Wed, 12 Sep 2007layman-1.1.1: Fixing --sync-all
The unicode support in layman broke the —sync-all option which I failed to test for the last release. Hence layman-1.1.1 has been released. One bug has been fixed:
Thanks to Mike Auty for providing the patch! Posted at: 08:00 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 11 Sep 2007layman-1.1: Layman went to SourceForge
layman found a new home on SourceForge and I released version 1.1. This is mainly a bug fix release. The new version adds unicode support, provides the —info action to receive details on a specific overlay and also adds a —nocolor option to remove color codes from the output. In addition the default for listing the overlays has been changed and layman will now show all overlays without using the -k option. The detailed listing of issues that have been fixed:
Thanks to all the people providing patches or sending suggestions for improving layman! Posted at: 16:50 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 09 Apr 2007layman-1.0.99: Supporting authenticated proxies
Another layman version with additional fixes went into the portage tree:
The new version adds support for authenticated proxies which was the last feature on my list concerning layman. If there are no bugs being reported during the next weeks I'll mark this as layman-1.1 which I'll then consider feature complete. The package will be maintained until its functionality will be provided by portage or a potential portage successor. Thanks to all the people providing patches or sending suggestions for improving layman! Posted at: 21:44 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Thu, 05 Apr 2007Kolab on Gentoo: Horde progress IV
Since I am now being paid by the Kolab Konsortium to advance the Horde groupware web client integration with the Kolab groupware server Horde is really going to end up as a fully compatible Kolab client. Initially I only planned fixing the most urgent structural problems but now the target is to enable Horde to even work with thousands of groupware objects (events, tasks etc.) at once so that the larger companies can actually use it without killing their Kolab server. Luckily intra2net already implemented an IMAP caching system for the Horde::Kolab module that only needed to be restructured for the current Horde CVS version. This has been completed and now the Horde applications are being ported to the newer framework. So far I did convert Mnemo (note management), Nag (tasks) and Thomas Jarosch from intra2net did Turba (addresses). So only Kronolith (events) remains to be converted. There are still a number of fixes needed but when I use my Horde installation now I am already rather happy. The system reacts much quicker and I can have thousands of elements without problems. Beyond that it is really, really nice being paid for open source development. I really hope that more and more applications will gain enough relevance in the business world so that this model becomes more and more common. And finally a big thanks to all the users testing Horde at the moment. I know I am breaking a lot of stuff and half of the time it is not working at all but every little bit of input I get back from you helps improving the software. And I am really grateful for that. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server php horde webmail Posted at: 08:46 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sat, 24 Feb 2007Kolab on Gentoo: Overlay restructured
Kolab is finally approaching version 2.1. I guess it is about time, since it is nearly one and a half year after the release date that had been targeted initially. In preparation for the next Kolab version the Gentoo overlay got updated and was restructured to support a clearer separation of different development states. Now there is a "stable", an "unstable" and a "development" version available. Stable and unstable versions are marked as such using the standard keyword notation and developmental packages will be masked. The procedure for selecting these different branches has been described in the Kolab wiki. p@rdus will now run corresponding machines that will always get monitored for potential conflicts between the overlay and the main portage tree. Thus you should able to select the stability you expect from your Kolab server installation. Right now all branches are still rather experimental but this should change once 2.1 has been release upstream and the corresponding overlay packages should get masked "stable" about a month later. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server Posted at: 22:46 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Fri, 23 Feb 2007webapp-config has a new home
webapp-config has now been transferred to a new location at SourceForge. It will hopefully reside there for the next few years. Besides that I still did not find much time to work on the new version of webapp-config but Renat Lumpau is currently adding Paludis support to the current version. gentoo php apache web_application lamp webapp-config python Posted at: 13:33 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 22 Jan 2007Kolab on Gentoo: Converting from Gentoo to OpenPKG
Oh my dear. I really left the Gentoo portage system and started building rpms for OpenPKG. And no, it is no fun ride. Not at all. But once it is finished the wider Kolab community will be able to test the latest Horde patches and I guess that makes this effort worthwhile. As long as I don't have to like it... I'll probably publish the rpms by tomorrow or Wednesday. So to anyone hooked Kolab on OpenPKG: Stay tuned, you'll be served soon. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server php openpkg rpm horde webmail Posted at: 23:58 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 09 Jan 2007layman-1.0.10: Priorities
