We are officially retiring 1.4-release in 2024, which means that if you have not yet done so, now is the time to upgrade to next-release. The official way to do this is to do a REINSTALL of Funtoo. You may be able to in-place upgrade from 1.4-release to next-release but THIS IS NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED so if you can't get it to work, you can ask on Discord for help unofficially but if you can't work through the various quirks you WILL need to reinstall.

Really, a reinstall should be done unless you have a very specific reason why you can't.

The Funtoo community is around to help with issues you may have with an upgrade, but just be aware of the possibility of hitting something that may warrant reinstall.

For new installs of next-release, the Funtoo community as well as myself are available to assist you with issues you may encounter. Reach out on Discord in the #install-help channel.

I've decided to move the Funtoo Telegram channel to non-official status, as we have Discord and it doesn't make sense to have two official discussion channels.

If you're on Telegram, you're encouraged to come over to Discord.

I've marked the Telegram channel as "Unofficial" and updated the wiki to make this clearer.

The latest newsletter combines both April and May 2023, and I'm using Markdown for publishing for now, so I'll just provide a link to the markdown file:

https://code.funtoo.org/bitbucket/projects/DOC/repos/newsletter/browse/docroot/2023/04-05.md

Enjoy!

Everyone,

Our datacenter in Taos, New Mexico experienced a very severe "fiber cut" in close proximity to the datacenter which severed its fiber links. This major fiber cut also has disrupted multiple ISPs and mobile carriers such as Verizon in Taos, NM.

This has resulted in a number of community containers going offline. This has not impacted Funtoo core infrastructure. The fiber cut is very severe and we expect at least 24 hours of downtime.

More info here: https://www.taosnews.com/news/severed-fiber-optic-line-causes-cell-phone-internet-outages-in-taos/article_cc7f41e6-03f7-11ee-9df2-fb4957e977a7.html

UPDATE from our datacenter:

What happened? At approximately 3:25 pm MT (GMT-6) yesterday a road construction crew caused a large fiber cut which knocked much of Taos, New Mexico's telecommunication infrastructure offline. This outage impacted both of our upstream networks in addition to local cell phone and phone service, as well as many local ISPs, including our sister company, TaosNet.  Lumen fiber technicians worked through the night to repair the broken fiber and are still at work on it.

Why did this happen?  Know that we're as shocked and devastated as you are by this extended outage and again, apologize profusely.  We were led to believe - by our upstream network providers - that our upstream network redundancy was complete, when in fact it was clearly not.  We have had fiber cuts to one of these fiber connections or the other over the last few years, and each time our traffic failed-over perfectly.  However, what this fiber cut revealed is that there is approximately a one mile stretch - of many hundreds of miles of fiber that our networks traverse - where both networks are in the same conduit. This is where the cut was.

The good news is that after detailed analysis we believe a network routing change can get us back to fully geographically redundant fiber paths.  We'll be working on implementing this in the coming weeks.

How did Brownrice get back online? Since the fiber outage was still not fixed, early this morning the CEO of a local ISP, Kit Carson Internet, reached out to us offering network connectivity.  Our network engineers, our TaosNet wireless team, and the team at Kit Carson Internet then formulated and executed a plan to build a high-speed wireless link between our two facilities and route traffic through Kit Carson Internet to our data center.  This brought all of our networking services back online. The amount of skill and know-how to pull this together within a single day was truly staggering.  And we can't thank Kit Carson Internet enough.

What are you doing to ensure this never happens again?  Now we have an active and tested, fiber-cut-proof backup connection in place and working.  It's not yet as fast as we'd like, and is currently experiencing some packet loss, but our higher speed fiber connections should come back online later tonight.  And once we are back to full strength we'll get the backup connection speed and packet loss sorted out.  And know that we will leave this backup connection in place forever, so this never happens again.

We have a much meatier newsletter this month, with recent technical updates, great news about Oleg aka angry_vincent, a profile of Kery, a new user – and his install challenges, and some really useful and detailed info about our bug tracker and how to use it well. Let’s start by covering the latest updates:

Note that we are using the Blog functionality of the Forums to publish the newsletter. This also gives you the ability to subscribe to a syndication feed to be notified of new newsletters, and the newsletter itself has a comment section on the bottom which you can use to provide feedback.

