Project:Alpha/Status Reports/20070721

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.

Developers
Since the last status report, some of our developers have gone and some others have joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting project.

Developers who left the Alpha Team:


 * Bryan Østergaard Our leader left Gentoo some time ago. He was one of the oldest alpha Gentoo developers and one of the main contributors to the port. We wish him the best.
 * Thomas Cort Thomas was one of our most active developers but, had to stop his contributions due to lack of time. We hope to have him with us again some time in the future.

New developers, arch testers and contributors:


 * Raúl Porcel Raúl joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team to help with keywording and security bugs.
 * Brian Evans (Gentoo/Alpha arch tester)Brian joined our arch tester program in May. He is helping with keywording and bug fixing.
 * Tobias Klausmann (Gentoo/Alpha arch tester)Tobias is our last addition to the team. He is also the admin of our main dev box.

Toolchain and Kernel development

 * GCC GCC 4.1.2 is our stable version which seems to not have any problem. Testing with gcc-4.2 is going fine so probably will enter into ~alpha some time soon.
 * Kernel Gentoo/Alpha changed the supported sources and now, we are happy to announce that  are our default kernel sources. Gentoo/Alpha current stable version is 2.6.21.
 * C libraries glibc-2.5 is the stable version since February. There was a known compiling error related to CFI in sigsuspend files. The error was fixed by bumping binutils version during these last weeks. The testing with glibc-2.6 goes just fine and it will enter in ~alpha sometime soon.
 * Binutils Gentoo/Alpha is now using an advanced version of binutils due to fails with stable glibc and a bug which makes ld takes too much time with some packages. 2.17.50.0.16 is the stable version after a heavy testing process.

New revision of aboot
Due to some changes in the way the kernel headers allow to use the types declaration (knowing by "sanitized headers") aboot was not able to compile against kernel headers >=2.6.19.

Aboot uses a lot of kernel structure definitions so the only quick fix available was to use the old headers during the building process. Mike Frysinger was kindly enough to provide a revision of the latest aboot version and now we have a shiny:  marked as ~alpha.

Keywording and Security
The keywording process has suffer a major improvement thanks mainly to the work of armin76 and our arch testers. xorg-7.2, gnome-2.16 and kde-3.5 are stables on alpha as well as latest versions for all desktop packages.

We also keep the status of security supporting arch attending all the security bugs managed by the Gentoo Security team with a very good response time.

Firefox and Thunderbird fixed
In the previous status report, firefox and thunderbird 1.5 series were broken on alpha. Currently, the situation has changed and now, the latest versions of these mozilla products are keyworded for alpha.

Alpha Arch Testers Project
The Alpha Arch Testers Project was 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.

Donations
Hardware donations are always welcome. We will gladly accept spare alpha hardware. We are specially looking for desktops systems which aren't too big to keep them in a house. That's because we lack the resources to test some software which needs to have physical contact with the box (cd-writers, sound, bootloaders, kernels, etc.).

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, other hardware components are also quite useful to improve our developers machines. If you would like to make a donation, please drop by #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net or send an e-mail to.

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


 * Gentoo/Alpha