Another layman version with additional fixes went into the portage tree:
In addition I will now remove all overlays that are still missing a contact attribute from the global list of overlays. Please contact overlays@gentoo.org and provide a valid email address for your overlay if it should be added again. Posted at: 18:58 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sun, 31 Dec 2006webapp-config: Bug fix release 1.50.16
Looks like my time in Swedish isolation is beneficial for my Gentoo projects. I finally managed to get a minor webapp-config release together. It is currently only available from my overlay and will be pushed into Portage once I return from the north. The changes in the new version:
gentoo php apache web_application lamp webapp-config python Posted at: 10:36 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sat, 30 Dec 2006layman-1.0.9: Shut up
layman has always been a little bit verbose and version 1.0.9 will allow you to change that. These are the modifications for the new version:
The new version has currently only been added to my overlay. I'll move it to portage once I returned from the north and have a better Internet connection. Posted at: 17:27 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Kolab on Gentoo: Horde progress III
A long outstanding problem in bridging Horde and Kolab has been solved by the acceptance of a larger patch for the Horde Share driver. This should now allow the OpenPKG-Kolab users to test the same kind of functionality as provided by Kolab on Gentoo. I am going to post instructions on installing and configuring the Horde web mail front end on Kolab OpenPKG installation once I return from Sweden. This important piece of progress reduces further development work to some bug fixing and I believe it will be possible to use Horde as a good and reliable groupware front end for smaller Kolab installations soon. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server php horde webmail Posted at: 09:37 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 25 Dec 2006Kolab on Gentoo: Horde Free/Busy
Horde has the same capabilities to display free/busy information as provided by Outlook or Kontact. But there have been some minor bugs within the Horde iCalendar module that prevented this from working. The last updates of the Kolab on Gentoo project fixed these problems and should allow you to use the free/busy view within your webmail. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server php horde webmail Posted at: 14:37 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Fri, 22 Dec 2006Gentoo Book: Step up reality
It makes a difference: Looking at some bytes in a subversion repository or having a cover image in front of you. I received the OpenSourcePress summer catalog today and it was a nice little surprise. Posted at: 09:25 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sun, 10 Dec 2006Gentoo book: Still having fun
pdflatex gentoo.tex ... Output written on gentoo.pdf (80 pages, 215280 bytes). Transcript written on gentoo.log. Nice, a third of the Gentoo book is done. When I initially agreed to that project I was not certain whether it would still be as much fun as it was in the beginning. But I am still making good progress and I still enjoy writing it. It is amazing to see how much of the knowledge that one uses every day and somehow takes for granted is actually worth describing once you consider the perspective of somebody not used to Gentoo. It helps to structure the bits of pieces of information one has acquired over the years and puts some loose ends into context. And then there are some blank spots that I always wanted to fill but never actually reserved time for. Now I am forced to fill these areas and so I am improving how I handle my favourite Linux distribution while writing. Somehow I am really satisfied with this project. Nice. Posted at: 15:24 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 05 Dec 2006webapp-config coming out of hibernationWhile the development on webapp-config did not entirely stop during the last eight months it has been very slow. And I did only work on the newer version which has not yet been released. In the meantime the older version accumulated a nice set of bugs that have been sitting and waiting for a while now. These will get fixed in a first step and I hope I will be able to finally get a release of the new version out after that. gentoo python Web_server webapp-config webapps Posted at: 18:08 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 27 Nov 2006Kolab on Gentoo: Horde Progress II
The efforts on bringing Horde and Kolab closer together have been progressing well on the Horde side of things. By now three different patches were accepted upstream by the horde project. This leaves one core patch and after that it will be only minor fixes and updates. On the Kolab side of things the patches have been improved but so far work on converting the fbview package to Horde CVS has not yet begun. Only if this is ported it makes sense to start moving the patches into Kolab CVS. Work on this project should begin soon. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server php horde webmail Posted at: 14:37 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sun, 26 Nov 2006Kolab on Gentoo: Kontact performance patch
A customer with a larger Kolab on Gentoo installation started
deploying Gentoo desktop machines to the users and ran into
performance problems with handling large amounts of events over
Kontact. While these problems had been solved in the Kolab branch of
