drobbins

Yep, I personally am happy with our very stable GNOME 36, and am willing to keep using it until we have a very stable GNOME 4+. 36 works very well for me and it doesn't feel old nor is it missing anything (in my opinion). I am not a huge fan of the new look for 4. I understand people may want the latest version and am happy to support work on having 4 in Funtoo. We do have up-to-date LXQT, Enlightenment and xfce I believe.

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux. 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.

Hello, everyone! Here's a summary of things going on in the Funtoo community -- and there is a lot to talk about: 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

Hi Everyone, The 2022-02 stage3 tarballs are now available for download. Enjoy. Best, Daniel

I want to announce a new Funtoo project that we're calling "Evolved Bootstrap". Here's the idea. Imagine you have access to a computer. It's not running Funtoo or even Gentoo, and it may even not truly be a Linux system. But there's a C compiler on the system. Now, imagine there was an easy way to build Funtoo entirely from source code -- even for a completely different CPU architecture (ARM, PowerPC) that you are currently running. No need to download a stage3 -- everything is fully bootstrapped, entirely from source code. The Funtoo system literally emerges from nothing before your eyes, rather than relying on any pre-built download from Funtoo. This is what is meant by evolved bootstrap, and it is also notable in that we are doing this as a community effort from the start, so we are going to be building this together. As a start, we are going to get familiar with "CLFS", or "Cross Linux From Scratch". Linux From Scratch and the LFS ecosystem is a fantastic community project that documents how to build a complete Linux system "from scratch", as evolved bootstrap will do. It is a series of manual steps, whereas evolved bootstrap will be automated. However, I do not want to lose the positive qualities that the LFS community has established in their projects -- providing excellent living documentation on what steps are needed, and why. We welcome you to join this effort as we get started. Please see https://www.funtoo.org/Evolved_Bootstrap for more information and join us in the #bootstrap channel in Funtoo Discord.

Today is a big day for Funtoo as metatools 1.0.0 is now available: https://www.funtoo.org/Metatools This page will give you information on what metatools is all about and how it forms a foundational component of Funtoo Linux development. The big deal is that metatools is now much easier to use and understand, and also much easier to install.

Generally you'd be learning Python 3 if you started now. There are just some minor syntax incompatibilities in the core language and there were other minor changes. And python3 has more features and extensions, and most modules work best with 3 now (many have stopped supporting 2.x.)

Thank you, morphmex. Very kind words. I do think Zogg had some decent points but also with some acidity mixed in. Thank you for standing up for me, sometimes I don't realize when there is a bit too much acidity. It is definitely confusing when it is mixed with feedback that is attempting to be constructie. We are currently a small (but rapidly growing) project and I have tried to not just ignore Zogg's feedback, but I will gladly ignore the bad attitude I felt from him at times 🙂 As you say, there are a lot of projects to choose from and it is wrong to have a sense of entitlement from a volunteer software project.

Here is the link to the same card but cheaper price: https://www.newegg.com/p/1FT-0014-00723

@frodo42 most servers have crappy video. If you are truly doing GUI things in this server, I recommend picking up one of these cards if you can: https://www.newegg.com/amd-100-506115/p/N82E16814105101 I am a fan of this card -- it is powering my dual 4K setup and is very fast (so yes, this is my primary graphics card for my home workstation.) This particular model comes with a low-profile bracket which are often found in servers (as well as full height bracket.) All you will need is a free PCIe (full height or low-profile) slot, x16 if you have it but this card should work in an x8 slot as well. EDIT: I picked mine up about 3 weeks ago from Newegg for $220, so hunt around and you may be able to find cheaper (newegg is currently showing ~$290 for this card). It's the HP edition which includes the extra bracket. You will also get FULL HP WARRANTY since it's a HP card in an HP server 😉 (there's a note in the box it comes in that the card warranty only applies if you plug it into HP-branded equipment).

Also note, this was on a server where I didn't care if I had graphics capability or not -- I just wanted to make sure I could get to a console I could see in the datacenter. This is really all you need for a server (in theory) as you can connect remotely for everything else except emergencies.

@frodo42 I think I have the answer for you because I had the exact same problem. I have an older server with a built-in matrox video card. Recent kernels would cause the screen to go blank as you describe with an invalid mode. The solution was for me to figure out what module it was using for framebuffer and BLACKLIST that module, so the framebuffer would not initialize. I put: blacklist matroxfb_base Into /etc/modprobe.d/video.conf, and this did the trick. (reboot after, of course) Do some grepping of "lsmod" and see what video modules have a usage count of > 0 and blacklist one until you prevent the kernel from kicking the framebuffer into an incompatible mode. Sometimes, the monitors in datacenters are old and may not support the default resolution of the chip in the server, or the refresh rate. Or this could simply be a new bug in Linux kernels related to older server gfx chipsets and how it initialized the framebuffer. Unfortunate that this is needed but I did start seeing this with newer kernels after I updated them recently. Previous kernels did not have the issue. I also played around with different gfxmode settings and nomodeset but this never seemed to help. The blacklist of the module did.

