Hello Eric, thanks for taking the time to do this interview for Mage Power.
Hi Paul, thank you for letting me have this opportunity. :)

Would you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Linux?
I became interested in Linux back in 1995 (or so) while I was in high school with my trusty Intel 386 SX (custom built, of course ;)). Microsoft Windows 3.11 (for Workgroups!) was meh and I wanted to try OS/2 Warp, but could only find a demo version. Back then I only had a 2400 baud modem, so downloading took a while. I bought Debian 1.0 from CheapBytes and fell in love with that as soon as I started playing with it. Sure, it was a PITA to figure out how Linux worked, what partitions were, etc., but the most fun was video, especially when X gave you a warning that incorrect frequencies *could* fry your monitor and/or video card.

As I understand it, Source Mage GNU/Linux was forked from a distribution named Sorcerer. What initially led you to become a developer for the Sorcerer distribution?
After using Debian and RedHat (had a nice GUI installer compared to Debian’s) for a while and a year into college I was tired of all the “broken” dependencies (you know, you need libgtk+-2.4.5.3-32 for GNOME, but GIMP needs libgtk+2.4.5.2-42, which conflict) which binary distributions have. I went looking for something new. The first distribution I found was Sorcerer GNU/Linux (SGL) by Kyle Sallee, who did all of the work. After a few months of using SGL I started submitting updates and, eventually, got CVS commit access as my work turned out to be not too crappy. ;) Later on, shortly before SGL was wiped from the Internet, Kyle asked for help and I formed the Grimoire Auditing Group (GAG ;)) and recruited others to help clean up our spells, though it only lasted until the end of SGL.

Could you explain how Source Mage GNU/Linux was started and what your role was at the time?
While SGL was still going well, Chuck S. Mead decided that he wanted it to go in another direction, which Kyle did not agree with, and so Chuck forked SGL into Lunar Penguin (now Lunar Linux). I believe it took a week or so, but eventually Kyle got so fed up with the fork that he wiped all of the SGL files from the Internet in March 2002, so we could no longer get updates, check the website, anything. Ryan Abrams (who became our first Project Lead) and Eric Schabell (who became our first Grimoire Lead) got together and put up the grimoire, ISO, etc. (each SGL install had all the files needed to re-host, except for CVS history, which some of us had anyways) on a server one of them had (IIRC, this was back in 2002 some time). I thought SGL was dead, so I volunteered to help out this group by working on the grimoire as I had done in SGL.

How was the name Source Mage decided upon?
I’ll leave out the why as that’s another rant. ;) For the name, Ryan asked for a list of names the users and developers liked and once we had a nice long list, we voted on which one we liked the most and Source Mage GNU/Linux (we purposefully kept the GNU/Linux part) was “born”.

What kind of memories do you have of the very early days of SMGL?
Lots and lots of fun work. :) There was always more work to do than there was workers (similar to now), but everything was still “new”. It was as though we had landed on foreign soil with familiar tools and said, “Make do”. So we did. I had a lot of conversations that looked like I was talking to myself, but that’s because there were three Eric’s. I was One of Three, Eric Schabell Two of Three (I think I got One of Three because I started that naming scheme, not that I was the first Eric in SMGL), and Eric Womack was Three of Three. Later on Eric Laberge joined and he became Four of Three (though I believe we changed it to Four of Four soon after).

You were the Project Lead for SMGL for many years. What led you to that position?
Mostly necessity as we needed someone to be the Head Wizard and do all the boring “paperwork”. While I enjoyed being the PL, I only accepted the position because no one else volunteered. I would much rather do grimoire work.

What is your current role in SMGL?
I’m currently the Grimoire Lead, where I try to organize all the grimoire developers into a cohesive unit. This is my favourite job in SMGL, and I’m glad to be back in it. :)

Would you please explain what the Grimoire is?
A grimoire is a complete container of spells, their sections, and supporting scripts (such as account management) necessary for the spells to function. We have multiple official grimoires: z-rejected for binary-only and non-OSI licenses, games for the majority of games, test is the up-to-date grimoire where packages are first released for wide testing, stable-rc is where we have a snapshot of test to prepare for a new stable release, and the stable grimoire has some testing done to it to verify packages work and is the most bug-free release. There is no one grimoire, but rather multiple grimoires each providing a different selection. A few unofficial grimoires are maintained by various developers with packages they are working on and one hosted on the SMGL servers is xorg-modular, where we’re working on integrating the newest X.org release process into our main grimoire.