Best,

Daniel

(Many thanks to Adbosco who is the editor of the newsletter)

If you want to have anything appear in future newsletters, please reach out to @drobbins or @adbosco -- here on forums or on Discord.

mount /boot ; emerge dev-embedded/rpi-eeprom sys-boot/raspberrypi-firmware sys-kernel/raspberrypi-image media-libs/raspberrypi-userland ; reboot

More infos on #raspberry-pi (discord)

Metro, our official stage3 build tool, now has a brand-new setup tool which should make initial setup of Metro quite easy. Please check out our high-quality initial setup docs, written by @adbosco.

That's not all.

You may have heard of our Evolved Bootstrap project, which is also called Funtoo from Scratch. The goal of this project has been to build Funtoo completely from scratch, in a fully automated way. In other words, it's possible to build Funtoo without starting from a Funtoo or Gentoo system, just from a base gcc compiler.

We have been building a stage1 using Funtoo from Scratch for several months in beta form, but today we have successfully had this stage1 be accepted by Metro, and used to build a stage2 and stage3. This opens a new world of possibilities for bootstrapping Funtoo, and also opens up new possibilities for development. Just as for Metro, we have full documentation on how to tie FFS and Metro together, on our wiki.

Best,

Daniel

Our initial havester branch, harvester/2022-09, has been merged into the official Funtoo tree (info here: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester/Branches/2022-09 )

Now, we have launched a new harvester branch, 2022-10: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester/Branches/2022-10

For more information on Harvester, our CI tree, please see: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester

Best,

Daniel

I'm happy to announce our most recent new technology, called "Harvester"! You  can learn more at https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester (including FAQ and Developer FAQ) with a summary below:

The harvester project is focused on providing a meta-repo that can be used for active development by Funtoo Linux contributors. This allows evaluation of experimental and potentially disruptive changes in a completely separate tree without impacting regular Funtoo Linux installs.

The Harvester Concept

Harvester exists as a branch of kit-fixups, which is listed at the top of this page. harvester.funtoo.org uses it to generate a full meta-repo, containing experimental changes. These changes are made available via git from harvester.funtoo.org directly, and can be consumed via ego sync.

Harvester Benefits

With harvester, we aim to:

Make community testing easier

By providing a system that can be used to do full community-based integration testing without having to locally generate your own meta-repo.

Accelerate development

By providing a 'judgement-free' space to evaluate aggressive and potentially breaking changes, and to learn how these changes impact Funtoo, for better or worse, without causing problems on live systems.

Make things more fun

We all have limited time. Sometimes we make a 'best effort' to test our PR, but it still breaks something. This is definitely "not fun" for the contributor, for Funtoo staff, or for users. We want to avoid these situations, and avoid having to frantically rush to clean up breakages that impact users, or get upset at people for braking the tree. Harvester allows us as a community to roll out mature, tested changes to users. This keeps Funtoo development "fun" and a positive experience for all! We don't want the 'stressful way' of dealing with problems to be our default way. It should only be the rare exception. Our process should produce successful results rather than demand individual perfection. Harvester supports a process that keeps things "fun" by reducing the risk and thus stress related to changes to Funtoo.

The official "home" of Funtoo Boxer is on GitHub, with documentation viewable there:

https://github.com/funtoo/boxer

The purpose of Boxer is to have an officially-maintained tool for creating container and VM images for Funtoo, so that our users don't need to search the internet for scripts to build containers and VM images, and so we can easily maintain and document these processes so they always work optimally.

In the 1.0.3 release, we currently support the creation of Docker and Singularity container images, with more container and VM formats to be added in future releases.

To install boxer, you can "emerge boxer" on Funtoo systems. On non-Funtoo systems, a "pip install funtoo-boxer" should install it. Additionally, it is possible to run Funtoo Boxer directly from a cloned git repository -- please see the README.rst for more details on this.

Enjoy Boxer -- and we welcome GitHub pull requests for this new and exciting tool!

Best,

Daniel Robbins

Have you ever thought about officially joining the Funtoo project and helping us move Funtoo forward? I've added a new Staff (General) role to our Open Roles page on the wiki! This job description now defines what we officially expect from all Staff for the Funtoo Linux project -- basically the baseline for our team. It's where everyone should start if they are wanting to get officially involved with being part of our team.

Why have this job description formally posted? In the past, joining our staff has been an informal process of being involved to some degree on Discord and engaging with us. While this has been low-key and flexible, we have a variety of people who have a variety of time commitments and expectations have not always been clear. As the project is growing, we are defining more focused goals for the project and a more straightforward, open and consistent application process is needed.

If you are already contributing actively to Funtoo, consider applying for a Staff position and joining us by sending an email to jobs@funtoo.org 🙂 If you are currently Staff or have previously been Staff for Funtoo, consider this a way of getting more insight into how we are trying to more clearly define our culture and work community, and take a look at our direction. This is going to help us to build the kind of community that we can be truly proud of.

