xorg-server-1.12 going stable

It is time for xorg-server-1.12 to go stable in bug 419473. If you want to help testing, run the awk command

# awk '/YOURARCHHERE/ {print "="$1}' x11_stable.list > x11_stable.keywords

on the stabilization list attached to the bug, and add the result to /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords (or package.keywords if you are still using the legacy location).

After the xorg-server upgrade, do not forget to rebuild all x11-drivers. If you find a regression, please report a bug (if none already exists) and make it block bug 419473.

In related news, our current x11-drivers/ati-drivers maintainer Enrico Tagliavini is going to step down, as support for his notebook was dropped by AMD in version 12.6. Enrico has done an excellent job maintaining the package and we thank him very much for his work.
If you care about this package and like writing ebuilds, please come to #gentoo-desktop on irc.freenode.net and contact the x11 team.

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.

Mesa 7.9 with Gallium3D entered ~arch

Mesa 7.9 was just added to the portage tree. Along with it came a new eselect module, eselect-mesa, which allows you to switch between classic and gallium drivers.

Especially interesting are the Radeon r300 and software renderer gallium drivers, which can give a significant performance and feature boost over the classic counterparts (enable USE="llvm" for best results). Gallium hardware drivers require DRI2/KMS to be active.

Please give it a good testing and report any issues that you find.