How do you like the Grimoire Lead position compared to the Project Lead position?
I would say the Grimoire Lead position is my favourite. As the GL I get to fix spells and organize package improvements that everyone may feel. I am not the most organized person, so less management is good for me.

The current tagline for SMGL is “Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic”. On some of the older artwork I have seen the tagline “Have a sorcerous day!”. Was this ever an official tagline for the distribution?
The “Have a sorcerous day!” is from the Sorcerer GNU/Linux days. The tagline was changed as we moved to separate ourselves from the non-GNU Sorcerer Linux formed after the split.

The raven has become a beloved symbol for SMGL. Do you remember how the raven started his reign?
When we were trying to decide the name for SMGL, “Raven” was one of the options that many people liked a lot, but “Source Mage” had more support. So when SMGL won the name the Raven was proposed for our logo. Long story short, the Raven won and was named “Quoth”.

What projects are you currently working on for Source Mage?
Currently I’m working, as I have time, on getting the latest OpenOffice to compile (such a PITA to work with) as well as getting GCJ to provide JAVA, but that will have to wait until 4.3 is released, most likely.

What advice could you give other developers who want to start contributing to Source Mage?
Come join us in #sourcemage and ask any questions you may have, we’re there to help. Submitting patches via Bugzilla which fix bugs will be much appreciated, but if you’d rather submit the patch yourself, ask the appropriate team for access and, depending on the team, we’ll hook you up. :)

Does Source Mage offer any advantages over other source based Linux distributions?
I haven’t used another source-based distro in a long time with the exception of Gentoo on my SPARC, but that was years ago when I set that up and haven’t really used the Gentoo part of it in a while. From what I recall our main advantage is in simplicity: everything is in BASH, which many Linux admins are familiar with (and if not, they should be ;)). We also offer more choices up front with our config_query* functions and Sorcery’s libdepends, whereas other distros require you to know beforehand what you want and to modify or set environment variables. Our tools also seem much simpler and easy to use (want to rebuild every package? `sorcery rebuild`) when compared to others I’ve seen.

What do you enjoy most about contributing to Source Mage?
Seeing others benefit from the work I do and, different from work, seeing my work available for others within six hours (through normal tarballs, or immediately if they use git) to use. Also fixing bugs people find and having them fixed in quick order, with a hearty thanks for the quick work.

Do you have a favorite Window Manager?
My current favorite is Enlightenment DR17, but now and then it breaks and I fall back to KDE (quite the opposite ;)). I’ve tried just about every window manager out there, but only like the prior two plus, XFCE, GNOME, and Fluxbox, depending on my mood.

How did you develop your programming skills?
Mostly practice. My first programming class was my freshmen year of college, but the class seemed to go fairly slowly so I decided to write a video game in C to learn the language. That was fun. :) Next semester we worked on C++, but the presentation for templates was confusing, so I re-wrote my game in C++ using templates to learn those. We also used a GUI in my C class called SRGP (Some Rotten Graphics Program we called it, I have no idea what it really stood for) which lead me to learning OpenGL on my own by writing a planetarium in C/OpenGL. So most of my knowledge came from self-guided projects, while school just got me interested in them.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
I know C, C++, BASH, HTML and some x86 assembly, MS Visual Basic, Sed, Python, PHP, PERL, Awk, C#. My favourite so far is C#, though I’m still learning it.

In your opinion, what could greatly improve Source Mage at this point?
A bug free path from downloading the ISO to having GNOME and/or KDE running on x86 and x86_64 (our two most popular platforms). This, of course, will require a lot of work and testing, but is fairly close (I fixed the issues I found with my recent x86_64 install on a work machine).

