This Week in SMGL (Nov. 5th 2007)

When I first posted the new "This Week in SMGL" a couple weeks ago, I mentioned it would usually be posted on Sunday. Well, I lied. It seems to work better for me on Monday, what can I say. Hold on to your wizard hat, here we go!

Source Mage Developer David "dmlb2000" Brown has placed glibc 2.7 in devel. Many developers have been busy testing it. David has put a lot of work into this. Thanks David!

Project Lead Jeremy Blosser has scheduled the next Source Mage Developer meeting for November 11th at 1700/UTC. The meeting will be held on the #sourcemage-admin irc channel.

Andraž "ruskie" Levstik and Ethan "eekee" Grammatikidis have kicked off the migration of the official Source Mage web site. It is moving away from Drupal and moving to MoinMoin Wiki. You can see it forming here. Eekee did a great job on the new theme.

Treeve Jelbert has been working hard on KDE4! Here is his message to the sm-discuss mailing list last week.

"kde4 in test is now at version 3.95.0

I have built all of the spells, on an amd32 with xorg-6.9.0 and on amd64 with
xorg-modular.

I had problems with two spells on my old xorg setup, which may be related to
my xorg configuration.

Most of the programs appear in my normal kde3 menu and can be run from there,
otherwise start them manually from /opt/bin.

For the more adventurous, you can try to run a full kde4 desktop.

1. create a user who belongs to the group kde4
2. disable the init script kdm
3. enable the init script kdm4
4. change the default displaymanager in /etc/sysconfig/facilities
5. after restarting at level 5, it should now be possible to login to the new
user and encounter the strange new world of kde4. Lots of right clicking may
be useful.

The first time login may be rather slow, as it builds lots of new data caches.

At present kde4 is configured to keep the desktop data in ~/.kde4
(see /etc/profile.d/kde4.sh). This means that if you use the same user for
both kde3 and kde4, the desktop settings can be completely different. It
also means that your existing email is safe in the other desktop.

It is also possible to run a kde4 desktop on top of your normal desktop, but I
shall explain that another time.

The next release is due in about 3 weeks."

David Kowis stated the SMGL Server Fundable was a huge success! Sqweek wrote this nice little poem to commemorate the achievement.

This was a triumph!
I'm making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS!
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
Source Mage GNU/Linux
We build it from source
Without remorse
For the good of all wizards
Except the ones who fizzled
But there's no sense crying over every segfault
You just keep on scribing 'till you run out of salt!
And the grimoire gets done
And you make a stable one
For the mages who cast all night long

Finally, a designer friend of mine is working on vectorizing the current Source Mage logo shown here. I explained to her we do not want to change the logo, it just needs to be a vector. She is making the raven look like the one in the long logo as well. Plus, she is designing the same type of logo for Mage Power! This is scheduled to be finished before Christmas.