@fredmyra yes, this is possible. Take a look at 'man 5 boot.conf' and this may help. This explains how to add other entries to grub when using ego boot. Alternatively, you can do it the other way and add the kernel, options and initramfs from /boot in Funtoo to another boot manager.

Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew. I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram. Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future. Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

I use pycharm professional (paid) because I do a lot of python. The JetBrains editors are pretty good and a 'sweet spot' in terms of functionality and usability. The python-code-related features really are helpful.

Also note: These are HP-specific cards but work in any system, although there is a note in the box saying warranty is void in non-HP systems. This is a low-profile card but comes with both low-profile and full-profile bracket. The low-profile edition is cheaper maybe due to people being afraid to order it for regular desktops when they shouldn't be worried at all as both brackets are included.

@gatolinux I am using this exact card to drive dual 4K monitors and getting great performance: https://www.newegg.com/p/1FT-0014-00723 (Radeon WX 3200 workstation card) You don't need to go massive GPU or NVIDIA if you are just looking for general purpose performance. That's what these workstation cards are good at. And if you use a standard DE (GNOME, etc.) stage3 or build up a desktop environment using our gfxcard-amdgpu mix-in, this will just work.

New next-release stage3 and GNOME images are now available at https://build.funtoo.org/next. These images have several updated things but are intended for active development only and not for production/stable systems. Please install them and help us test out GNOME and get other desktop environments supported! Builds are only currently available for amd64-zen2 and intel64-skylake. Please note that next-release is inherently unstable and thus can break at any time. The current status of next-release is that basic stage3's and GNOME stage3 should work fine, and we are expanding out from here to find issues and address them via the bug tracker.

@dutch-master I totally agree. Ironically, I started Enoch (which became Gentoo) when I got frustrated by dpkg in Debian 1.3. Portage has since 'evolved' into something that has a lot of problems that dpkg originally had -- of being very good at telling you why it can't do something but not very good at resolving the problem it's complaining about, or providing a coherent error message when there is a problem. Software tends to evolve this way -- it becomes more rigid over time. The cause is that most engineers will try to make the software more 'correct' and eliminate problems, but they often do this without advancing the architecture and just adding more internal checks. This actually can significantly reduce the usability of the software. This approach becomes much worse when the error messages displayed are not comprehensible by mortals. Despite Portage's strengths, it does suffer from this way more than I'd like. We do have some technical work in progress that should offer some relief for this to some degree.

Thanks, @seemant. Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew. While Zogg started this thread with (in my opinion) overly trolling and negative opinions about Funtoo -- which me and some others found triggering -- there was some useful critical feedback mixed in, which I definitely reflected on and it would frankly be a mistake to ignore. I have tried to address much of the basic conceptual issues he raised (like differences from Gentoo) via the Wolf Pack Philosophy and Support Matrix (linked from main page of www.funtoo.org). But clearly there is still more work to do. I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram. Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future. Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Due to https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy -- it would seem that a wolf is getting some traction as a mascot!

We talked about this on Discord a bit -- I definitely recommend trying out our official desktop (gnome in particular) stage3's first, and ensuring those are working well for you, before playing with KDE, as we don't have a KDE stage yet and it's not officially support (but in progress): https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix

Funtoo Community, One important quality of the Funtoo community, which is somewhat unique, is that officially, there are no 'developers'. In Funtoo, we are all users. Even as BDFL, I consider myself to be a user of Funtoo, first and foremost, who sometimes puts on a developer hat (OK -- I do this quite often 🙂) Why is this distinction important? In Funtoo, I do not want to have two different classes of people, 'users' and 'developers', with different jobs. I have found that communities formed around this model can manifest some cultural problems, creating walls for users that denies them a voice, and also encourages a developer culture that is disconnected from the user community. That is why it's so important. I have updated the introductions on the following pages to explain this in more detail: https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix By having this in two key documents, I'm hoping this concept will become more and more familiar. Remember, when you talk about Funtoo to your friends, be sure to explain that this "user-centric" philosophy is a key part of our culture. We are all users. Best Regards, Daniel Robbins also a user of Funtoo 🙂

@stilzchenno actually, that is not true. python3.7 is the standard interpreter in 1.4-release and this has been the case for a long time. We just didn't participate in Gentoo's 'pythocalypse' where 2.7 was forcefully removed from the tree prematurely resulting in a lot of chaos. We still have py2.7 and compat ebuilds for packages that need it. We now have a Support Matrix online, which is here: https://www.funtoo.org/Support_Matrix I have also added Wolf Pack Philosophy: https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy I have also updated the main wiki page with this text: "Funtoo is similar to Gentoo, but take heed -- it is also different! Our distinctives all stem from our different approach to community. If you are new to Funtoo, please familiarize yourself with Funtoo's Wolf Pack Philosophy. It will help you to understand what Funtoo is all about. And the second half of the page will explain some key technical differences in comparison to Gentoo." So hopefully this will help people to understand that Funtoo is different from Gentoo, and that the roadmap is defined by users who contribute and 'howl' on the bug tracker. We do not have a 'team' of people who are building funtoo for you. WE (all the users) are the team.

It is also possible you didn't run 'ego boot update' so you are missing a grub.conf, even though grub technically is installed. I believe this will result in no menu appearing, and you getting an interactive GRUB prompt.