Source Mage is about 5 years old. Why hasn’t there been a 1.0 release?
Because most people (including myself) prefer to work on what we use, and all that’s left for 1.0 apparently does not have many developers using it (e.g. LVM on the ISO and many of the packages with bugs in the grimoire). The main issue is motivating people to work on issues that do not affect them.

To make a push towards a 1.0 release of Source Mage, what do you think needs to be completed?
All that’s really left from our 1.0 RoadMap are less open bugs against the grimoire and some ISO/Installer work. The grimoire team needs to have a focus on fixing open bugs, which I plan on setting out to do as I find the time. The ISO team is looking for volunteers to help as it’s only Karsten (BearPerson) doing much of the work at the moment and he’s fairly busy (like many of us).
Editor’s note: Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has recently joined the ISO team and is providing help.

How many computers do you own and what are their names?
I have 6 computers:
jet: An Athlon-XP for gaming ;)
thunk: My main laptop, an IBM ThinkPad R40
moby: Used to be my main laptop, but it runs too hot, a Dell Inspiron 4000
rover: My first laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3000 (barely works now)
sparky: A fun toy. ;) A Sun UltraSPARC 5
cerberus: The machine behind sandall.us, an Athlon-MP (with one processor burned out, so not SMP :()

What other things do you enjoy besides computers?
Hanging out with friends, playing tennis, bicycling around town, camping (tent, not camper), and Adrienne’s cooking :).

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
I’ve enjoyed working on SMGL (in one incarnation or another ;)) for six years and look forward to continuing to improve SMGL with help from our industrious developers around the world.

Thank you Eric!
Thank you for helping out with Mage Power, Paul. :)

-sandalle

Welcome to another edition of This Week in SMGL. I want to mention that this week is Thanksgiving in the States. Mage Power will be posting another interview next week. This time, Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall will be interviewed.

Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has been busy writing documents again. He has been working on describing Sorcery and Cast recently. Next on his list is dispel. If you are new to Source Mage, the documents provide a good explanation of each component.

A new ISO has been built for testing by Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer. This is great news! It is very good to see new action happening on the ISO front. Flux has passed it on to Cauldron Lead BearPerson now. More to come when information becomes available!

Jaka “lynx” Kranjc sent in some news that I would like to include to finish off this week’s activity:

“My last week was pretty fruitful. Most of the action concentrated in the middle of the week and on the grimoire QA - I fixed a bunch of bugs and resolved all the pending integrations. As a result, a new minor stable was released and the next stable will be more true to it’s name. The standard stable-rc testing procedure followed, but only Eric Sandall, George Sherwood and Mathieu Lonjaret helped, which is a shame. Not only is the Grimoire team the biggest, but also this stable-rc ritual is pretty trivial and requires more involvement only when bugfixing. The initial and constant part is just about checking if spells on the list have any known (severe) bugs and doing a sorcery rebuild with the stable-rc (chroot saves). Fixing any of the known bugs is of course much welcome, but that initial part is as important.

Sorcery and Quill received some minor attention too. The latter just a bugfix, the former a few more. Among others, confmeld now has a man page and some more investigation was done on the ‘transaction commit failed’ bug.”

This concludes this week’s edition. See you next week and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Last week was a busy week kicked off by Juuso “iuso” Alasuutari and topped off by the latest Source Mage developers meeting. Juuso wrote a new patch that has the potential to make a SMGL developer’s life easier.

Here is the message from Juuso “iuso” Alasuutari:

“I’ve written a patch for pkg-config which adds the option to log to a Unix socket. That means you can capture info about what packages a configure script is looking for — without ever having to modify the scripts. You simply fire up a program that listens on a socket, set the PKG_CONFIG_LOG_SOCKET variable to point to that socket, and voilá: pkg-config will report the packages and versions requested from it.

Add to that some logic for matching pkg-config package names with spell names, and you get a program that tells you what spells a source package is hungry for.

