xorg-server-1.11 going stable

In bug 394393, a number of x11 packages are going stable, including x11-base/xorg-server-1.11.2-r2.
After you upgrade, don't forget to rebuild your x11-drivers packages. Use the command that is shown in the elog messages to find out which. In case you missed it:

# qlist -I -C x11-drivers/

The output of qlist can be directly passed to emerge like this:

# emerge -1 $(qlist -I -C x11-drivers/)

If you are sitting at a gdm/kdm/xdm/... login prompt and can't type anything, press Alt+SysRq+R to switch to raw input mode and Ctrl+Alt+F1 will bring you back to the console.

Should portage hide build output from the user by default?

There has recently been a discussion on gentoo-dev about making portage output less noisy
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_4f0401066abe2dc04458a952ac2a17bd.xml

A solution was implemented to suppress the build output (the configure, make and install) by default, unless the user specifies --quiet-build=n explicitly. There were both supporters and critics of that idea, but no real data about what users think.

If you have an opinion on this, please visit  the forums and participate in the poll and/or comment in the forum thread:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901858.html (plain)
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901858.html (ssl)

New toy: AMD E-350 Zacate motherboard

Today I picked up an ASRock E350M1 from a local computer store for 94 EUR. I'll never be able to use an Atom again! 

On this mobo, there is an AMD E-350 Dual-Core CPU with a Radeon 6310 (comparable to 5450) graphics core. To use this board with open source drivers, you need xf86-video-ati-6.14.0 and kernel 2.6.38_rc1 or later. The proprietary driver supports it too, but I didn't test that.

According to various reviews, the E-350 does fairly well against the competition. Let's see how long compiling LibreOffice will take.