Mage Power: Tell us a little bit about yourself, name/age/skills?

My name is Gary R. Raper, Jr., I’m 51 and as far as skills are concerned, I was trained in firefighting and emergency medicine (paramedic), and worked in those fields for 20 yrs. I consider myself an above average Linux user.

MP: When did you first start using Linux and why?

I first used Feather Linux on a FAT32 partition. Then a friend sent me a copy of MEPIS and I switched over to it immediately. This was in 2004. I started using it because of intense disgust with Windows 98SE.

MP: How adept at Linux and computers in general do you consider yourself?

Aside from the fact that I don’t program anymore, I’ve been using a variety of OSes for 22 years, so I consider myself to be fairly proficient in hardware, and competent in [GNU/]Linux.

MP: You’re a Source Mage user, correct?

I will be, as soon as I can get my new mobo up & running. I used it in the past, too.

MP: What got your attention about it?

I first heard of it on a forum and was interested in source-based distros. The Source Mage website made it sound intriguing, so I downloaded and installed it.

MP: So how was your first experience?

Informative and, as I had hoped, educational. I particularly liked the command set of words. And it was MUCH easier to install than any of the other source-based distros I had tried.

MP: Interesting… What have you tried before Source Mage?

I had tried Gentoo and found it overhyped, with a command set that was intrusive. Then I tried CRUX and found its repositories were limited.

MP: How long ago was this?

About 3 years ago.

MP: What’s your favorite Source Mage feature, spell, or tool?

Cast because its command set is much easier to remember. All of SMGL’s commands have a distinct internal logic, so it’s a very easy distro to install and maintain. It’s as close to a “source-based user-friendly” distro as you’ll find.

MP: Is there any feature or spell you would like implemented/added into Source Mage?

I can’t think of any offhand… Actually, there’s one I will be adding: a very nice little CLI frontend for cdrecord. I figure that would be useful for anyone working with limited HDD space.

MP: How difficult do you find spellwriting?

I’ve never done it, which is one reason I’m looking forward to adding that little app to the SMGL repositories.

MP: Would you consider helping the project in any way (be it ISO tester, spell writer, documentation writer)?

Since I’m on dial-up, being an ISO tester isn’t really feasible, but I’d offer my services in the other two categories.

[Editor's Note: He finally got some broadband. :) ]

MP: Now, changing the subject a bit. What do you think of our ’support’?

Top notch. When I tried SMGL for the first time, I ran into a package with an error that caused it to fail to install. I went to #sourcemage, informed the chanops of it, whereupon one of them immediately patched it and i was downloading it 2 minutes later. The really impressive thing about that experience was that it was a game package, not “serious” software.

MP: I can guess who helped you with that one… ruskie?

Right, ruskie.

MP: How about our “package” selection?

It supplies all but my arcane wants. I install a few dockapps that have to be obtained from other sources, but that’s always been true.

MP: If we gave out awards to your developers, who would you nominate?

David Kowis, I suppose. He’s got the same kind of humor as I do: low.

MP: (wow… just… wow…)

Hehe. I don’t honestly know which of the developers are most adept, so i chose from a personality standpoint.

MP: And last but not least: Any personal messages for the Source Mage users out there?

My usual 3 rules of computing:

1. GIGO;

2. RTFM; and,

3. GIMBF (Google Is My Best Friend).

Even at this level of computing it always surprising to me how many people ignore those rules.

Thanks for your time Gary. We look forward to seeing you donned with your own shiny mage cloak. Until then, we’ll reserve details of your eating-barbeque-sandwich-over-[censored] experience for your next interview as a full time mage.

And thank you everyone for sticking with us through thick or thin (mostly thin) and we’ll see you again in the next issue of “People Behind Source Mage”! (Seriously, what should we call this?)

Until next time!

Greetings fellow mages and welcome to another issue of “Get to Know Your Wizards”! OK, so it’s not really called that (but maybe it should be). Anyway, we’ve been gone for quite a while so here we are with a rather longish, yet information-crammed, treat for you. Hailing all the way from Slovenia, we bring you games guru, xorg tinkerer and overall mage extraordinaire, Andraž “ruskie” Levstik!

Mage Power: Hello Andraž. Thank you for taking some time out to indulge in our curiousity. How are you and how have your owners (your cats) been treating you?

Rofl… attention grabbing like usual ;)

MP: I looked at your information on the developer page. Could you tell me how many years you have been with Source Mage now? It only says less than one year in your info there. :-)

I started as a General Guru, took over games grimoire a month later, worked on that for a while almost exclusively, then started quill which was prompted by users submitting spells with a few errors here and there which drove me nuts. I also started thinking about sorting out the init stuff and some other things but then got derailed a bit then went back to rewriting quill. As it stands I’m thinking about IMP (Init Manager Program) to handle our init system selection easily and trying to get to rewrite the FSF/UNESCO directory parser for quill.