I’ve uploaded a tarball with the patch plus an example program to demonstrate the feature. I’ll highly appreciate any feedback. Get it at: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~a445063/pkg-config-logsocket.tar.bz2“

One of the new Source Mage developers welcomed last week was Vlad “Enqlave” Glagolev. Here is the message sent by Eric “sandale” Sandall:

“I would like to welcome a long-time SMGL user (since 2003) into the developer fold. You may know him from ages ago as Stelz, or perhaps more recently as Enqlave, or innocuous stealth, or the taken Codex on IRC. Those whom really know him say he is Vlad Glagolev, but we know his True Name. ;) Somehow we have managed to dupe him into helping out with our packages and he has even volunteered to focus on the python-devel and xfce sections, but we know he won’t stay locked in those for long.

Please welcome our newest member to the Valley, Enqlave!”

Another new developer was also announced last week by Karsten “BearPerson” Behrmann:

“As I mentioned in the meeting, we have a new wizard grabbing a cauldron to help with the cooking of our ISOs. You’ll probably know him as flux_control on IRC, or just plain flux. Someone managed to convince him to brave the insanity-producing vapors of the kitchen, to see if our Ancient Recipes (now with new flavor!) still work as they used to, and to stir the old fires up to a warm yellow glow again.

So please join me in a warm welcome to flux_control as he wanders the Valley to add his power to the Circle of Mages :)”

Eric “sandalle” Sandall also generated a new Grimoire stable-rc-0.15 to test. Here is the official message from him:

“The stable-rc-0.15 branch is ready and the Wiki is up at http://sourcemage.org/Stable-0.15 for our eager developers to start checking for bugs. I will generate the tarballs (x86 and x86_64) and put them on the wiki once they’re up.

The stable-rc tarball has been updated on the server and will be working its way out to the mirrors.”

Martin “mar_s” Spitzbarth has been working on a spell for the new ATI fglrx driver. He is making progress and has pushed the spell to a devel branch. He added some information about the spell to his web site.

Juuso “iuso” Alasuutari sent out a message about a Udev change coming:

“Udev’s toolset (udevinfo, udevmonitor, udevsettle, udevstart, udevtest, and udevtrigger) will be merged into a single binary in the next release [0], our init scripts need to be changed then.

[0] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/hotplug/udev.git…“

Treeve Jelbert sent out an update on his KDE4 progress:

“I have just spent some time testing kde-3.95.2 in a clean amd64 partition, everything builds and mosts things that I need are ok, current problems:

• can’t add printer
• any use of javascript crashes konqueror
• sometimes need ot force reload of a page in the browser

On my normal amd32 system I have problems building some packages, probably because of some obscure conflicts with kde3/qt3. Both systems now use xorg-modular.”

Since David “dmlb2000″ Brown had great luck and positive response from testers for glibc 2.7. He integrated it to the devel-glibc test branch Friday.

Project Lead Jeremy “emrys” Blosser sent out a Lead Developer Vote for Paul “novaburst” Beel.

“We have a motion/second/acceptance of a Lead Developer Vote for Paul Beel aka novaburst. Please send your signed ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘abstain’ vote to me privately by Sun Nov 18 18:45 UTC. Lead Developers must vote, General Developers may vote.

http://sourcemage.org/SourceMage/Voting_Policy“

Finally, a developer meeting was held on 11-11-2007. There is a summary posted by Mage Power right below this post. If you want to read the entire log, you can read it here.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK. SAME MAGE-TIME, SAME MAGE-CHANNEL!

Here is the summary from the latest Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer Meeting. It was held in the #sourcemage-admin irc channel.

Everyone gathered around the SMGL crystal ball and the discussion began. The first order of business revolved around the Cauldron Team. If you are new to Source Mage, the Cauldron involves the ISO. Cauldron Lead Karsten “BearPerson” Behrmann stated they were scaling back to simpler installer schemes until they can get a regular release schedule started again. The current ISO generation system is too complicated.

Karsten introduced a new developer, Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer. Justin has been getting accustomed to the current Cauldron setup and working on rolling out a test ISO. Justin said he may have a new test ISO ready this week if things go as planned.

