CREATE_HOME was inadvertantly set to 'yes' in Gentoo's stock login.defs. Changed it to 'no' as it is a RedHat'ism that the stock shadow package doesn't support. useradd from the stock shadow package generates a warning message which was a constant source of confused Gentoo users, if CREATE_HOME is set to 'yes'. Learned something new from that.

Got R and octave working for Gentoo and cleaned up some user contributed ebuilds.

Hmmmm......journeyer? Don't know about that. Flattering, but it is amusing that one certification has that much influence. It may be a coat-tail effect from the increasing interest in Gentoo Linux.

New baby has been taking a lot of time, but have been trying to take care of some bugs and some simpler ebuilds. The tougher ebuilds are slow going, spice is a bitch, especially. Really need to get a working ebuild for lapack commited as many useful crunchy apps depend or benefit from it. Will probably borrow heavily from Debian for that :).

Even GREATER news! I am now the proud father of Jacob Michael as of 00:12 CST 19 Jan. 2002. All 7 lbs. 8 oz, 20 inches of him. Needless to say, I haven't done much the last few days but dote and change diapers. I'm saving all the black tarry stuff so I can pave my driveway :)

Good news! I have been given a "developer" account for Gentoo Linux.

Hooray!

I guess the other developers were getting tired of committing the ebuilds and patches I was submitting :). I am very excited about being a Gentoo developer. It is very satisfying when others find your contributions of value.

Daniel Robbins released a new version of portage last night. 'emerge update --world' will now automagically update all installed packages to their latest versions. This allows me to sort of "make tod's world" to use a BSD analogy, :). Gentoo is really shaping up to be a very nice distribution. I have created a GNOME profile based on the Gnome Installation Guide, but the new portage probably supplants its usefulness. Still might be useful for an initial merge of everything Gnome though.

Submitted a ghex ebuild and found a simple dependency conflict bug related to freetype-1.3.1 between the abiword and gfontview ebuilds