MP: What else have you been doing in Source Mage?

Here’s a nice list:

• Grimoire contributions
  • games grimoire - Reorganised it, fixed a ton of stale bugs, updated a ton of spells, wrote up a document for how games spells should behave, added various automated functions to the games grimoire which make it possible to quickly and easily setup things. Now, the official Source Mage grimoire which holds nothing but game related spells. (http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Games_Grimoire)
  • xorg-modular grimoire - This is the unofficial Source Mage grimoire which holds xorg-modular spells and that was recently merged as a separate branch to the main grimoire in preparation for a final push to test. When this became known, I volunteered to help with it along with CuZnDragon (Robin Cook). We started working on it but it soon became apparent that doing it manually will be painful so I made a quick modification of the old single file quill to generate all the spells quickly. Then later on I enlisted the help of BearPerson (Karsten Behrmann) to write some other scripts that helped out with DEPENDS and CONFIGURE options. This was the start. Later on iuso (Juuso Alasuutari) wrote up a spellbump script that allows me, since I seem to have become the defacto maintainer for the grimoire, to quickly get spell update information so I can easily update it. [Editor's Note: X.org modular is now in the latest stable as well. Gone is the monolithic X.org]
  • config_query_multi - When I started working on xorg-modular more I soon noticed that I will either need to work with dialog or have a different way of sorting through multiple selections. As I never was a big fan of working with dialog I rewrote Sorcery’s config_query_list to behave as a multi selection system. It’s pending inclusion into Sorcery at the moment. (http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12950)
• Sorcery contributions (in more or less chronological order)
  • libpatch for Sorcery - I wanted an easy way to handle patches in Sorcery so I wrote up this lib for Sorcery. It allows to specify patches in a while and also accept on the fly patches (which is what I was after actually). (http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7296)
  • verbosity option in Sorcery - A few people were complaining that Sorcery was spewing to much info at them they didn’t need. As I was bored at the time, I decided to try and solve it. With the help of dufflebunk (Paul Mahon) I came up with this. (http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7324)
  • lzma support in Sorcery - I created a patch to add lzma support in Sorcery when I first discovered lzma. (http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13176)
  • profiles in Sorcery - I wanted a way to easily update chroots/etc without needing to go into them or needing to modify Sorcery configs each time. So I came up with profiles. (http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13286)
  • hooks in Sorcery - I discovered dzen2 a while back and thought it would be nice to have Sorcery report back through it about spell casts, etc. I worked on it for quite some time and also rewrote some parts to go out of Sorcery completely like sounds and mail notification and be just another hook. (http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13938)
• Other contributions
  • Quill - A spell creator and updater that makes it dead easy to create and upgrade spells. Well as said above I started this because I got a bit fed up with minor bugs in the spell files submitted by people. The first version was a single file and part of guru-tools. People started using it and I soon got a couple of patches. afrayedknot (Andrew Sitt) provided the first external contribution to quill with the Freshmeat interface and abouter (Arjan Bouter) provided a way to generate .desktop files. Then I decided to rewrite it Sorcery style (multiple files as libs, etc.). As I started, I asked for help from anyone that could and iuso helped out. There wasn’t much in the rewrite at the start other than copy pasting. After some initial work was done, lynxlynxlynx (Jaka Kranjc) joined in as well and started doing some serious work. As it stands, quill is a bit asleep at the moment. I need to rewrite some stuff like the FSF/UNESCO directory parser and possibly add others as I find them.
  • IMP - This is a WIP progress on the back burner. It’s meant to provide configuration and setting up of init scripts for Source Mage. IMP has been coded up in the meantime and is in alpha phase. Needs more developers or atleast people to play with it and test it. I’ll write up a spell for it in the next few days.
  • sm(k)freebsd - This was a nice experiment. Basically I wanted to run Sorcery on a FreeBSD system. I setup an older system and worked on it and actually got it to work. I was in the progress of modifying spells when I lost interest.
  • Some spells from those experiments should still be available in witchcraft: http://repo.or.cz/w/grimoire-witchcraft.git . I know that a few people were and possibly still are interestedin this so I might resume the work someday.

MP: Wow! Seems like you’ve been all over the place. What’s keeping you busy currently?