Best Regards,

Daniel Robbins
Creator, Gentoo Linux
BDFL - Funtoo Linux

If you develop autogens for Funtoo, then you know that metatools is our official tooling for performing autogen magic. I have just released an official 1.1.0 release of metatools. Plenty of major new features, which are described on the wiki:

https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Metatools/Releases/1.1.0

An ebuild for metatools-1.1.0 will appear soon in the Funtoo meta-repo. Enjoy.

Enjoy! 

Download Link: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD/Releases

I wanted to let everyone know about "next" release -- which is the new release of Funtoo that is intended to receive regular updates to all the latest packages.

Currently, a generic_64 build of next-release is available here:

https://build.funtoo.org/next/x86-64bit/generic_64/

'next' release currently includes gcc-11.2.0 and an updated unified binutils (binutils and binutils-libs have been combined, and binutils-config has been removed.) It also has a small handful of updated packages.

Our intention is to gradually add more and more auto-generated ebuilds to 'next' so that it is fully updated at all times. Next-release *may* break -- and if you use next-release, you should be aware of this. Right now, the stage3 is building but it's likely that DE's like GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE will need gcc10 fixes for certain packages to build properly. I'm hoping to generally keep the stage3 functioning at all times as we gradually update everything inside next-release to be current. We at least have a working stage3 as a starting point :) And it's fine to test DE's and open issues for any ebuilds that don't build -- so we can all start working on fixing them.

SO -- YOU CAN HELP!

So, since Funtoo is a user-based distribution, we provide a way for you, technical user, to help us in our goal of updating next-release. I am particularly interested in autogens for various ebuilds in the stage3. If you would like to autogen something on the stage3, all you need to do is open a bug at https://bugs.funtoo.org, entitled something like "autogen sys-apps/foo in next-release". Then describe what you would like to do and why. I think the most obvious candidates for autogens are stand-alone tools like gzip, for example, which are not libraries. These are the easiest initial candidates. Once your bug has been reviewed, it will be moved to a "ready to fix" state, at which point it will be possible to submit a PR to code.funtoo.org. Here are the steps to create a PR:

1. Create Funtoo account at https://auth.funtoo.org/new (you need this for the bug tracker and code.funtoo.org)
2. Open an issue on the bug tracker (improvement) for the package you would like to autogen.
3. Talk to us in #dev-help on Funtoo Discord for help in writing your autogen.
4. When the issue moves to 'ready to fix', you are ready to submit your PR.
5. To create your PR, first fork the kit-fixups repo on code.funtoo.org. Then on the bug tracker issue, click "create branch", and choose your forked repo (myname/kit-fixups) as where the branch will live, and make your branch a "feature" against master. Give your branch the name of the bug, like "feature/FL-9000".
6. On your local system, "git pull; git checkout feature/FL-9000". Now do the edits...
7. When creating your files, you can put them in kit-fixups/core-kit/next/sys-apps/foo, for example. This will make the autogen active for next release only. This is a good, conservative place to put it (rather than in 1.4-release too, which is what would happen if you added it to kit-fixups/core-kit/curated/sys-apps/foo.) When you're all done: "git add new files, git commit -a -m "FL-9000: description here."
8. Then "git push", and you will see a URL on your console you can use to create your PR. Click on it, and create the PR against core-repositories/kit-fixups master.

You may get comments on your PR -- you can simply do new commits to your "feature/FL-9000" branch and they will automatically appear in the PR without any additional steps when you push to your branch.

Also note that I have a bunch of issues I created for "funtoo-izing" various packages, which was my way of saying "autogen them and put them in next-release." You can find these bugs listed under this epic link (see the associated issues) and if you want to update any of these packages, you can simply "start work" on any of these bugs by clicking the "start work" button and then follow the steps above (minus creating the issue -- since you're using an existing one):

https://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-8375

Thanks in advance for your involvement with next-release. This will be fun!
 

ZoneMinder is open source software used to capture, analyse, record, and monitor cameras.

It is quite a momentous day in Funtoo history as we have our first official public job posting! We are now actively hiring Staff Engineers. Please see https://www.funtoo.org/Open_Roles/Staff_Engineer for information on the role and how to apply.

Staff Engineers are very senior Engineers who have some leadership responsibility as well, so it is a role above "Senior Engineer".