Kontact the necessary patches were not yet available in the mainstream
3.5.5 release of Kontact. So the customer decided to contract
the kolab consortium with porting the necessary changes - and voila:
There is a patch available. It will hopefully be integrated into KDE
3.5.6. For the anyone that does not want to wait that long: There is
now a kde-base section in the Kolab on Gentoo overlay that holds
patched ebuilds of either And a big Thank you to the customer that paid for the Open Source development. The fact that Kolab is being deployed on Gentoo and the users are working with Gentoo desktop machines also reminded me of Stuarts search for Gentoo success stories. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server kontact kde Posted at: 13:53 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sat, 18 Nov 2006Ledger: A command line accounting tool
Sebastian provided an updated ebuild for ledger and so I finally took the opportunity to move this tool from my overlay to portage. I guess it will only be useful to the command line freaks among us - me included. I actually do all the accounting work for my company with the tool since nearly two years now and would recommend it to anyone that feels GNU-Cash might be a little bit bloated. The capabilities of ledger are actually pretty amazing and I did not find any double-accounting entry I could not fit in its framework. Which I find surprising since the tax system in Germany is far from anything one might call "logical". gentoo ledger accounting overlay Posted at: 13:02 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Thu, 16 Nov 2006Kolab on Gentoo: Horde progress
So far Kolab is still lacking a decent groupware webmail client. While Horde has been halfway supported for quite a while there has been some blocker problems that were never cleared away. I have been patching Horde here and there during the last half year but some of the patches were somewhat ... brutal. Now I took the time to clean up the mess and consolidate the past work to walk towards a fully functional webmail client for Kolab. So it is time for a short update on the Horde situation. I did update the Kolab wiki page on horde and tried to summarize the current problems. For most of the problems described there are already solutions available. Some of the patches have also found their way into Horde CVS already. I am going to continue to work through the list of open problems until the necessary patches have been integrated into either horde or kolab CVS. The only problem I am currently not going to tackle is the cached IMAP access. Feel free to add any comments or suggestions to the wiki page. The easiest way to test the modifications is certainly on a Gentoo system since all patches are being applied when installing the development version of the Kolab on Gentoo project. But I know that most people rely on OpenPKG and so I'll try to prepare experimental Horde install instructions for OpenPKG some time next week. To me it currently looks like there is a good chance of having a reliable web client for small kolab installations some time spring next year. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server php horde webmail Posted at: 17:24 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Fri, 03 Nov 2006glibc-2.4 on virtual servers with an old kernel
Since I got this request several times now I thought it would be useful to blog it once: If you run Gentoo on a virtual server with an older Kernel (this is the case for systems rent at 1 and 1 or Strato in Germany) you won't be able to upgrade to the newer glibc-2.4 since it only supports nptl systems. Instead you will need to relink your rm /etc/make.profile ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/vserver/no-nptl/ /etc/make.profile Make sure you have both gentoo Virtual_server howto glibc nptl linux Posted at: 16:36 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Wed, 01 Nov 2006Kolab on Gentoo starts to merge into Kolab CVS
Another round of kolab-core ebuilds (perl-kolab, kolabd, kolab-resource-handler, kolab-webadmin; version 20061101) has been added to the Kolab on Gentoo overlay today. The older experimental packages (version 20061009) have been unmasked now and should provide you with a fixed kolab free/busy system. The 20061101 ebuilds are all about getting a better integration of horde into the Kolab system. The new ebuilds have been switched to horde cvs which should now allow to improve the horde patches to a state where they can be sent upstream. For people that feel adventurous: Please remove the profile/package.mask file from the kolab2 overlay after syncing and update all kolab related packages. This should install a large set of PEAR-Horde* packages and give you a much cleaner (but probably non-functional) Horde installation than you had before. In case of trouble feel free to open bugs, post to the mailing list or harass the forum. In addition I started merging some patches from Kolab on Gentoo into the main Kolab CVS. Eventually I hope to get the Gentoo version patch free but this will certainly be a longer process. Most of the patches still need some love before they are acceptable for the main Kolab source repository. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server horde Posted at: 16:11 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 31 Oct 2006A German book about Gentoo
