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badcomputer.org

wednesday, may 9, 2007

Paludis

Well, precipitated by a three and-a half minute wait for an `emerge -puD world`, I dedided to install Paludis a few days ago and give it a try. Yesterday I installed it on my fileserver/backup desktop (nina). I must say I am very impressed. Now really: speed is hardly the only, nor certainly the best reason to switch over. What I find most compelling is the 'sets' feature. What are 'sets' you ask? Well, you already have a pretty good idea, as emerge/portage comes with two of them: 'system' and 'world'. Paludis, of course, supports world and system, as well as two more builtin sets: 'everything' and 'security' (if you build with 'glsa' USE flag).

You can also define your own sets. So: let's say you are building a server, and want to quickly install a LAMP stack. All you need to do is create a file '/etc/paludis/sets/lamp.conf':

* net-www/apache
* dev-lang/php
* dev-db/mysql

Now you can do a `paludis --install lamp` and Apache, PHP, and MySQl, and all their dependancies will be installed. Later updates can similarily be grouped together logically. One could also see using user-defined sets to create custom Kde package collections. That is: if you don't want everything in kdenetwork, and don't want to mess around with the split ebuilds you could collect the apps you want in `sets/kde.conf` and be done with it.

I am going to play around with this for a week or so, and I will probably end up migrating the rest of my boxes over to Paludis. Good work Paludis devs!

2007.0 released

This seems to be the big news in Gentooland. Wasn't really a big deal for me, as there is nothing to upgrade or reinstall like some other sad, sad, Linux distros. Just relink your make.profile and be done with it.

Io - cool new language

I wrote a new sieve in a cool language called Io which has a syntax similar to Smalltalk, or perhaps even Ruby without all the Perl damage mixed in. I must remember to write something non-trivial, as it is very cool IMHO.

Hockey

And last but not least, it is now well into May, when the birds are chirping, sun is shining, buds are budding and a young man's fancy turns to ice-hockey. First of all, NHL-wise, I am sad that to say my Vancouver Canucks gave up after the first round and went out 4-1 to Anaheim. A fate, I sadly acknowledge, they richly deserved. I take solace in the fact that Detroit will surely give Pronger and the rest of the Ducks a sound thrashing in the conference finals. I guess I will start cheering for Ottawa now. I like Ottawa, but I also like Buffalo. Buffalo is a really good, young, hard-working team that I think will be dominant in the next few seasons. Gotts cheer for the Canadian team however, so Ottawa it is.

Additionally, Canada remains undefeated entering the quarterfinals of the 2007 IIHF World Championship. I will have to wake up at 6:00am localtime to catch the matchup with Switzerland tomorrow morning. As long as they don't blow it like they did at the Turin Olympics, they should likely move on through to a semifinal matchup with Sweden, which as always, will be great. Unfortunately, TSN has only been showing the Canadian games, so I haven't been able to watch or guage how some of the other teams, namely Russia, Sweden, and Finland, have been playing.

That is all

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