Yesterday was my last day at NVidia. I’ve worked with the Embedded Software team there for the last 15 months, specifically on the system software for a Linux based stack that you will see some time next year. I’ve had a great time there, learning new things, and doing everything from tweaking bit-banging I²C implementations with a CRO to tracking down alleged compiler bugs (I’m looking at you -fstrict-aliasing) by wading through ARM assembly.

As some of you might already know, my next step, which has had me bouncing off the walls for the last month, is to join the great folks at Collabora Multimedia working on the PulseAudio sound server. I’ll be working from home here, in Bangalore (in your face, 1.5-hour commute!). It is incredibly exciting for me to be working with a talented bunch of folks and actively contributing to open source software as part of my work!

More updates as they happen. :)

In this podcast comprookie talks about Gentoo and podcast procrastination.

LINKS:
SSH access to cvs.gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/infrastructure/cvs-sshkeys.xml
cvs
http://www-mrsrl.stanford.edu/~brian/cvstutorial/
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/cvs-tutorial.xml
git
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gittutorial.html
perl-overlay
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/perl-overlay.git;a=summary
tove
http://cia.vc/stats/author/tove
Michele Beltrame
http://www.cattlegrid.info/
Kent Fredric
http://kent-fredric.fox.geek.nz/v1
Gentoo GuideXML
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml
Gorg
http://gentoo.neysx.org/mystuff/gorg/gorg.xml
Gentoo Tips
http://gentoo-pr.org/

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

I've just bumped media-sound/amarok in the tree to 2.2.1-r1 which includes some missing deps.
Even though 2.2.1 hit the tree before the official release, I'm a few days behind in the bump and unmasking it - the mask should be out when you read this.
Unfortunately, amarok-2.2.0 and amarok-2.2.1 segfault on start when built with >=binutils-2.20 even though they have no issue starting with >=binutils-2.20 if built with a previous version of binutils - see bug #290662 for more details.
While the issue isn't solved, here is a quick workaround:

# emerge -1 =binutils-2.19.1-r1 && emerge -1 amarok && emerge -1 binutils

Another testing request. Kernel 2.6.31 is planned to be stabled soon on all architectures. Hereby I now ask users on stable x86 systems to upgrade to gentoo-sources 2.6.31-r6 or vanilla-sources 2.6.31.6 and report back to me in all cases (failure or success). The other arches appreciate tests, too, but I can't speak for them. Thanks in advance.

So… qt-*-4.6.0_rc1 is now in the portage tree, masked (since its not a final release) and you can begin testing your shiny Qt applications with it.

But there’s a catch.

4.6.0_rc1 is not binary compatible with 4.6.0_beta1. [1]
This means that if you’re upgrading from 4.6.0_beta1 you have to rebuild every single app depending on qt-*, or they won’t start at all. This obviously includes all of KDE 4.

You can get portage to do that by using a command like this:
*update* it seems some shells didn’t like the old command, so I’ve updated it:

emerge -av1 $(for i in $(qlist -IC x11-libs/qt-); do equery -q d $i | grep -v 'x11-libs/qt-' | sed "s/^/=/"; done)

Note that this command assumes your system is up-to-date. If some installed packages don’t have ebuilds available for their version anymore, you’ll have to resolve that manually (probably by removing them and rerunning the command).

You’ll find equery in app-portage/gentoolkit and qlist in app-portage/portage-utils.

You don’t need to do this if you’re upgrading from Qt 4.5.3 (although you should). You’ll also be safe if you upgrade from 4.5.3 to 4.6.0 final when the time comes.

Portage will warn you about this when you upgrade qt-core to 4.6.0_rc1:

* Messages for package x11-libs/qt-core-4.6.0_rc1:

*
* Binary compatibility broke between 4.6.0_beta1 and 4.6.0_rc1.
* If you are upgrading from 4.6.0_beta1, you’ll have to
* re-emerge everything that depends on Qt.
* Use the following command:
*
* emerge -av1 $(for pkg in $(equery -q d \
* $(qlist -IC x11-libs/qt-) | grep -v “x11-libs/qt-” |
* sort -u); do echo “=$pkg”; done)
*
* YOU’VE BEEN WARNED
*

But users (my user side as well :p) tend to ignore ewarns from time to time

Happy rebuilding!

[1] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/11/12/bc-break-in-46-against-previous-46/

Here's something awesome I found mostly by accident:
In recent kernels the support for hotswapping CPUs works on x86/amd64 architectures. I stumbled over it in the 2.6.32 menuconfig and couldn't wonder if it actually works. So I had a look and found this gem:

# cat /proc/interrupts | grep CPU
            CPU0       CPU1       CPU2       CPU3

Very boring, 4 processors.

