Testing for Stable-0.13 Grimoire

Chris Dombroski, the sheep herder this time around, has stated testing for the new stable grimoire will start August 1st. He is asking for all willing developer volunteers to help test. The new version is stable-0.13 and it is headed for an August 15th launch if all goes well. The new wiki page for this release is up and ready, so check it out for more information.

SMGL Eye Candy

If you are looking for Source Mage GNU/Linux eye candy, most of the images that have been created are kept in the logos directory at http://dbg.download.sourcemage.org/logos/. My favorite background is the red waves one. If you use KDE, there is a decent KDE splash screen found at kde-look.org. Also for KDE, there is a spell that places an SMGL logo on the sidebar of the KDE menu for KDE3. Just cast kside-smgl. Eye candy is always welcomed. If you are an inspiring artist and create something SMGL specific, please let us know. You can post it in the forum or send it to the SM-Discuss or SM-Users mailing list. Someone will be able to add it to the main repository from that point.

News 7-20-2007

I apologize for the delay in posting lately, but I was on vacation. A few important events happened lately. On July 15th, Jaka "lynx" Kranjc was elected to a Lead Developer position. Since it is July, a call for Sorcery Lead nominations were sent out by Jeremy Blosser. The nominations deadline is Monday, July 23rd. Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has already been nominated for Sorcery Lead. If you don't understand the voting process, read more here.

On July 17th, the most recent Stable Grimoire, version 0.12 was released. You can use the "scribe update" command to update to the new release or download it manually. Links and much more information are available at the official Source Mage GNU/Linux web site.

News 7-8-2007

Thomas "sobukus" Orgis is asking developers to help prepare the new Stable-0.12 branch. You can check out the Stable-0.12 page for a list of spells. There are three days left before the branch is frozen. Release of the new stable branch is scheduled for Sunday, July 15th.

Lead Developer voting is under way. Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has been nominated and has accepted. Source Mage Project Lead, Jeremy Blosser stated voting is now open and will end July 13th, 2007. Check out the Voting Policy page for more information on the voting procedure.

I've been working with Source Mage Developer Andrew Stitt on his interview. This will be coming to Mage Power sometime soon. It should be a good one!
Andrew may be writing some articles for Mage Power in the future. Knowing Andrew, the articles promise to be extremely informative.

Behind the Scenes

Some of the Source Mage developers were nice enough to inform me about some of the projects they are working on lately.

Jaka Kranjc plans to continue work on a new quill feature, which is currently only available in a git version. It allows for spells to be almost automatically converted to use upstream gpg methods of authentication. As long as the signatures are provided. He is also planning to help with getting Sorcery 1.14 into test stage.

Martin Spitzbarth is working on the asterisk and asterisk-addons spells. Asterisk is a complete IP telephony platform for business and is open source. You can find more information about Asterisk at http://www.asterisk.org. Martin goes on to say, "A rework of its CONFIGURE is on my todo list to make some use of asterisk's features that are normally only accessible by a "make menuconfig"-style menu *after* ./configure. And the choices presented by this menu are dependend on the DEPENDS. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit too well into the way sorcery handles spells.".

Thomas "sobukus" Orgis plans to complete the port to Alpha architecture with an install ISO. He has working installations, it's just the ISO that is missing. The other major project on his list is to rework the handling of system accounts. He explains it like this, "The used numerical IDs for system user/group accounts should at least be user-configurable to accomodate local site requirements. Another point is to make casts into a to-be chroot (with INSTALL_ROOT) independent of the host system's user database (including: leaving host accounts untouched!).". Besides that, a future goal is to include Sorcery/spell support for cross-compiling a whole system for a different architecture.

Eric Sandall is working on getting OpenOffice 2.2.1 to build. He is adding Second Life to the games available in Source Mage. He mentioned it will take a lot of manual work to get it working correctly. He is trying to package ZFS too. I'm sure you have noticed he is busy staying on top of Source Mage stable releases as well. He just released the new stable-rc-0.12 for testing.

All of the developers will be spending time triaging and destroying bugs. Please keep checking Mage Power to get the latest news on Source Mage projects.