I don't remember when I searched for a book about Gentoo the first time. I do remember though that it is about half a year ago that I checked the book shelves the last time. Still, there was nothing to be found and though I already had sufficient knowledge about Gentoo I was slightly disappointed to find no book about my favourite Linux Distribution. If somebody would have told me that I would actually attempt to fill that empty spot in the shelves... well, I guess, I would have laughed. But just one article in the Linux mag and a few e-mails later I do type the first few words of a book with the draft title "Gentoo". Now, with the first few pages under my belt I did sign the contract last week. So there is no way out any more. Next year the lonely, dark gap that has been longing to be completed with compressed knowledge about Gentoo will be filled. Wish me luck and stay tuned... Posted at: 12:39 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Fri, 20 Oct 2006Kolab on Gentoo - Reduced memory requirements and next steps
The newest version of the Kolab on Gentoo project supports running the apache server in a memory efficient mode that does not preload the PHP compiler. All scripts will be run in CGI mode. This way it will be far easier for administrators to install the server on systems with reduced memory or on virtual servers with limited resources. In a next step I will improve the webmail installation procedures for the server. This will also include some bug fixes and corrections in order to finally provide a reliable and efficient webmail frontend. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server horde Posted at: 10:28 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 09 Oct 2006New supporting systems for Kolab on Gentoo and updates
Finally all subsystems that will be used for the Kolab on Gentoo Groupware project are in place: All systems are now clearly under the colors of my company which will provide a solid long-term background for this open source project. If you wish to follow the progress of the project you should subscribe to one of the mailing lists. "Kolab-gentoo-feeds" bundles the information from all other subsystems and will be a high volume list. "Kolab-gentoo" is the general discussion lists while "Kolab-gentoo-announce" will be used for important announcements. As you might guess: The presence of mailing lists also means that there is now a new "mailman-kolab" ebuild in the overlay that neatly integrates into the whole kolab environment. It is still experimental but if you wish to use it, you may enable the "mailman" use flag for kolabd and emerge "mailman-kolab". Follow the post-install instructions afterwards. If you dislike mailing lists feel free to use the forum for questions. Any new topics in the forum will also be mapped into the "Kolab-gentoo-feeds" mailing list. In case you have questions concerning undocumented features you may post them into the documentation wiki and in case you identified a bug please submit it in the bug tracker. The development process has been modified to provide a higher protection for users of the overlay. Experimental packages will now get masked and the different ebuild versions have a clearer separation now. It was also necessary to remove older packages that were marked "stable". It will take a while until the current packages will be marked stable though they are being run in production. Hopefully no major bugs will be discovered. One remaining problem is the horde webmail: The initial fixes worked only partially and there are still a number of open bugs. These will hopefully be fixed soon. It will be necessary to switch to horde cvs to make the patch management feasible and less time consuming than it is now. So there is still hope for a fully functional webmail for Kolab on Gentoo. And as a final note: I received Kolab CVS access which means that patches resulting from the Gentoo project will have a faster route into Kolab CVS. There are currently a number of fixes that I plan on integrating upstream once there is enough time. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server Posted at: 10:07 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sat, 30 Sep 2006German Linux Magazine publishes article on overlays.gentoo.org and layman
The editors of the German Linux mag considered the concept of a distributed distribution development interesting and accepted my article on both the overlays project and the layman tool. It has been published in the current issue (06/11). The article features some of the basic concepts behind Gentoo and portage, describes the recruiting process and highlights the benefits of the new overlays project to this process as well as the distribution development in general. If there are any errors or information is missing I'd be happy about feedback. gentoo overlays layman python Linux_Magazin Posted at: 12:26 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sat, 23 Sep 2006Doing more with layman (... and layman-1.0.8)
Since dju just asked: Yes, you can use layman as a general repository
manager. I've been doing something like that for a while now. I have a
second directory in dju specifically wanted to manage the Gentoo tree using layman. To do
that you will need to use a separate layman configuration file so that
you can define a new storage directory within that config file. If you
would add the new checkouts to the regular overlay repositories in
So let's create the config file: mkdir /etc/gentoo echo "[MAIN] config_dir : /etc/gentoo storage: /usr/portage/local/gentoo cache: %(storage)s/cache.xml local_list: %(storage)s/overlays.xml make_conf: %(storage)s/make.conf overlays: file:///etc/gentoo/layman-gentoo.xml" > /etc/gentoo/layman.cfg Okay, now we need the "overlay" definitions:
echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<layman>
<overlay
type = "cvs"
src = "wrobel@cvs.gentoo.org:/var/cvsroot"
subpath = "gentoo"
contact = "wrobel@gentoo.org"
status = "official"
name = "gentoo-web">
<description>
The Gentoo web repository.