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/online

And we just knocked out one!
We see that in dmesg:

kvm: disabling virtualization on CPU3                                                                                                                       
CPU 3 is now offline

Hmm, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

kvm: disabling virtualization on CPU2                                                                                                                       
CPU 2 is now offline                                                                                                                                        
kvm: disabling virtualization on CPU1                                                                                                                       
CPU 1 is now offline                                                                                                                                        
SMP alternatives: switching to UP code

Wheeee. I just castrated it to a single core! I actually didn't check if the kernel lets me take CPU0 offline. That would be hilarious. Anyway ...

echo  > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

And we just gained a CPU:

SMP alternatives: switching to SMP code                                                                                                                     
Booting processor 1 APIC 0x1 ip 0x6000                                                                                                                      
Initializing CPU#1                                                                                                                                          
Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5200.20 BogoMIPS (lpj=10400418)                                                                            
CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line)                                                                                           
CPU: L2 Cache: 512K (64 bytes/line)                                                                                                                         
CPU 1/0x1 -> Node 0                                                                                                                                         
CPU: Physical Processor ID: 0                                                                                                                               
CPU: Processor Core ID: 1                                                                                                                                   
CPU1: AMD Phenom(tm) 9950 Quad-Core Processor stepping 03                                                                                                   
checking TSC synchronization [CPU#0 -> CPU#1]: passed.                                                                                                      
kvm: enabling virtualization on CPU1 

This is seriously wicked. Now I just need to figure out how to bolt that onto powermanagement so that the machine knocks out cores when idle and powersaves. Linux never gets boring ...

Last week before catching the H1N1 I had the chance to play around a bit with DVB-T.

Here in .dk the analog TV signal was turned off at the start of the month, and we got some new digital freeview channels. Most notably DR HD broadcasting unencrypted 720p movies in MPEG-4.

The MPEG-4 encoding can be a bit tricky since TVs from just a few years back (ie. both my Panasonic TVs) only support MPEG-2 decoding, so a lot of people had to buy new hardware MPEG-4 decoders. However not wanting yet another power consuming device I decided to solve it on the cheap (not speaking of yet another redundant remote control).

First off old DVB-T PCI cards/USB sticks should generally be able to receive DVB-T broadcasts in any encoding, including MPEG-4. I just had an old Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T card lying around in the basement, what luck:)

I've collected a few notes here that might be helpful for others.

First figure out what kernel options you'll have to enable.

Getting the right channel list:

emerge linuxtv-dvb-apps linuxtv-dvb-firmware w_scan
w_scan -x > dvb_frequencies
dvbscan dvb_frequencies > channels.conf


Now watch the first channel with: vlc channels.conf. Note if vlc doesn't play anything you might have messed up the generation of channels.conf as I somehow managed to do the first time.

Then record the HD content:

gnutv -channels channels.conf -out file drhd.mp4 "DR HD"


Now come the not so great part, it seems like the MPEG-4 used by DR HD is not well supported in Linux or more precisely the HE-AAC audio codec.

Current stable vlc-1.0.2 seems to be slow to tune in to the programs and audio is choppy and stastistics show dropped audio frames. Upgrading to vlc-1.0.3 seems to make it tune in faster, but the audio is still choppy.

Changing the "Caching value in ms" to 1000 seems to have solved most of the stuttering problems (Preferences -> All -> Input/Codec -> Access modules -> DVB).

Current stable ffmpeg-0.5-r1 only shows 3 streams and refuses to encode:

Stream #0.0[0x907]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 50 tbr, 90k tbn, 100 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x91f](dan): Subtitle: dvbsub
Stream #0.2[0x920](dan): Subtitle: dvbsub


However upgrading ffmpeg to 0.5_p20373, results in it detecting another 2 streams:

Stream #0.0[0x7ef]: Data: 0x0006
Stream #0.1[0x907]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 50 tbr, 90k tbn, 100 tbc
Stream #0.2[0x911](dan): Data: 0x0011
Stream #0.3[0x91f](dan): Subtitle: dvbsub
Stream #0.4[0x920](dan): Subtitle: dvbsub


And the live ffmpeg ebuild actually detects the audio stream, but hangs when encoding:

Stream #0.0[0x7ef](dan): Subtitle: 0x0006
Stream #0.1[0x907]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 50 tbr, 90k tbn, 100 tbc
Stream #0.2[0x911](dan): Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 450 kb/s
Stream #0.3[0x91f](dan): Subtitle: dvbsub
Stream #0.4[0x920](dan): Subtitle: dvbsub


So for now I can watch DR HD on one computer, but playback on my PCH-110 is not working either as the audio codec HE-AAC seems to be unsupported too. Later on I might just install a MythTV backend and do some automatic transcoding to the troublesome devices. That is once proper HE-AAC support is in ffmpeg:-)

As documented in this bug (which mirrors an upstream bug here there's a bug in glibc 2.10 and 2.11, and this one seems to be easy to hit. Multithreaded apps "randomly" crash with "Invalid free" and other confusing errors. A hackaround is to unset or empty the environment variable "MALLOC_CHECK_". For me setting MALLOC_CHECK_="" before starting some of the affected packages seems to completely hide the error, now we can only hope that the gentoo glibc gets this patch soon.

For the rest of this post I'll only consider portage 2.2. Most options are in portage 2.1 already, but I'm a lazy bum, so I don't compare to see what's what.

You can set PORTAGE_DEFAULT_OPS in /etc/make.conf, but if you add --ask you will have trouble running emerge from a script. --ignore-default-opts disables those defaults so you can run emerge --sync in a cronjob again.

Sets are really great, --list-sets shows you which are available. Just have a look, there are some nice ones - "security", "installed", "unavailable" ... they can help streamline some tasks. I find their names quite self-explanatory.

If you want to put something into the world file without rebuilding it use --noreplace, and if you want to remove it again use --deselect.

