[gentoo-alpha] Gentoo/Alpha Status Report

[Thomas Cort]

Note: this doc can be found on the web at the following URLs...
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20060621.xml (HTML)
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20060621.txt (plain text)

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Gentoo/Alpha Status Report
==========================

1. Status Reports
-----------------

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 gentoo-alpha@g.o. 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[1] subproject page.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/index.xml

Index

This status report will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives, 
and/or projects related to the Gentoo/Alpha porting team:

    * New Developers
    * Keywording and Stabilization
    * Firefox and Thunderbird are Broken
    * Documentation Project
    * Alpha Arch Testers Project
    * New Alpha project page
    * Donations
    * 2.6 SMP Kernels

2. Content
==========

New Developers
--------------

Since the last status report, the following developers have joined the 
Gentoo/Alpha porting project:

    * Christel Dahlskjaer (christel)
      Christel joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team recently to help 
      with testing kernels on SMP hardware.
    * Thomas Cort (tcort)
      Thomas joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team in early April to help 
      with bug fixing, keywording, documentation, and security bugs.
    * Chris Gianelloni (wolf31o2)
      Chris joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team recently to help with 
      testing kernels on SMP hardware.

Keywording and Stabilization
----------------------------

Stephen Bennett (spb) has continued his work with SELinux on alpha. 
hardened-sources is now keyworded for alpha. Thanks to the work of 
Stefaan De Roeck (stefaan) and others, modular X has been keyworded and 
is working well on alpha. The Alpha arch team is also pleased to 
announce that we have stabilized gnome-2.12.3 and kde-3.5.2 since the 
last status report. 

Firefox and Thunderbird are Broken
----------------------------------

The mozilla project[2] has chosen to discontinue the development of the 
1.0.x versions of firefox and thunderbird. Since that decision, multiple 
security holes have been uncovered. As a result, we had to mask the 
1.0.x versions of firefox and thunderbird to keep our users secure since 
there are no plans to fix the security holes.

No one on the Gentoo/Alpha team has been successful at getting the 1.5.x 
versions of firefox and thunderbird to run correctly, see Bug #113944 
and Bug #131359. If you can help get these packages working on alpha, it 
would be very much appreciated. 

[2] http://mozilla.org/
[3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/113944
[4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/113944

Documentation Project
---------------------

The documentation subproject has written multiple new documents:

    * The Gentoo/Alpha FAQ[5] - an FAQ intended to answer some of the 
      most frequently asked questions relating to Gentoo/Alpha and 
      Linux/Alpha in general.
    * Alpha Porting Guide[6] - a guide intended to show C programmers 
      how to port programs written on other architectures to the Alpha 
      architecture.

Thomas Cort (tcort) has begun work on an SRM console guide. It will be 
published in the documentation subproject[7] section of the Gentoo/Alpha 
project page. 

[5] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-alpha-faq.xml
[6] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/doc/alpha-porting-guide.xml
[7] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/doc/index.xml

Alpha Arch Testers Project
--------------------------

The Alpha Arch Testers Project was recently created by Fernando J. 
Pereda (ferdy). 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[8]. 

[8] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/AT/index.xml

New Alpha Project Page
----------------------

Our project page was significantly revamped by Jose Luis Rivero 
(yoswink) and Fernando J. Pereda (ferdy) with the help of the rest of 
the Gentoo/Alpha team. The developer list has been refreshed to reflect 
the current team membership. We now have information about our 
subprojects too. Most subprojects now have their own project pages.

    * Gentoo/Alpha Project Page[9]

[9] http://alpha.gentoo.org

Donations
---------

Hardware donations are always welcome. We will gladly accept spare alpha 
hardware. Even an old AlphaServer 1000 is useful for testing 
installation media and kernels. 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; a SCSI or 
IDE DVD burner would allow us to test dvdrtools, PCI 802.11 NICs would 
allow us to do more extensive testing and unmask the wifi USE flag 
(currently only 1 dev has an alpha with wireless), PDAs would allow us 
to test PDA applications and unmask the pda USE flag. If you would like 
to make a donation, please drop by #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net or 
send an e-mail to alpha@g.o.

2.6 SMP Kernels
---------------

The Linux kernel developers have been working hard on the Alpha port. 
SMP is functional again and has been tested by a number of developers 
and users in #gentoo-alpha. 2.6.15.1 and 2.6.16.19 have both been tested 
on SMP hardware with good results.