PLEASE NOTE that these open positions have the possibility of regular compensation thanks to the support of the Funtoo community and containers. These are true community-supported roles, to serve the community with great Funtoo Open Source/Free Software work!

At this time, I have made next-release the recommended release of Funtoo Linux for most people, as it has a very recent release of gcc and has more modern support for applications. 1.4-release is still available but unless you are specifically looking for a stable release, most users will want to install next-release at this time.

If you go to the https://www.funtoo.org/Download link, you will see that next-release stages are now available for all x86-64bit builds of Funtoo Linux including amd64-zen3, as well as riscv-64bit and raspi4-64bit. Soon, I will be updating install documentation to reflect this fact.

If you would like a build of 1.4-release, you can always grab it from https://build.funtoo.org directly, and I wlll be looking into making wiki improvements so that the Download page will inform users when this option is available.

A new Funtoo Direct CDN infrastructure is currently in beta. Leveraging our kind support from CDN77, this new infrastructure vastly improves distfile downloads. I will describe some of the technology behind this in a future post, but for now just know it fixes a "lot of things", and you can test it out by adding the following to your /etc/make.conf:

GENTOO_MIRRORS="https://direct.funtoo.org"

In the next Funtoo release of Portage, coming in the next few days, this CDN will become our default (meaning portage will use this new CDN after an upgrade without any /etc/make.conf setting) and the older fastpull will be deprecated.

Jira Changes!

I've made several changes to Jira that the Funtoo Community should be aware of. The Jira workflow has been optimized -- all new issue will now be in the "Needs Triage" state. Funtoo Senior Staff will be able to triage issues, filling out an Impact field describing the impact of the issue, and setting a Priority to more clearly reflect the severity of the issue and its negative impact. Once an issue has been triaged, it is then ready to be worked on by a member of the Funtoo Community.

There is also now a hard-limit maximum of 5 issues that any given user may have in an "In Progress" or "Test/Integration" state at one time. This was done to prevent people (such as myself -- I am the worst offender) of accumulating many, many issues that are theoretically in progress but are really stalled. To help make this less painful, you can now move issues out of your "in progress" stack by clicking "stalled" -- this will result in the issue being unassigned from you and moved into the "Work Queue". 

In the past, "Work Queue" could not be touched by mere mortals, meaning you couldn't "Start Work" on anything in Work Queue, making this issue state kind of useless to anyone. This limitation has been removed! This means that you should not be afraid to use the "Stalled" button to move things out of your In Progress bucket, because you can always "Start Work" on these issues again when you are ready to resume work.

As part of this new change, I have also moved 50+ issues from "In Progress" to "Needs Triage". If anyone needs an issue triaged so that it can be moved back to "In Progress", please let @drobbins or @seemant know! (Otherwise we will triage the issues as soon as we can.)

So, how do you know when you've reached your 5-issue In Progress limit? Jira currently doesn't show you any warning -- you will just not be given the option to "Start Work" on any new issues. Want an easier way to keep track of what is in your In Progress stack? -- Use this query:  https://bugs.funtoo.org/issues/?filter=12503 (To find this in the future, go to Jira -> Issues -> My Bugs In Progress).

The goal of these Jira changes is to help to optimize our overall utilization of Jira to increase our velocity, and also ultimately allow "In Progress" status to reflect the reality of what is truly being actively worked on, and help us to work better as a distributed team. This also positively coerces us to close out those "almost done" issues to free up our availability, which I think is a really good development practice.

I am continually open to feedback about Jira so if you have some additional suggestions on how to improve things, be sure to find me on Discord and let's chat!

So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!

Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD

There's MORE:

• Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3 
• SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama
• 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon.

Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)

OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.

Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.

Best Regards,

Daniel Robbins, BDFL.

First, we'll start with the March Stages Refresh -- All Funtoo stage3's have been rebuilt as of 2022-03-10 or so and contain the latest package updates.

Funtoo Community Live Streams -- @siris has been running Funtoo Community Hacking Live Streams on Funtoo Discord -- These have been happening twice weekly and are a great way to get familiar with creating Funtoo autogens and just connecting with other people hacking on Funtoo. You can view upcoming Live Streams by going to our Discord and looking at the "Events" list. This link will show you open autogens on our bug tracker than you can help to tackle, and this wiki link will show you PR's that were turned into autogens, so you can learn from the past work of others.

Projects, Projects and More Projects! -- I've been building out a Projects infrastructure on the wiki, and as of right now we have launched over 12 projects! You can view the projects list on the right side of https://www.funtoo.org, and there is a live feed of project updates on the main page, too. This project infrastructure exists to help build out our efforts and also help users to find ways to get more involved. More is coming...