</description>
</overlay>
<overlay
type = "cvs"
src = "wrobel@cvs.gentoo.org:/var/cvsroot"
subpath = "gentoo-x86"
contact = "wrobel@gentoo.org"
status = "official"
name = "gentoo-portage">
<description>
The Gentoo portage tree.
</description>
</overlay>
</layman>' > /etc/gentoo/layman-gentoo.xml
You need your own list here since you cannot use my account for accessing the cvs server. But the principle should be clear. I reached a weird point when I suddenly realized that layman does not have cvs support. Took five minutes to add it but I would have sworn it was in there. Looks like cvs is far more dead than I imagined since nobody complained about it missing so far. So this means you need to use layman-1.0.8 in order to do the following. Now it should be possible to get and update the two repositories: layman -c /etc/gentoo/layman.cfg -a gentoo-web layman -c /etc/gentoo/layman.cfg -a gentoo-portage You can then sync them at a later point using I do not want to judge if it makes sense to use the overlay manager for handling non-overlay repositories but I leave that to you to decide. I just wanted to point out that it is possible. Posted at: 10:02 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Wed, 20 Sep 2006"layman is missing a contact attribute"
Since the warning or phrase "layman is missing a contact attribute" has been googled a few times now I thought I might just clarify the meaning of this warning here: Stuart requested that overlays should always have a contact email address as well as a useful description of the overlay contents. Since I believe both requirements are quite helpful from the users point of view I made these attributes mandatory for all overlays in layman-1.0.7. Layman will now simply reject overlay definitions without the required information. The new version is still marked unstable and will remain that way until the overlays team managed to complete all necessary information in the global list of overlays. What can you do if you find that behaviour annoying? Simply run layman
using the new And yes, I'm going to keep the green leaves for news about layman :) Posted at: 16:25 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 19 Sep 2006German Gentoo Server Providers
So far I did test FirstDedicated and Internet24. Both provide servers pre-installed with Gentoo. FirstDedicated was definitely the worst experience I ever had concerning security. I did receive the password for the management web front end by standard e-mail and there was no option to change it anywhere. The login page was only offered over an unsecured line though that is something that they probably changed by now. Once logged in on the server it was easy to observe network traffic that did not belong to my machine and from time to time my arpwatch detected massive amounts of activity that did not look quite normal. The server itself was okay though the installed Gentoo release was not the recent one which forced me to upgrade a good deal of packages. On the plus side the server had an automatic rescue mode so that I was able to upgrade the kernel and reboot the machine without any manual intervention. Last but not least they unnerved me when I requested electronically signed invoices. Or printed ones as an alternative. Both versions are accepted for getting your taxes reimbursed in Germany. Simple electronic invoices are not. They outright rejected this even though the law is not too hard to understand. In the end I simply stopped arguing and moved my server to a different provider. Internet24 did actually make a good impression concerning security. The Gentoo release was up-to-date and they also provided signed invoices by default. So the initial impression was definitely far better. The only significant problem was the lack of a rescue system. A serial console. Or some other possibility of managing the machine once you have to upgrade your kernel. You have to call their technicians which might cost you money depending on the amount of work they have to do. While you certainly don't have to pay for a simple reboot this might change once you realize that you fucked up your kernel configuration and need a rescue system. So I did not upgrade the kernel. For eleven months. During which the machine never failed or developed any kind of problems. It's Gentoo Linux after all. But finally some process destabilized the machine and I suddenly had no SSH access anymore. That was the moment the machine went down the drain. I had to pay a technician that was unable to fix the thing and then I got a rescue CD that at least allowed me to rescue my data. I immediately cancelled my contract which was about to get eleven months old in two days. With an automatic extension period of three months and 30 days of advance notice for cancellation I figured this would be just in time. I did overlook that they actually predate a contract that was closed in the middle of a month to the first day of the month. So I was actually a few days late and I have to pay another three month for a broken server. So if you ask me, Internet24 sucks too. Finally I came back to http://1und1.de which provides a really good service and a smoothly running network. Sadly no Gentoo. So far I converted five of their servers to my preferred distribution. But I wonder if there are any Gentoo Server providers out there in Germany that combine the service and technical features that I am used to get from 1&1? gentoo server provider germany Posted at: 17:38 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Wed, 06 Sep 2006layman-1.0.7 - Gentoo mit Frische-Garantie
