Hello all!

I’d like to start writing weekly status reports about what is going on around the project. This is also an easy way to catch up with what happened for people who cannot, for whatever reason, read the IRC backlog.

Web site

The Adélie Web site had a large process overhaul, and a slight reorganisation.

The Web site now has a functional template system, which means the nav bar and footer only have to be changed one time (instead of on each HTML file). This will allow us to ensure the site is kept up to date easier and faster. The system uses simple POSIX Make, with grep and sed, so is completely portable.

Meanwhile, the About page was split into separate Meet The Team, Q&A, and About The Distro pages. Additionally, a section was added as a ‘quick overview’ of what we offer.

Top 5 referring URLs to the Web site:

• 114: Without Systemd.org
• 58: Google searches
• 54: Reddit post on using musl on desktops
• 18: DuckDuckGo searches
• 16: Repology

Top 5 pages accessed (and homepage):

• 3075: /
• 246: /about.html
• 51: /announcements/1.0-BETA2.html
• 48: /about-qa.html
• 46: /team.html
• 45: /contribute.html

These statistics generated by yours truly, using grep and awk on privatised Apache logs.

Wiki

• awilfox@ and aerdan@ both catalogued their available hardware for testing. The catalogue is available for reading on the Wiki.
• The Project:Roadmap pages were updated to reflect the BETA3 target.

CD Image (image.git)

• The CD image system now supports mastering of multi-architecture discs. It is still early days, requiring some manual intervention, but the hope is that we will be able to generate a CD that has a GRUB menu to select 32-bit or 64-bit kernel/userland. This will allow us to serve more people with less resources. (For example, we’ll only need to have a single print run for x86 and PPC, not a 32-bit and a 64-bit for each.)

Shimmy

• The _NPROCESSORS_ONLN extension for getconf(1) has been added. This is supported by glibc, Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX, and is used by the Linux kernel build system to determine the number of build jobs to run.

gcompat

• smauel fixed support for newer Linux kernels (v4.17+). He also implemented pthread_getname_np and optional obstack support, and cleaned up some of the code.

Packaging

• aerdan@ bumped some Perl packages, and ensured all Perl packages have the proper owner (the Adélie Perl Team). He also bumped some aspell dictionaries that have newer third-party releases, and many other packages.
• skarnet@ bumped system/utmps, fixing a bug in wtmpd.
• aerdan@ added:
  • user/pcmanfm, a lightweight file manager for X11.
  • user/uptimed.
  • And a few others.
• awilfox@ fixed system/ca-certificates to generate the /etc/ssl directory correctly when installing to a chroot. They also added:
  • user/adwaita-icon-theme, ensuring Gtk3 apps have proper toolbar icons.
  • user/gnumeric, a spreadsheet application.
  • user/gnu-ghostscript, which allows PostScript files to be manipulated, and is a requirement of many CUPS printer drivers.
  • user/jpegoptim and user/optipng, image optimisers.
  • user/nfs-utils, for network file sharing.
  • user/openttd, a game.
  • user/rdesktop, for RDP connections to Windows® computers.
  • and many others, mostly from the alpha7 and alpha2 missing package
    lists.
• multiplexd, a relative newcomer, has also been busy! They added:
  • user/abiword and its dependencies, a light-weight word processor.
  • user/nftables and its dependencies, a firewall and NAT system.

General discussion

Issues with nouveau were shaken out; on ppc64, a special Xorg.conf setting is required to prevent improper behaviour and coloured lines. Additionally, a Pentium 4 test box was set up in the main Tulsa lab so that the pmmx architecture can be better tested going forward.

Support for “RAW” digital camera image files was added to Krita, ImageMagick, KStars, GwenView, and KPhotoAlbum.

Here’s to a great week ahead!