--nospinner disables that funny rotating spinner thingy so you can save precious bandwidth when connected remotely, and --quiet hides most of the output, which can be nice if you don't want to be hypnotized by scrolling compile output. For the OCD crowd --quiet-build might be nice as it doesn't show the compile output on console, but redirects to logfiles. --changelog is neat for seeing the log messages for that update, this often shows fixed bugs or other issues you might care about. --color with a parameter y or n toggles colorized output. And of course --alphabetical. The horror of unsorted output!

Sometimes people are confused that emerge -e world tries to update packages that emerge -uND world misses. That is usually caused by build-only dependencies. --with-bdeps=y and --complete-graph are good options to modify portage behaviour.

If you're on a fast machine and in a hurry you can try to set --jobs X with a reasonable value of X. Think about memory needs and such before setting it to infinity minus one! With --keep-going it gets really easy to not have the whole process stopped on the first failed package. This is not without issues, but it avoids the --resume --skipfirst in a loop tricks. If --jobs seems to hard to calibrate to you --load-average=LOAD may help to limit it.

For the scripters --columns might be nice, it tweaks the output to be more script friendly.

Support for binary packages has grown considerably, there's support for local (-k / -K) and remote (-g / -G ) binpkg repositories. And you can --buildpkg and --buildpkgonly to create them (they are stored in PKGDIR). There's --binpkg-respect-use to only install the packages that have useflags set the same as the current configuration - it's a very powerful mechanism if you need to support Gentoo on multiple machines and don't want to compile that much.

I hope y'all enjoyed this little lesson in RTFM, there's plenty of other options to discover. Don't be afraid of the documentation, it doesn't bite and makes your life easier :)

Few people take the time to actually read through the documentation, but if you have some time to spare "man make.conf" is a great read.
For example you can pre-set some CLI options like --ask or --verbose in EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS so you never have to type them again. Especially the FEATURES variable has some interesting bits:

buildpkg builds packages of everything
buildsyspkg builds only packages of the system set, which is awesome for recovery and doesn't take much space.

keepwork keeps the $WORKDIR and can be quite useful for debugging purposes (but not for general use)
noclean leaves even more there.
fail-clean is the opposite, it always wipes the build directories. Useful if you build on a small (but fast) disk or tmpfs.
installsources installs all the package sources to /usr/src/debug/, which can be used for debugging, but eats lots of space. Together with splitdebug it offers some really great debugging convenience.
test-fail-continue helps when you just want to have the tests run for logging purposes, but don't want the package to not be installed if tests fail. Most people won't need this.

split-elog and split-log features are quite interesting if you do logging.

Logging can be very nice to have, and portage has lots of configuration options for it.
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM defines how the log data is sent, be it through syslog, email or just to a file. Or completely custom?
And you can do combinations like PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="mail:warn,error syslog:* save".
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES defines what you want to log - warnings, errors, qa warnings, everything ... it's your choice.

Of course there are lots of other configuration options:
PORTAGE_NICENESS can be useful when you don't want portage to interfere with anything else.
PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND needs ionice (or an equivalent tool) and can be used to make the disk activity of portage a bit less distracting. Both features may increase the time needed to install things, but will make portage more benign so you can still do things while it runs.

Also you can change almost all directories - PORTDIR, DISTDIR, PKGDIR and so on. This allows you to make portage behave a lot more like you want it (unless the defaults satisfy you already ...)

Finally I stopped slacking for long enough to fix a few bits of my desktop, and the results are grrrrrrreat.
Now I have (OpenGL!) full effects in KDE4 as opposed to the slightly less bouncy XRender-accelerated thingies before. Performance is pretty awesome (but then the HD4650 shouldn't even notice those few effects).
What you need:

~arch install (I'm not going to care to find out what minimal versions you need)
x11 overlay
a really recent kernel

And with really recent I mean "at least 2.6.32". At the time of writing that hasn't been released, so a 2.6.32-rc6 git-sources has to substitute for me. From what I've read you might have to disable framebuffer for things to work well, but as I'm usually seeing text mode for ~30 seconds every month I don't care enough to find out. I'm lazy!
In the kernel config you need to enable DRM and especially the radeon bits. Device Drivers -> Graphics -> Direct Rendering Manager is the "most important" bit there.
The following packages were suggested in a few places, I have no idea if that is the minimal set. But you'll have to unmask:

>=x11-libs/libdrm-9999
>=media-libs/mesa-9999
>=x11-base/xorg-server-9999
>=x11-proto/fixesproto-9999
>=x11-proto/xextproto-9999
>=x11-proto/xf86vidmodeproto-9999
>=x11-proto/renderproto-9999
>=x11-proto/recordproto-9999
>=x11-proto/inputproto-9999
>=x11-proto/xineramaproto-9999
>=x11-proto/bigreqsproto-9999
>=x11-proto/xf86driproto-9999
>=x11-proto/xf86dgaproto-9999
>=x11-proto/xcmiscproto-9999
>=x11-base/xorg-drivers-9999
>=x11-libs/libXext-9999
>=x11-libs/libXi-9999
>=x11-proto/xproto-9999
>=x11-libs/libX11-9999
>=x11-libs/libxcb-9999
>=x11-proto/xcb-proto-9999

