• On OpenPGP (GnuPG) key management

  Over the time, a number of developers have had problems following the Gentoo OpenPGP key policy (GLEP 63. In particular, the key expiration requirements have resulted in many developers wanting to replace their key unnecessarily. I’ve been asked to write some instructions on managing your OpenPGP key, and I’ve decided to go for a full blog post with some less-known tips. I won’t be getting into detailed explanations how to use GnuPG though — you may still need to read the documentation after all.

  [...]

  Signing keys are used to sign data, i.e. to prove its authenticity. Using multiple signing subkeys is rather trivial — you can explicitly specify the key to use while creating a signature (note that you need to append ! to key-id to force non-default subkey), and GnuPG will automatically use the correct subkey when verifying the signature. To reduce the wear of your main signing subkey, you can create a separate signing subkey for Gentoo commits. Or you can go ever further, and have a separate signing subkey for each machine you’re using (and keep only the appropriate key on each machine).

• Fractal Hackfest, Strasbourg (day 2)

  The encryption is a needed feature but encryption is hard to do in rooms. Matrix uses public-key cryptography, for rooms they are using Megolm, that's a protocol to exchange encrypted messages with more than one and share that message keys in a one-to-one secure communication.

  I don't know a lot about this E2E because for me it's more important to have the client working with a basic functionality before the encryption. So you should read the official doc because maybe this that I'm writing here is completely wrong.

  To do all this E2E key sharing, client side encryption and communication, Riot has three different implementations of the same lib, so they have this code in the JavaScript SDK, the same ported to iOS version in ObjectiveC and the same ported to Android in Java. Below this lib there's the libolm that does the real encryption.

Raise your hand if you’ve always wanted to try Gentoo Linux but never did because you didn’t have either the time or the skills to invest in such a challenging installation. I’m sure there are plenty of Linux users out there not willing to admit this, but it’s okay, really; installing Gentoo is a challenge, and it can be very time consuming. In the end, however, installing Gentoo will result in a very personalized Linux desktop that offers the fulfillment of saying, “I did it!”

So, what’s a curious Linux user to do, when they want to experience this elite distribution? One option is to turn to the likes of Redcore Linux. Redcore does what many have tried (and few have succeeded in doing) in bringing Gentoo to the masses. In fact, Sabayon Linux is the only other distro I can think of that’s truly succeeded in bringing a level of simplicity to Gentoo Linux that many users can enjoy. And while Sabayon is still very much in active development, it’s good to know there are others attempting what might have once been deemed impossible.

Sabayon is a Gentoo-based distribution which is available in many desktop editions as well as a server edition. Sabayon strives to provide a working system out-of-the-box, saving the user a lot of time when it comes to configuring the operating system. Sabayon provides several categories of installation media. The project uses a rolling release model and the distribution's many editions are provided in Stable, Monthly and Daily snapshots. It has been about a year since the last Stable set of installation media was produced and so I decided to explore one of the monthly snapshots.

I began with the MATE edition of Sabayon's Monthly snapshot, a 2GB download which I confirmed downloaded properly using the distribution's checksums. Booting from the live media brought up a menu asking if we would like to start a live desktop environment, launch a text-based installer, start in safe mode or launch a live text console. I was surprised when taking the live desktop option booted the distribution to a text console and showed me a login prompt.

We are pleased to announce the release of Calculate Linux 17.12.2, based on Gentoo 17.0. Therefore, the whole of the packages were rebuilt and some fixes done.