The Cauldron Team will focus on i486 and others as that’s the basic install, but they will do their best to get an x64 ISO out as well once they get things going again. The version of the ISO has not yet been determined.

Several developers offered to test a x64 version of the ISO. Karsten said once they move ahead he will post a mailing list announcement about x64 development, so anyone willing to help will be able to volunteer then.

The next discussion centered around the Grimoire. The Grimoire is our collection of spells or software. Grimoire Lead Eric Sandall started by mentioning the current influx of new developers. With the newest being Vlad “Enqlave” Glagolev. Enqlave has been a SMGL user for about 4 years, but decided to join us as a developer.

Eric Sandall said his free time lately has been lacking and this has caused the new stable grimoire releases to suffer. He mentioned that timelines are slipping, the developer list is not being purged according to policy and bugs are being submitted faster than they are being fixed. Developers stated that maybe the project was growing quickly as of late and that the bug count is pretty stable and not too far out of hand.

Andraž said he would contact the idle developers to check their status to help with determining inactivity. Eric Sandall will fix the timelines by looking for volunteers much sooner, as in right after the prior release at the latest. As for the bug list, he will be going through it to find outstanding bugs and point them out or at least give feedback on the bugs so the user knows we’re aware of it. He wants the bug count to decrease and not increase. Jaka “lynx” Kranjc volunteered to help Sandalle with the bugs, because he already has a good understanding of their status. Lynx said for stable we need to revert/fix this hal/hal-info bug, some integrations remain. Lynx will become the gatekeeper for this to facilitate things.

General grimoire developers are still needed. The current influx is welcome and more are definitely needed. Project Lead Jeremy “emrys” Blosser said all things considered he is still happy with how stable grimoire releases have been relative to other things.

Eric Sandall also stated he would like to find more developers to take over a section, as some sections seem to get ignored. While general devs pick up a few here and there, the section developers primary task is to check for bugs in that section and get them fixed. But the main need for section devs is not updates per-se, but bug triage. Feel free to send Sandalle an e-mail if you’d like a section.

Jaka added he would like to express some awe at our diligent grimoire updaters, especially Treeve Jelbert, Ladislav “lace” Hagara and George “p3pilot” Sherwood!

Lastly, Bugzilla needs updated. Jeremy will update things like Bugzilla when he moves it to the other datacenter if not before. The move will happen when Jeremy has the time to make the move.

Next on the list was Sorcery. Sorcery is our package management system. Sorcery Lead Jaka “lynx” Kranjc reported devel received a few fixes, but not in the blocker category. The focus is still on the new stable and the weird regression blocking it. He is investigating it further. Once this is fixed, version 1.14 of Sorcery will get all of the attention. Also, user Anmaster cleaned up half of the bashdoc pipeline and it now produces valid xhtml with css support. So the goal of having the APIs somewhere on the web site is closer.

Jeremy then asked to hear from the Tome side of things. Currently there is no Tome Lead developer, but work has been taking place. Tome is our documentation and web site area. Developers like Andraž have been moving the data from the Drupal side of things to the wiki. Ruskie said user Juan Carlos G. Torres (Jucato) has been helping with that. Most of the project related things(policy, developers etc…) have been transferred to the wiki under the SourceMage/ hierachy, but we still need to transfer the docs and any other possible pages that are around. Other than that he urges people to look over drupal pages and see if they can move one or two pages. That would help the whole effort much more easily.

Jeremy then reported about his projects. Mainly, stability, delegation and mail lists. For delegation he needs to get the script done so component leads can add their own own git repositories. He has started this already, by adding Andraž’s licenses repository and making the script as he goes, so stuff doesn’t get missed. The other thing he needs to do with git is move some repos around so we can add the p4 history ones back in without spamming the list. The mailing list stuff he mentioned is a priority for him because it’s the big block keeping him from catching back up with things. The developers determined the section aliases could be dropped to help with this.