Now go forth and rebuild all your shiny new packages.
If you managed to build that and reboot your new kernel things should look pretty much as before. The only "obvious" hints I've found to test are the output of glxinfo (has changed quite a bit) and that KDE4 allows me to use OpenGL now. And maybe the wobbly windows effect was a giveaway :)

I'm positively surprised that things have progressed this far, and I'm happy to finally be able to use more of my graphics card :)

EDIT: Seems that this is not the minimal set of packages and configuration needed. Some people suggested -9999 packages of mesa + libdrm + xf86-video-ati only. If that works even better :)

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2

Title says it all. It's pretty obvious that gnome team can't currently keep up with the income of new bugs (especially a lot of unexpected 2.26 bugs) and I keep being split between my gnome duties and maintenance of various other stuff (notably freedesktop that no-one seems to care about these days). So I need one, two or more guys/gals that want to get their hands a bit dirty. If you feel up to it, just come and say hello on #gentoo-desktop, if I'm not around, probably other gnome herd members will be waiting for you .

As I previously noted, the 96.x.y and 173.x.y series had not seen any updates yet for xorg-server 1.7 compatibility, however today that has changed. They both saw updates late last night from NVIDIA and now those drivers are available in the Gentoo tree so feel free to give them a try.

The linux kernel has lots of complexity in memory management. Swap allows to go beyond the size of real memory to allow applications to use "more". But still, at some point, you might exhaust all available memory.

The next application that requests memory (usually through malloc) will cause the kernel some trouble. It can either deny the request (which often causes hilarious results in the application) or free some memory somehow. (About the hilarity: Many coders assume that a malloc will always succeed. If it doesn't you'll get interesting misbehaviour like segmentation faults. Lots of fun to debug ...)

So, how does the kernel free memory? It can't just ask some other processes to surrender some. But it can terminate processes! It's a terminally stupid idea, but it's so stupid that it often works. And the handler for that is, obviously, the out-of-memory killer.
There's a very nice bit of information hidden in /proc to tell you what the oom-killer would do if it had to run now.

/proc/$pid/oom_score

contains the current value of the process with PID $pid. You could just compare them and see who is good and who is bad. And you can adjust it - a rarely used protection, but it might just help the oom-killer to act more sanely and less psychotic.

/proc/$pid/oom_adj

That's a numerical value used as a multiplier. Valid values are in the range -16 to +15, plus the special value -17, which disables oom-killing altogether for this process. The heuristic is quite complex, to quote:

The process to be killed in an out-of-memory situation is selected among all others
based on its badness score. This value equals the original memory size of the process
and is then updated according to its CPU time (utime + stime) and the
run time (uptime - start time). The longer it runs the smaller is the score.
Badness score is divided by the square root of the CPU time and then by
the double square root of the run time.
Swapped out tasks are killed first. Half of each child's memory size is added to
the parent's score if they do not share the same memory. Thus forking servers
are the prime candidates to be killed. Having only one 'hungry' child will make
parent less preferable than the child.

On some systems you might not ever want to have the oom-killer strike. It's just a hilariously bad idea to kill random processes. And you can even disable it:

The sysctl vm.overcommit_memory variable (also represented in /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory ) defines the behaviour. To summarize: 0 is default, where the kernel uses some heuristics and allows allocating more memory than available (which is what can trigger the nice OOM assassin) 1 always allows overcommit. The documentation is a bit sparse, but it seems to be tuned by vm.overcommit_ratio, which gives a percentage to overcommit (unless I misread that). And finally a value of 2 disables overcommitting and limits application memory to the size of (swap + ram*ratio). This means that worst case you'll disallow a request when there's still physical memory available, but you'll never have to trigger Mr.OOM-Killer.

What is best? That depends on what you do and how you want things to fail. overcommit_memory = 2 will cause memory allocation failures, but your machine will always be "alive". overcommit_memory = 0 might allow to allocate more memory, but you risk getting any process killed by oom. Sucks to have sshd killed on a server - maybe it's not the best idea to have a psychotic process assassin? But it's your choice, so do what you want to do :)

Decided I'd shake things up a bit this month, after keeping the same look for nearly three straight months. Thus, I present:

icons: Area o.43
gtk+: Rele (Rezlooks engine)
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk (yes, it is confusingly named)
background: rassilon

It's grungy, but rather sleek. Surprisingly easy on the eyes, too. The lighter elements of the Rele gtk+ theme aren't overpoweringly white, but are just light enough to provide a decent contrast to the generally darker Area icons.

There's also an uncluttered version here.

I've been looking to assemble themes that are grungy, and themes that are warmer-yet-wintry. I like winter. I still have some hope that these 80 degree weeks will come to an end soon. We're almost to the middle of November. Surely we'll see gray sky, cool breezes, and maybe even rain here in SoCal at some point, right? Right? Well, if not, I can at least put it on my desktop.

As most of you know, KDE 3.5 is getting off the Gentoo train for various reasons mentioned elsewhere (in short: security, lack of upstream interest).

Some people are still using it though and they have been asking how they can keep it on their system, without emerge screaming each time they try to update world.

I’m writing this post to guide those people (you? ) on how they can achieve that.

1. Adding the kde-sunset overlay
Perhaps the most important thing you need to remember is that the ebuilds will be completely removed from the tree, so you need to add an overlay called kde-sunset to portage which contains a copy of most of them.