Security Project -- Is now officially organized, and actively engaged in addressing CVEs and other potential security vulnerabilities in Funtoo. There has been a very significant focused effort to fix CVEs in the past few weeks. Thanks to @mrl5 and @invakid404 and other community members for efforts here.

Evolved Bootstrap Project -- This is a project that @pnoeckerand I are spear-heading, with significant contribution from @invakid404 and @alex2101 -- documenting the steps on one wiki page that can be used to build out a cross-toolchain. What is the significance of doing this? Well, it will serve as a foundation for more innovation in the future in regards to Funtoo. We're starting phase 2 of this effort now that we have a PowerPC 64-bit cross-toolchain as well as an ARM-64bit MUSL toolchain documented. Phase 2 involves documenting -- on one wiki page -- how to build up a Gentoo/Funtoo system using the cross-toolchain. Getting all the steps on one wiki page is important, because bootstrapping a compiler toolchain is very order-dependent and having the big picture of the steps and their order helps us to streamline and innovate the process, which is harder to do when everything is isolated in individual ebuilds. Expect some interesting things to come from this project in the future.

Telemetry Project -- @siris has launched the Telemetry project, which is now starting phase 3. The goal of phase 3? No less than engineer a custom Golang Funtoo Prometheus exporter on code.funtoo.org that can expose all types of fun and useful Prometheus metrics about a Funtoo Linux system. Exciting stuff!

Languages Project -- @seemant has organized an umbrella Programming Languages Project, whose goal is "to enable developers to embrace Funtoo Linux as their preferred platform for programming. We aim to do this by ensuring that each programming language is able to supply a reasonably stable version and a reasonably up to date version of each language, as appropriate." @alex2101 is doing some excellent work in helping us to finally deprecate python2.7 in next-release. Find out more at the Funtoo Programming Languages project page and in the #languages project channel on Funtoo Discord.

New Funtoo Software Releases -- We have recently seen the release of fchroot 0.2.2 (major update), ego 2.8.6 (including fixes for AMD microcode), as well as metatools 1.0.2 (major release with no need for mongodb).

Beyond these things, there's even more stuff going on -- these are just the highlights. To connect with any of these efforts, please visit us on Discord. We look forward to working with our users to move these various efforts forward 🙂

Best,

Daniel

So, I've been around for about 60 days now, and I wanted to share some of what I've been doing and some thoughts from Daniel and the development team.

I've been slowly getting to know the Funtoo ecosystem more and more each day.  From exploring the Funtoo system from a predominantly Gentoo context to combing through JIRA to having voice chats on Discord with some of y'all.

During our time in Gentoo, Daniel and I interacted with users via:
IRC, bugzilla, and mailing lists (and btw, the website was generated xml that Daniel had written and designed).  Later on, the forums came along and blogs came along between when Daniel left and when I left.  Since that time, the world has changed a little bit.  IRC has been replaced by Discord and Telegram, bugzilla replaced by JIRA, and not a lot happening on the mailing lists, and Twitter is a new addition (and now the website is another avenue for direct interaction for the Funtoo community.

Last week I invited everyone in the #general Discord channel to ping me if you'd like to schedule a 1 hour chat with me.  We can talk about anything you like. And now I’m opening that invite up to all of you as well. If you can see this and want to chat, please let me know so that we can schedule some together.   Although..based on the conversations I've already been having, I reckon we'll talk mostly about Gentoo and Funtoo things 🙂.

Thank you for your patience with all the JIRA emails lately, that's because I was going through each open ticket one by one, to bring everything up to date, and jump start some that had languished. I took a second pass through the tickets to tag them.  Within a day, community members were using the new tags/labels. Thank y'all for noticing and adopting 🙂

The goal is for us to start creating a plan for Funtoo development. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll start to communicate about where we’ll be focusing our efforts.  Most importantly, we’ll be focusing extensively on improving the experience for those of you who want to learn how to write ebuilds and autogens and want to share your ebuilds and autogens with the rest of the community.

I’ll provide another update next month,  near the 90-day mark.  Meanwhile, I’d love to chat with y’all..

Please feel free to book a time on my calendar, or get in touch with me via DM on Discord, Telegram or the forums. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 930PM PDT (530AM UTC +1 day) please join us in the Voice channel in Discord, where @sirisis leading an educational series via screenshare. Come learn about making ebuilds, autogen'ing ebuilds, and more.

Looking forward to get to know ayou.

Cheers,

Seemant