Jeremy had this to say about the server move:

“I’m still planning to piggyback building this new server on some similar stuff I’m doing at work. Which is taking a break for the LISA conference this week but will be happening the week after that. Once it’s done at work I can spend a weekend day doing it for us and then schedule some services downtime to move things as they’re ready. I don’t intend to move Drupal. There’s a decent chance I can make time during the move to set up fudforums though. I do intend to get things like bugzilla and moinmoin updated on the move. On the ML front, do we have anyone completely wedded to the idea of using mailman? It’s not fun from an admin perspective, there are much better options for automation and integration with other stuff. I want to move us to one of those that mostly uses email for administration, still with web archives of course, but provide a web interface at least for some admin.”

Andraž reminded Jeremy there is a vote pending for a lead developer status for Paul “novaburst” Beel. Jeremy went ahead and sent the e-mail about this to the mailing list. It was also determined that Tome Lead nominations needed to happen. Jeremy will do nominations for Tome Lead next week.

To finish the meeting a rather large discussion involved the direction of the web site. The wiki needs access control. In the end, it was decided that we would do it by using git to handle the backend of the wiki. David Kowis confirmed the move by posting this on the official site: The next server we’ll be migrating too will no longer have drupal on it. Reason: no one maintains it. And it’s more than we need. We’ll simply lean on Mage Power! for all our news-y-ish things. We haven’t come up with a forums replacement yet. We’ll migrate to using the wiki for everything.

That concludes the meeting notes. It was an informative meeting and well attended. Great job Mages!

When I first posted the new “This Week in SMGL” a couple weeks ago, I mentioned it would usually be posted on Sunday. Well, I lied. It seems to work better for me on Monday, what can I say. Hold on to your wizard hat, here we go!

Source Mage Developer David “dmlb2000″ Brown has placed glibc 2.7 in devel. Many developers have been busy testing it. David has put a lot of work into this. Thanks David!

Project Lead Jeremy Blosser has scheduled the next Source Mage Developer meeting for November 11th at 1700/UTC. The meeting will be held on the #sourcemage-admin irc channel.

Andraž “ruskie” Levstik and Ethan “eekee” Grammatikidis have kicked off the migration of the official Source Mage web site. It is moving away from Drupal and moving to MoinMoin Wiki. You can see it forming here. Eekee did a great job on the new theme.

Treeve Jelbert has been working hard on KDE4! Here is his message to the sm-discuss mailing list last week.

“kde4 in test is now at version 3.95.0

I have built all of the spells, on an amd32 with xorg-6.9.0 and on amd64 with xorg-modular.

I had problems with two spells on my old xorg setup, which may be related to my xorg configuration.

Most of the programs appear in my normal kde3 menu and can be run from there, otherwise start them manually from /opt/bin.

For the more adventurous, you can try to run a full kde4 desktop:

1. create a user who belongs to the group kde4
2. disable the init script kdm
3. enable the init script kdm4
4. change the default displaymanager in /etc/sysconfig/facilities
5. after restarting at level 5, it should now be possible to login to the new user and encounter the strange new world of kde4. Lots of right clicking may be useful.

The first time login may be rather slow, as it builds lots of new data caches.

At present kde4 is configured to keep the desktop data in ~/.kde4 (see /etc/profile.d/kde4.sh). This means that if you use the same user for both kde3 and kde4, the desktop settings can be completely different. It also means that your existing email is safe in the other desktop.

It is also possible to run a kde4 desktop on top of your normal desktop, but I shall explain that another time.

The next release is due in about 3 weeks.”

David Kowis stated the SMGL Server Fundable was a huge success! Sqweek wrote this nice little poem to commemorate the achievement.

This was a triumph!
I’m making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS!
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction
Source Mage GNU/Linux
We build it from source
Without remorse
For the good of all wizards
Except the ones who fizzled
But there’s no sense crying over every segfault
You just keep on scribing ’till you run out of salt!
And the grimoire gets done
And you make a stable one
For the mages who cast all night long

Finally, a designer friend of mine is working on vectorizing the current Source Mage logo shown here. I explained to her we do not want to change the logo, it just needs to be a vector. She is making the raven look like the one in the long logo as well. Plus, she is designing the same type of logo for Mage Power! This is scheduled to be finished before Christmas.