To add the overlay you need to have layman with git USE flag enabled:

USE="git" emerge -av layman

make sure you add the git USE flag in your package.use or make.conf

you can then use layman to install the overlay:

layman -f
layman -a kde-sunset

if this is your first time using layman, you’ll have to add the following line @ the end of your make.conf:

source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf

you can keep the overlay updated by running:

layman -s kde-sunset

2. KDE 3.5 is masked (this is necessary only while KDE 3.5 is still in tree)
Now we have the overlay, but until KDE 3.5 is completely wiped off the tree, there’s a mask to warn users about it.
Portage will scream about this mask each time you try to emerge so you need to unmask KDE 3.5 manually.

There are two (and a half) ways to do this:
a1) if your package.unmask is a folder, symlink the unmask file from kde-sunset to /etc/portage/package.unmask/

ln -s /usr/local/portage/layman/kde-sunset/Documentation/package.unmask/kde-3.5 /etc/portage/package.unmask/kde-3.5

a2) if your package.unmask is not a folder you can append the file (but you’ll have to update it manually)

cat /usr/local/portage/layman/kde-sunset/Documentation/package.unmask/kde-3.5 >> /etc/portage/package.unmask

b) if you don’t like all that, you can emerge autounmask

emerge -av autounmask

and ask it to unmask stuff for you – note that autounmask doesn’t like :slot and will only work with -version

autounmask kde-meta-3.5

3. I don’t want KDE 4 (yet)
So all is great now but portage wants to install KDE 4 when you emerge world.
This is happening because KDE 4 went stable recently and portage thinks you want to upgrade (you should btw ).
To fix this one we need to tell portage that we actually want the 3.5 version of KDE and we don’t care about 4.

we need to edit /var/lib/portage/world and add a version (or a slot) to every kde 3.5 app we have in there.

* be careful with this file *

for example, lets say that you installed kde 3.5 using the kde-meta ebuild.
if you open /var/lib/portage/world you’ll find a line saying

kde-base/kde-meta

you need to add :3.5 which is the 3.5 slot, or -3.5.10 which is the version (or both, version first) at the end. if you add the version, you’ll have to prepend a “=” as well.

the line should now read:

kde-base/kde-meta:3.5

do this for each KDE 3.5 app you have in the world file. If you’re unsure of the slot/version, use eix packagename to find it out.

4. All systems go

emerge -avDuN world

^^ this should now be clean of any KDE 4 traces and mask warnings

If you have any issues or are interested in maintaining kde-sunset, you may visit us over @ #gentoo-kde in freenode’s IRC network or drop us an email at kde _at_ gentoo _dot_ org. We’ll do our best to help you

Maybe after reading this post your KDE 3 installation will last a bit longer

Enjoy and see you w/ KDE 4 soon

Even though I'm currently sick with H1N1, also known as swine flu, this morning I was feeling well enough to write an ebuild for an interesting media app I found: Tabu Audio Player. It's an interesting player -- while it still needs some translation work into English, it's simple and has an appealing UI drawn by Cairo.

It had only a single configure option, "debug," and a very short list of dependencies, so I figured it'd be a simple ebuild to write, right?

Wrong! Turns out that after a half-hours' worth of poking at configure.ac, the package's check for --disable-debug/--enable-debug was completely broken. If you explicitly passed --disable-debug, like "-debug" in IUSE, then it would enable the debug build every time. Thanks to rej and a3li on IRC for nailing this problem down; they were really helpful.

a3li also shared his solution for the same problem in one of his packages, so I used it in my ebuild to ensure that "debug" works properly as a USE variable.

Meanwhile, I sent a bug report to upstream asking for a smarter debug check. I also asked for CFLAGS="-02" to be removed from Makefile.am, that way folks are free to use their own -O levels without having to resort to using sed on the Makefile, as I had to in the ebuild.

Speaking of which: I have an ebuild for Tabu 2.1 waiting for you in my devspace, if you'd like to try it out.

For the longest time operating systems have been able to handle swap. In short swap extends physical memory with slow diskspace so that applications can use more memory than there is available.
On most unix systems the swap is in a dedicated partition because that has the lowest overhead. Plus you don't risk running out of diskspace when you want to swap, so things are quite predictable and nice. Linux has a very nice knob you can turn to affect the swap policy. It will not avoid swapping (in some situations you will have to), but it will affect how and when swap is used. That knob is /proc/sys/vm/swappiness.