With layman-1.0.6 being stable on x86 it is time to add the next version into the tree. These are the changes:
The most notable change is the check for contact address and
description for each overlay. While it makes sense to require this
type of information layman cannot do much more than issue a warning
and ignore the overlay in case this is missing in the global list (or
any of your local additions for that matter). Layman will issue many
such warnings and also present you a very short list of overlays since
the global list has only been partially updated so far. This is even
further reduced since layman now filters all overlays that are not
hosted on overlays.gentoo.org if you do not use the
If you consider that behaviour annoying you may either use the
Please post any bugs layman-1.0.7 might have to our bugzilla database. And last but not least both overlays.gentoo.org and layman will be featured in the next issue of the german linux magazine. The announcement is in the preview of the current mag: "Gentoo mit Frische-Garantie". gentoo layman python Linux_Magazin Posted at: 10:31 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Sun, 03 Sep 2006Virtual servers get converted to Gentoo
It looks like a number of people are not too happy about running SuSE on their virtual servers. I got a good deal of feedback on my HowTo that describes the conversion of a virtual server preinstalled with SuSE. I integrated all fixes and improvements that I received from various contributors. Thanks a lot to all of them! While the instructions were initially targeted at the servers provided by 1 and 1 it definitely also works for the servers of Strato. Anyone with a success story on the servers of other companies? gentoo Virtual_server howto linux Posted at: 23:33 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Thu, 31 Aug 2006Updates to the Kolab on Gentoo projectThe Kolab/Gentoo project upgraded the groupware to the latest horde releases and incorporated a number of bug fixes from the Kolab project. List of changes:
You are encouraged to sync your overlay. In case any of the new versions fail you should always be able to revert to one of the older versions. The overlay will always provide an older version that is marked stable and the last two unstable ebuilds. This should help to avoid unnecessary breakage. In case of problems, feel free to request for help in the forum. gentoo kolab groupware Email_server Posted at: 09:35 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 21 Aug 2006I have had enough - ebuild for trac-0.10devEven though I tried the mod_security hacks for trac somebody started using my trac installations to specifically spam a company. So I finally got annoyed enough to get an ebuild for the development version ready. This allows to install a spam filter plugin that hopefully prevents the constant spam abuse. You can get the ebuild from my overlay. Use layman to fetch it: layman -a wrobel The trac ebuild is labelled as version 3562 which corresponds to the subversion revision that is currently powering the trac website. I figured this might have the highest chance of being stable enough for productive use. emerge =www-apps/trac-3562 It is currently only marked unstable for x86 but I could add keywords if you need it. After the installation the trac environment needs to be updated: trac-admin /path/to/trac/env upgrade And now it should be possible to throw the AntiSpam plugin into the plugins directory of your trac project environments. You can also directly download the necessary egg. No additional configuration will be necessary. A side note on running trac under mod_python: Since I use several trac installations in separate virtual hosts and also run moinmoin under mod_python I sometimes had annoying errors like a simple "Connection: close" or some random errors from the trac site. There are two bugs in the trac database that describe similar problems when using mod_python with several virtual hosts and a simple workaround is to use a single python interpreter by adding the statement PythonInterpreter "global" to all hosts that include mod_python. Worked for me. gentoo trac mod_python ebuild python Posted at: 10:19 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Fri, 11 Aug 2006Preliminary layman-1.0.7I would have released layman-1.0.7 this weekend but my little server crash managed to rob me more time than I actually had available. So right now the preliminary version lingers around in my overlay. I'd be grateful if a few people could test its functionality and provide feedback. Should help to get this version out a little bit faster. It now requires contact information