At the moment I am working on:

• general spell updates
• xorg-modular grimoire specifics
• thinking about how to best implement IMP (I think about things a lot before actually touching them)
• thinking about things to work on for quill
• thinking about getting a way to hook Sorcery into native package managers of other distros (I already did something similar once)
• generating some content for Source Mage, i.e. made a background recently from a photo of mine: http://ruskie.codemages.net/images/smbackground.jpg and http://ruskie.codemages.net/images/smbackground2.jpg
• Might write some more Source Mage inspired poetry: http://ruskie.codemages.net/poetry.html ( near the bottom of the page)

MP: That’s quite a lot! Is there any specific project for SMGL that you would like to complete by next year?

Yeah. IMP, the Init Manager Program, to give more choice to our users in ways of managing their init systems.

MP: You mentioned earlier that Source Mage GNU/Linux has now incorporated a new spell for Xorg called xorg-modular, Can you tell us more about this? Is it now the spell you should use to setup xorg? Is it stable or are there still issues to deal with?

First a correction. The spell is not named xorg-modular. There is no single spell for this. The closest one could say is xorg-server. But generaly this is the xorg-modular sub-project to transition from the old monolithic xorg/xfree86 and such to a fully modular system.

This sub-project started at the end of 2005 with me and Robin Cook (CuZnDragon) as the only volunteers. As we didn’t have much in spells for this, I made a modified version of quill to quickly generate all the spells then asked BearPerson (Karsten Behrmann) to help with getting the depends from another source. After that it just took so long to figure out all the bugs, stability issues and so forth.

The spell to cast now is xorg-server and is the only thing that will even remotely setup an X server but without a lot of things. It’s the most minimal yet still usable configuration.

As for stability, there might be issues here and there but quite a few developers reported that it’s running fine and I can concur with that. The overall stability and various other issues seem to have improved with each new version and I’m hoping this will just keep on going.

It has separate spells for nearly every part of the X11 stack. Some of the more notable:

• xorg-server - this holds all the X11 servers(xvfb, X, kdrive and others)
• libx11 - is the main X lib that more or less pulls a lot of others as well
• xterm - yes this is now a separate spell along with most other apps

MP: What do you like about Source Mage GNU/Linux?

Hmmm. Single word: community.

It’s above anything else I’ve seen thus far. Somewhat small but highly dedicated to bringing the best to our users and to the Free Software world.

Beyond that I really love the magic theme, the tools, the choices, the near infinite possibilities that are available to me or our users.

MP: In your opinion, does SMGL need any new developers at this time? If so, what areas need the most help? What skills are needed?

We always need developers but I believe in keeping it a slowly growing environment. This ensures that developers actually care about the work they do and that they fully appreciate what goes on.

Where we do need an influx of a few devs would be the Tome team. And a few to give a helping hand to Sorcery as well. Not sure about Cauldron but maybe flux_control (Justin Boffemmyer) needs some help as well…

As for skills, well either writing docs or writing bash code. Don’t think there is much else required.

MP: Are there any other projects in production for SMGL that you are not involved with, but excited about?

Hmmm can’t really recall any…

MP: What do you think could best improve Source Mage GNU/Linux?

Overall nothing much… I like the organisation, the small team, the slowly expanding userbase…

But specifically:

• We should not configure anything for users at all (install example configs in a separate location)
• We need the ability to pick inits to provide more choice
• Remove z-rejected completely and get FSF certified as Free
• Get more users interested in generating own grimoires and publishing them
• A bit more directed leadership (not that I mind the current one) but someone to say this is our target in the next year would be a good idea (i.e. less than 500 bugs etc…)

*shrug* probably other things…

MP: What type of window manager or desktop do you use? Are there any particular utilities or terminals that you like to use?

I started with FVWM 10 years ago went through various DEs and WMs and ended up back with FVWM 2 years ago and have been using it ever since.

As for utils I use: gkrellm, episoder, urxvt (though hopefully mrxvt will get utf8 support so I can use it instead), zsh, and dtach.

Hmm, then there’s my whole photo workflow I only recently started working with which includes: fotoxx

jbrout, ufraw, and gimp.

And of course the regular net tools: kazehakase, irssi, and rtorrent.

Take your pick what a utility is ;)

MP: You have been taking good care of the Games Grimoire in SMGL for a long time. Could you tell us what your top 5 games are?

Ooooo the top most without a doubt is: bzflag (tend to play atleast once per week)

Hmm then I guess: wesnoth (though I tend to not play much), fillets-ng (love it though I’m stuck), enigma2 (been a while since I played), and puzzles (play a few on occasion).

MP: How do you feel about operating systems with totally free content?

Content or Software? Free or free? (I’ll assume Free for now).