The kernel default is a value of 60. The value can be between 0 and 100 and is effectively a percentage. It is used roughly in the following way:
If all available memory is exhausted (application memory, buffers and filesystem cache) and any memory allocation is requested the kernel needs to free a few pages of memory. It can either swap out application memory or drop some filesystem cache. The "swappiness" knob affects the probability which one is chosen.
This means that at a swappiness of 0 the kernel will try to never swap out a process, and at 100 it will try to always swap out processes and keep the filesystem cache intact. So with the default, if you use more than ca. 40% of your memory for applications and the rest is used as filesystem cache it will already start swapping a bit. The hilarious result is that you may up swapping a lot with lots of memory left - think of a machine with 64GB RAM! If you try to use 32G memory you'll be in swap hell.
That default might have been good with machines with less than 256MB RAM, but with current desktops and servers it is usually not optimal.
Now you might be tempted to tune it down to 0. Avoid swap. Swap is slow. All is good?
Not quite. At 0 your machine will try to avoid swapping until the last moment. Then it will have killed all filesystem cache (so every file operation will hit the disks) and in addition to that you start swapping like a madman. The result is usually a "swap storm" that hits very sudden. At the point where you might need some performance your machine doesn't provide it and might just be unresponsive to your input for a few minutes.
The other end (a value near 100) might make sense for a file server, but then it might be cheaper to just not run extra services on a machine that is very loaded already. I don't really see a usecase for a swappiness of 100 except maybe on machines that are very memory-limited.
On my desktop I've found a swappiness of 10-20 to be the sweet spot. This means that when 80%+ of memory is used by applications the machine will start swapping, but it's a more gradual hit and not an instant kill. And because there's still some filesystem cache the responsiveness for starting new processes (like a login shell ;) ) is still high enough to allow recovery from this pessimal system state.
Still your goal for optimal performance should be to avoid swapping. Disk access is slower than RAM by a factor of 1000 or more!
I've seen servers achieve roughly double the throughput with the right swappiness value - it can avoid an expensive hardware upgrade. Of course that's not all the tuning advice I have, so if you wish to discuss that feel free to send me a mail and maybe I can prove to you that Gentoo is the fastest penguin out there ...

Maybe I should discuss the OOM killer too - most people have seen it, but few know who it is and why he goes killing processes.

Starting today, Greek Gentoo users have their own mailing list to discuss stuff and ask questions: gentoo-user-el.

For more info on how to subscribe, please visit http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

The list is not mentioned there yet, but you can use it normally.

[the rest of this message is in greek]

Θέλετε να συζητήσετε για το αγαπημένο σας Gentoo στα ελληνικά αλλά δεν βρίσκετε κάποια official mailing list?

Πλέον μπορείτε να χρησιμοποιείτε την νέα λίστα gentoo-user-el, που δημιουργήθηκε για να καλύψει αυτό ακριβώς το κενό.

Για να γραφτείτε, αρκεί να στείλετε ένα κενό e-mail στην διεύθυνση gentoo-user-el+subscribe _at_ lists.gentoo.org και να ακολουθήσετε τις οδηγίες.

Μπορείτε να συνομιλήσετε με άλλους χρήστες του Gentoo αλλά και με Gentoo Developers (είμαστε 6 Έλληνες) και να λύσετε κάθε πρόβλημα και απορία σας

Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες σχετικά με τις λίστες του Gentoo μπορείτε να επισκευτείτε την σελίδα http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

Η λίστα δεν αναφέρεται ακόμα σε αυτήν την σελίδα (πρέπει να ενημερωθεί από το κατάλληλο team), αλλά εσείς μπορείτε να γραφτείτε και να την χρησιμοποιήσετε κανονικά.

Επίσης μπορείτε να διαβάσετε το περιεχόμενο της λίστας πηγαίνοντας στην διεύθυνση http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user-el/

Όπως βλέπετε εγώ έκανα την αρχή: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user-el/msg_4eb9364bded3280c9685356b9e0445d0.xml

Εάν είστε από αυτούς που προτιμούν πιο άμεση επικοινωνία, μπορείτε να επισκευτείτε το κανάλι #gentoo-el στο freenode irc network: http://java.freenode.net/index.php?channel=gentoo-el

Τα λέμε εκεί

As many may have already known, MythTV 0.22 is officially out. Slashdot is late to the party to report the news, however Gentoo does have ~arch ebuilds available in the tree for MythTV and all officially supported plugins. In the future I may add an ebuild as well for mythstream since it is a fairly popular plugin.

Some known issues include compilation problems on x86 as a result of PIC support, the issue is being looked into actively. For this upgrade, you must manually upgrade your database however the process is pretty painless.

If you run into any other issues, please file a bug and I’ll do my best to get to it.

1. git clone git://www.gentoo-cn.org/var/git/loongson.git

2. Don't include loongson overlay's directory directly in your PORTDIR_OVERLAY. But in your own overlay, like /usr/local/portage, create symlinks pointing to sys-devel/ and sys-libs/glibc in loongson overlay. This is because you may not want to install packages from loongson overlay in your host machine. Also you need to make sure your own overlay is the first overlay containing binutils/gcc/glibc in your PORTDIR_OVERLAYS list. You may check the value of this list using command:

portageq envvar PORTDIR_OVERLAY

3. Then, just run crossdev -t mips64el-unknown-linux-gnu. This command installed the following components on my host machine:

• linux-headers-2.6.27-r2 from portage.
• binutils-2.19.1-r1 from loongson overlay.
• gcc-4.4.2 from portage. The gcc in loongson overlay currently is just a symlink to portage gcc.
• glibc-2.9_p2009042 from loongson overlay. However if you build the toolchain now, glibc-2.10.1 will be installed instead, I just updated it.
  

