XBPS: working in GNOME 2.30, xorg-server-1.8.0 ready...

Long time without posting to the blog, but really I have stuff to do everyday much like every other person in the world. So much stuff happened over this time that I cannot remember, but briefly, XBPS is currently at version 0.4.1 and the number of available packages and quality of the build system has improved vastly.

Long ago I added support to build packages in a chroot (with xbps-src) without root privileges; this works thanks to Linux supporting POSIX File capabilities. You still need root permissions to be able to bind (or null in BSD world) mount some directories. This is the only step requiring the permission and it's all encapsulated in a small shell script.

I've been working for the past days in bringing GNOME 2.30 to XBPS, there are zillions of dependencies as you might already know, but it's really progressing. The number of packages in XBPS has increased vastly for these months:

[juan@nocturno srcpkgs]$ find . -type f -name \*template|wc -l
1121
[juan@nocturno srcpkgs]$

Every template file results in a binary package. Some highlights include latest Xorg (with the xorg-server-1.8.0 that doesn't need HAL and uses UDEV), latest stable and main (HEAD in BSD world) kernel, latest XFCE, latest GNOME (a minimal desktop, not fully finished), etc.

I wanted to show everyone some mandatory screenshots of GNOME running in XBPS (really I should give the distribution a name, but every time I think about it I'm out of ideas)... enjoy.