[Editor's note: "Free" means "free as in speech" in the FSF definition, while "free" means "free as in beer"]

I have no issues with non-Free content, i.e. graphics and music. It’s a completely different thing from software. I do consider if you provide Free software that you provide some Free content along the way but I don’t consider it a must for the final product. For example, the Planeshift project provides the sources and a small subset of example data under the GPL while they provide the real data that is used on their server as non-Free but still free as in beer. I have no serious issues with such but I would never provide any of my own content to such projects simply because I prefer to provide it on a less restrictive license.

As for software, I’d rather we dropped z-rejected and make a complete sweep through the main grimoires about anything non-Free. As for things like firmware, it’s just annoying but I don’t see much wrong about it though I try to get hardware that doesn’t need it, simply because it’s easier to get such hardware working generally. I can’t stand such things as ati_driver and nvidia_driver though, as that is basically a binary driver with a slim wrapper around to make it work.

MP: Can you tell us about your poems for Source Mage and where to find them? What are some of your other interests besides SMGL?

Where to find them? Easy: http://ruskie.codemages.net/poetry.html

Tell about them… hmm…

The raven was the first one and I tried to incorporate various tool names from Sorcery.

Guidance was meant for the ISO release with the same codename.

MP: Any words of advice for prospective SMGL users as well as future developers?

To users: Enjoy using it as we enjoy working on it.

To devs: Work on what you think is your best area and play well with others.

And to all: remember… To each his own.

Thank you Andraž. Be sure to thank your owners for us for giving you some time off to answer our questions. Speaking his furballs, it is worthy of note that the picture does not make justice to them. They are healthy furballs that weigh around 7kg at the moment. Lastly, the information is relevant, but might be a bit dated.

Stay tuned as we bring another interesting person really soon. Yes, that two, not one, but two interviews in a row! See you soon!

With 12 votes, Jeremy “emrys” Blosser stays as our Project Lead. For those of you that want to read his speech, you can do so from here. Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz had 6 votes, but still holds the Grimoire Lead position. Arwed posted to the mailing list some sort of braindump/speech that is available for reading also.

That’s all folks!

And today, Elisamuel “ryuji” Resto (me, me!) posted too that Donald “minozake” Johnson is joining the Tome Team to help with the wiki and documentation itself. He has already helped organize the FAQ section of the wiki a bit and has been in discussion with the Tome Team about other changes.

The two candidates for this position are Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz and Jeremy “emrys” Blosser. Both have been respectively seconded and have accepted their nominations.

As our voting policy states, send a GPG-signed vote to dkowis+vote@shlrm.org before January 29th 2009 @ 0130 UTC.

Our new Cauldron developer, Quentin Rameau, has produced a devel version x86_64 ISO. The ISO was produced using the same scripts that produced 0.10.0-test6, so it should be rather comparable in nature, but with some differences for 64-bit (the kernel, a lack of grub, etc.). The new 64-bit ISO can be downloaded here:

http://quinq.dtdm.net/smgl-devel-quinq-x86_64-20090115.iso.bz2

If you have a 64-bit system, please help test this ISO. See the release notes for test6 for general information at:

http://www.sourcemage.org/Cauldron/0.10.0-test6

For any concerns/questions/comments specific to the x86_64 ISO, talk to quinq (Quentin Rameau).

The current nominees, which have been seconded as-of this writing, are Arwed “alley_cat” von Merkatz and Jeremy “emrys” Blosser.

On a unrelated note, please stay tuned as we will soon post a interview we had promised. The developer interviewed this time was Andraž “ruskie” Levstik. Also, I took the liberty to interview a user this time, to change from the developers perspective of things to the user perspective. I interviewed Gary, also known in IRC as “ahmratcheer,” a Source Mage user from the Texas area.

Download: smgl-0.10.0-test6.iso.bz2 [md5 / sig]

If you encounter any problems with spells building after a fresh install of 0.10.0-test6, please let us know. It’s possible that there might be a bug in the ISO, but it could also be a bug in one of the spells. Either way, letting us know about it means we will be able to fix it sooner.

I didn’t post the stats in a while, so here’s a graph of the spell counts of our stable-rcs.

http://lynxlynx.info/smgl/spell.count.29.png

Recently the inclusion of xorg-modular can be seen, but other than that, we seem to have a pretty constant rate of adding new spells. The 6000 mark was reached one stable ago.
It also shows that we do release (cut) stable-rcs regularly. Thanks to the few people involved!

Hi everyone,

stable-rc 0.28 is cut and ready for testing. There’s the usual wiki page for those who want to help testing.

The release will be released on December 15th if nothing major gets in the way.

Tarballs have been created and are on the master server, should make it to the mirrors in a few hours. I’m working on the x86 chroot, volunteers for x86_64 are welcome.

As always don’t forget to file any bugs against our bug tracker so we can fix and integrate any bugs/issues.

Let’s give this new stable-rc a good testing!