in the overlay description and only lists official overlays if you do not list using the verbose option. It also has support for mercurial overlays, handles error messages in an improved fashion and has preliminary support for sorting overlays according to a priority so that conflicts between overlays can be avoided. layman-1.0.7 will probably be the last version for a while since webapp-config has been craving for more attention for a longer time now. More once I have more time again ;) Posted at: 21:20 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 01 Aug 2006Horde Webmail fixing for the Kolab Groupware ServerThe Kolab on Gentoo overlay now features a set of patches that completely breaks ... err ... fixes integration of the Horde webmail with the kolab groupware server. While Horde has been declared the official web client for the Kolab groupware server the current implementation had a number of bugs that made it impossible to use shared address books, note books, task lists etc. in a similar manner to Outlook and Kontact. I did break the underlying Kolab driver apart and reimplemented an alternative that hopefully resolves these problems. The new implementation is only based on the functionality of the IMAP server which makes sense since all groupware information is stored there. The former driver needed an additional mysql backend which should now be obsolete. The code is definitely still alpha. Nevertheless I did integrate it into the horde ebuilds since I believe that the situation cannot be much worse than it was before. I'd be happy about feedback from the users of the overlay. The patches will be sent upstream to the horde project soon and hopefully be integrated into cvs after they have been reviewed. php groupware kolab horde webmail Posted at: 16:03 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Wed, 26 Jul 2006Map flickr to your file system (flickrfs-1.2.9)FlickrFS is a python script that uses the FUSE library and the Flickr API in order to map the magic of flickr into your file system. It can be used to upload, retrieve and edit your own images. In addition it allows you to search the image database based on tags. Identified images will end up as a standard image folder on your disk. The flickrfs ebuild in my overlay got updated to 1.2.9 now and it should work with the cvs based ebuilds for FUSE and python-fuse. I had some trouble with the python bindings for fuse lately so I felt it was easier to migrate to cvs based ebuilds. Any hints on a stable fuse version and the corresponding python bindings that work fine? Posted at: 09:30 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 25 Jul 2006Seem to make this a habit ... layman-1.0.6Did not help that I had the new version in my overlay for a while ... Needed to fix a bug and released 1.0.6. Posted at: 14:40 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Mon, 24 Jul 2006layman-1.0.5 is in the treeThe new layman version moved from my overlay to the portage tree. The most important change is the way layman handles errors in the global list of overlays. layman should now refrain from updating your local list if it receives garbage from the gentoo webserver. Please report any problems with the new version to bugzilla or the ticket system of the project site. Posted at: 17:14 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Fri, 21 Jul 2006Changes to the kolab groupware overlayThe Kolab2 on Gentoo overlay has been restructured yesterday for an improved development process. The most recent ebuilds have now been marked "stable" within the overlay. They have been available for several weeks and there were no major bug reports. In addition to the stable ebuilds the overlay will now always provide two unstable ebuilds that represent the most recent development releases. Since these ebuilds come from the bleeding edge of the Kolab CVS they have a higher chance of being broken. But with the new structure you should always have the option to revert to the older or the stable ebuild if necessary. Because of the switch the unstable ebuilds could be broken at the moment and bug fixing will continue next week. Just to be on the safe side you should remove the unstable flag from your package.mask for the packages dev-perl/perl-kolab and net-mail/{kolabd, kolab-resource-handlers, kolab-webadmin}. There is still no real release date for Kolab-2.1 which is one reason for the structural change. It looks like the overlay will work on the CVS basis for a while longer. Posted at: 12:25 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Tue, 18 Jul 2006Another round of bugfixing for layman (1.0.5)I added a new version of layman to my overlay for testing purposes. I'll move it to portage next week in case I don't find any major problems. Changes for this version:
Please report problems to bugzilla or my project site. Posted at: 16:36 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo Wed, 28 Jun 2006hrm..., layman-1.0.4Testing on layman-1.0.3 was not rigid enough and I needed to resolve a bug ... hence layman-1.0.4. Posted at: 14:09 | Permalink | category: /english/technical/gentoo |
