All is relative…

It’s a bit sad that Gentoo didn’t promote this more, but Gentoo users now have support for license-based masking.

What does this mean? Well, previously, Gentoo already supported various masking reasons (like stable versus staging – the x86 versus ~x86 saga, package.mask’ing – for security reasons or critical bugs, …). Now, a new feature is added: license masking.

By default, Portage accepts all non-EULA licenses. If a package uses a EULA license, you’ll get a failure message stating that the license is ‘masked’.

Now, what good does this do for users? Well, you can now ask Portage only to accept certain licenses (like @FSF-APPROVED, which is a list of all FSF-approved licenses) and deny the installation of others. Nice, isn’t it?

I’ve added information regarding package license states (and the global as well as per-package unmasking support through /etc/portage/package.license) to the Linux Sea document.

A few updates have made it to the Linux Sea book:

• Information regarding ndiswrapper
• Some information about udev and the symlinks that it creates

The PDF version has been updated as well.

I’ve added quota support information to the Linux Sea book as well as information about the eclean command for cleaning distfiles and packages. The part on building a Linux kernel has been moved into its own chapter, the chapter on hardware support now has a bit more information about dealing with sound cards (ALSA support) and will contain information about sound servers in the near future. This chapter will also be used to configure the various other hardware things as they come by (printers, scanners, …).

I’ve added a draft PDF version of my Linux Sea document. If you don’t mind the A4 papersize and the bad typesetting of the text boxes (I still have lots of overflows to correct) it is quite usable.

My everlasting document, Linux Sea, is progressing slowely but surely. I’ve started a few new chapters and also initiated a chapter on Installing Gentoo (which is more a shortlist of tasks with pointers to earlier chapters).

I also took a different CSS (docbook.css file used by the FreeBSD handbook) as it looks a lot better.

As stated earlier, I’m now focusing on the existing content of my (work-in-progress) ebook called Linux Sea (PDF, HTML). I’m going to add more text where appropriate, add exercises to each chapter as well as references to online resources.

When that’s finished, I’ll probably be writing a chapter on installing Gentoo Linux as that’s a major end-user topic that isn’t discussed yet (but luckily, there’s still the Gentoo Handbook).

I’ve updated the chapter on graphical environments a bit to reflect how applications, window managers, X server and widget toolkits work together. Hopefully it isn’t a big lie that I wrote there ;-)

I’ll probably be doing a bit of clean ups the coming days before I start out with more chapters…