I've been on a roll to clean house lately, and part of that is simplifying my hardware setup.  One thing that needs to be ripped out completely is my old server, which is getting to be a real pain to maintain.  Mostly it's just my personal stuff on there, but the ebuild packages website is also running on there right now.  Between now and Tuesday, I'm going to take it down since I'm going to be rearranging my hardware setup anyway.  I'm not going to bring the old website back online, either.  The code for the new one is almost complete, and it will use a lot less resources.  There's gonna bet lots of cool stuff on the new one: better feeds, simpler interface, new domain name and hopefully a new design as well.  Oh, and the scripts aren't dependent upon portage anymore, which is the real crutch right now.  I have to run an old version of portage (2.1.4.5) that isn't even in the tree anymore, and it's making updates painful or impossible.

The new site will also run on my dedicated Linode, where I think I've finally correctly managed the apache issues, so that means there will be less arbitrary downtime as I screw around with my box here at home.  I really hate running servers at home that other people are dependent on, because I like the freedom to change things around without affecting anyone.  Right now, the old site is so CPU intensive, that I can't move it over to the VPS.

The code for the new site is much cleaner.  The entire thing is rewritten in OOP classes to access the portage tree, which makes my job incredibly easier.  Not to mention it's a lot faster.  It'll still be a bit before I get it online, but killing it will inspire me to push it along.  I'm tired of having this thing limp around when it's just a dead albatross around my neck right now.  So, farewell.  The new one will be better.

Please turn your KDE radio on, and make sure to increase the volume to its maximum level for this important message.

After multiple setbacks we have finally managed to stabilise KDE4 on both major desktop architectures (amd64 and x86), with other teams to follow.

For this and other reasons as discussed , those of you who still use KDE3 should be seriously considering an upgrade in the near future.

The KDE3 support is being deprecated with immediate effect. This means that ebuilds are dropping KDE3 support where they were broken, or clashing with KDE4.

If you wish to still use KDE3, and you want to help others with having KDE3 around, drop a mail to kde@gentoo.org, where we can give you commit access to the special overlay which will specifically contain only KDE3 packages.
This overlay (named kde-sunset) can be easily used via layman.

Sadly upstream is not supporting KDE3 anymore and we simply lack the manpower to keep support for both (as you might have noticed in the past few months KDE3 has become more and more rusty for which we humbly apologize).

Sorry to bring you the bad news and with hope that KDE4 will suit your needs,

Tomas Chvatal
KDE Teams substituting Lead

KUDOS to Nirbheek Chauhan and David Abbott for helping to put this announcement together and Alec Warner for proofreading it.

KDE 4.3.3 was released on Tuesday, with ebuilds instantly available to users in the main tree.

We also have KDE 4.3.1 in stable \o/

KDE 3.5 is on its way out of portage, with kde-sunset being the overlay that will (hopefully) be maintained by users still interested in it.

Finally, KDE 4.4 Beta 1 is due December 1st and you’ll find it in the kde-testing overlay as usual

Yesterday, I wanted to see if I could rip a Blu-Ray disc using my PS3.  I really want to get a BD-ROM drive, but they are so expensive still, and since I can install Linux on my PS3, I figured maybe I'd try and save myself some money and see if I could manage to get one ripped and decrypted.  It actually worked, which surprised me.  Ripping the disc was the simplest thing in the world, but the key on the movie I tried (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) was too new, and currently only AnyDVD has support for it.  I'd love to buy a copy of that, but it only runs in Windows, and it's really expensive.  Instead, I'll just have to wait for the keys to pop up eventually on the doom9 forums.

The first step, though, was getting the PS3 to run Linux.  I took the shamelessly easy way out (and I don't regret it either) and installed Xubuntu.  I won't go into details about how I got Linux on my PS3 since that's well documented.  I will say that I remember quite vividly now why I can't stand binary distros.  Bleh.

The BD filesystem is UDF.  Providing you have a recent kernel (2.6.20, I think) with UDF v2.5 support, you are good to go.  I mounted a remote share and just dumped the disc to an ISO file onto my desktop.

$ cat /media/cdrom0 > wonka.iso

That was the easy part.

The hard part was trying to get it decrypted.  I had to use Java tools (bleh) to get to the source.  There are three applications you need.  And if you hate digging through forums and using download services, then I've got direct links for yah:

• aacskeys-0.4.0c.tar.gz
• bdvmdbg-0.1.5.7z
• dumphd-0.61.tar.gz

For Gentoo, you'll need to install the JDK to build the aacskeys library and binary.  I just emerged dev-java/sun-jdk and it worked for me (I know absolutely nothing about Java, but my stabbing in the dark miraculously worked).  You'll also need a runtime environment to actually execute the stuff, and I emerged dev-java/sun-jre-bin and that worked fine, too on my amd64 box.

For aacskeys and Gentoo, you'll need to apply this patch that I cobbled together from what I found on the doom9 forums to get it to compile.  It just fixes the Java include directorys for the Makefile.

Now, I'm still a bit fuzzy about what each program does, and whether you need all of them or not, so I won't go into a lot of detail.  What you want to use, though, is the dumphd program.  But to use it, you'll need to copy the aacskeys library and a file from the bdvmdbg package as well into the path or same directory as the dumphd program.

Once you have that, you can just run dumphd.sh and it'll fire up a simple little GUI telling you if it has all the libraries it needs.  Then you just specify the source and destination, and aacskeys will see if it has a working key to access the disc.

I can't really give much more detail than that, since I'm so new to this.  Suffice it to say, if you read the accompanying README doc that comes with each one, you'll get along just fine.

