the status of the Gentoo/Alpha porting team. It will be posted regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted to. The Gentoo/Alpha porting team, has its own project page (just like almost all other Gentoo projects). You can find it at http://alpha.gentoo.org/. Also you can contact us via IRC at #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net. The latest status report can always be found on the Gentoo Linux Alpha Status Reports subproject page.

New Developers
Since the last status report, the following developers have joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting project:


 * Christel Dahlskjaer Christel joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team recently to help with testing kernels on SMP hardware.
 * Thomas Cort Thomas joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team in early April to help with bug fixing, keywording, documentation, and security bugs.
 * Chris Gianelloni Chris joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team recently to help with testing kernels on SMP hardware.

Keywording and Stabilization
Stephen Bennett has continued his work with SELinux on alpha. hardened-sources is now keyworded for alpha. Thanks to the work of Stefaan De Roeck and others, modular X has been keyworded and is working well on alpha. The Alpha arch team is also pleased to announce that we have stabilized gnome-2.12.3 and kde-3.5.2 since the last status report.

Firefox and Thunderbird are Broken
The mozilla project has chosen to discontinue the development of the 1.0.x versions of firefox and thunderbird. Since that decision, multiple security holes have been uncovered. As a result, we had to mask the 1.0.x versions of firefox and thunderbird to keep our users secure since there are no plans to fix the security holes.

No one on the Gentoo/Alpha team has been successful at getting the 1.5.x versions of firefox and thunderbird to run correctly, see Bug # 113944 and Bug # 131359. If you can help get these packages working on alpha, it would be very much appreciated.

Documentation Project
The documentation subproject has written multiple new documents:


 * The Gentoo/Alpha FAQ - an FAQ intended to answer some of the most frequently asked questions relating to Gentoo/Alpha and Linux/Alpha in general.
 * Alpha Porting Guide - a guide intended to show C programmers how to port programs written on other architectures to the Alpha architecture.

Thomas Cort has begun work on an SRM console guide. It will be published in the documentation subproject section of the Gentoo/Alpha project page.

Alpha Arch Testers Project
The Alpha Arch Testers Project was recently created by Fernando J. Pereda. The project is meant to help the Alpha Arch Team provide a stable, secure and up to date Gentoo Linux port by allowing users to participate in the testing and stabilization process. If you want to learn more about this excellent opportunity to give back to Gentoo, please check out the Alpha Arch Testers Project Page.

New Alpha Project Page
Our project page was significantly revamped by Jose Luis Rivero and Fernando J. Pereda  with the help of the rest of the Gentoo/Alpha team. The developer list has been refreshed to reflect the current team membership. We now have information about our subprojects too. Most subprojects now have their own project pages.


 * Gentoo/Alpha Project Page

Donations
Hardware donations are always welcome. We will gladly accept spare alpha hardware. Even an old AlphaServer 1000 is useful for testing installation media and kernels. More powerful systems could be used to assist in testing packages, to provide developers with access to alpha hardware to port applications, or to assist in building releases. Alpha computers aren't the only hardware that we could benifit from; a SCSI or IDE DVD burner would allow us to test dvdrtools, PCI 802.11 NICs would allow us to do more extensive testing and unmask the wifi USE flag (currently only 1 dev has an alpha with wireless), PDAs would allow us to test PDA applications and unmask the pda USE flag. If you would like to make a donation, please drop by #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net or send an e-mail to.

2.6 SMP Kernels
The Linux kernel developers have been working hard on the Alpha port. SMP is functional again and has been tested by a number of developers and users in #gentoo-alpha. 2.6.15.1 and 2.6.16.19 have both been tested on SMP hardware with good results.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following authors and editors for their contributions to this guide:


 * Gentoo/Alpha