It took me a long time last night to get just one disc ripped and transferred over my subnet to try it out, and by the time I managed to get it mounted (mount -o loop -t udf wonka.iso /mnt/udf) and access it, it was pretty late.  The keys I had didn't work for my disc, and I didn't want to try the whole procedure over to try another disc.

Anyway, good luck if you try it.  One thing that impressed me is how much simpler it was than I thought it'd be, but what a pain it was trying to figure out where things went wrong.  The doom9 forums are a good resource, but not exactly the best place to find clear, concise information for a beginner.  That part was frustrating.

Personally, I don't think it's worth the hassle right now, the way I did it.  I'll get a BD-ROM sooner or later so I don't have to transfer the content over the network and can instead just test it directly.  But, I started out to see if I could at least get a copy of the ISO and get the tools running all without Windows, and I can.  So, that's progress right there.

In ripping my DVDs, I try to future-proof it as much as I can, by putting in as many elements as I *think* I might need or want someday down the road.  One of those elements is subtitles.  There are three types of subtitles that can be on DVDs -- VobSub, closed captioning and SDH -- and the first two can be extracted fairly easily.  I have no idea how to access the SDH ones.  I think you need either a newer DVD player or a Blu-Ray one.

I've been ripping my TV shows, and so far I haven't seen any really hard and fast rules on what to expect with them on DVD.   Part of the reason is that I just haven't been paying much attention to subtitles until recently.

I was playing with ripping one show last night, and I saw the CC logo on the back of the case, so I went to check the rest of my library to see which other ones had it.  Nearly my entire library of Warner Bros. DVDs displayed the logo -- even for much older cartoons (Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo) -- once again staying consistent with the fact that the studio puts a lot of effort into the quality of their releases.

I just started playing with extracting CC though, and just barely wrote the code to my DVD ripper to extract them, so I have no idea what the other series are like, if they have subtitles or not -- VobSub or CC.  I usually don't find out until I actually go to rip them.

Extracting the closed captioning subtitles is a lot easier and faster than getting the VobSub streams.  For Linux (and Mac and Windows) there's a nifty OSS program called ccextractor.  Once you have your VOB video file on your harddrive, just run that on the movie, and it will create an SRT subtitle file of the closed captioning text.  It's great, and really fast, taking probably under a minute on a 60-minute video on my box.  Comparatively, when ripping a VobSub stream, you need to read the DVD directly which causes its own bottleneck, and then demux the entire stream.  It takes probably around 3 to 5 minutes for an episode of the same length.

Another thing I like about the closed captioning titles is that because they are extracted as SRT, it's easy to look through them since they are just text files.  If you're really anal, you can correct typos yourself.  The VobSub subtitles are all bitmaps.  I've also noticed that on some DVDs, where there were issues with framerates or something else, that the VobSub timestamps will be off ... and sometimes either they will show up clumped together at the beginning of the film or the sync will be way off.  I think that this has to do with the dumping process, somewhere, but I'm not sure.  I've never really taken the time to pin down the source.

So, with closed captioning being easier and faster to extract, as well as editable and the timestamps haven't had any issues for me (yet), it's quickly becoming my preferred subtitle format.

There's only one small issue with using ccextractor, and that is you won't know if there are any captions in the VOB until after it's made its trial run.  The program will create an .srt file regardless when you run it, but the file will be empty if it couldn't find any.  That's the only drawback.  With VobSub, you can know if there are subtitles just by probing the DVD using lsdvd or something similar.

Muxing it into matroska is simple, too.  Just pass it as a file argument and you're done.

As a sidenote, while my bend application that I wrote and use to rip DVDs would be a major pain to setup for someone else, I've rewritten it recently so that it uses individual classes to access every object directly: DVD, DVD track, DVD VOB, Matroska file.  They are standalone classes written in PHP if anyone wanted to use them, feel free.  You would also need my tiny class of shell functions as well, since they all make calls to it.

The DVDVOB one makes it simple to extract the subtitle stream.  In fact, all the classes make things relatively simple.  They have made writing my code so much simpler.

After few months of delay, Curses::Toolkit is now available on CPAN.

Curses::Toolkit tries to be a modern toolkit to implement semi-graphical interfaces using Curses. It's inspired by Gtk.

I gave a presentation of Curses::Toolkit at the French Perl Workshop 2009, and at the Open Source Developers conference France 2009. BooK presented it as part of a Lightning Talk at YAPC EU 2009 where I couldn't participate. Thanks to him for that. I will try to participate to London Perl Workshop this year and give a talk about it as well. I have received quite good feedback from people and users about it.

I'd like to mention that Jerome Quelin helped me with the initial release, injecting some Dist::Zilla magic into Curses::Toolkit. Thanks, Jerome.

What next ? I'll try to post a video of what is currently possible with Curses::Toolkit. I need to add more widgets and signals, and fix some bugs. Also, migrating to Moose is on the todo list. The module is usable now, but you can't really build a very nice big application with it.

Want to help ? If you have some free time, please consider helping me on next development of the module. You don't need to be a coder, here are some of the things you could help with :

• Improve documentation : current documentation has some errors, and a better front page for the module would be good.
• Create a Tutorial : preferably in POD, but not tied to follow sub-modules' names
• Help implementing additional widgets
• Create new themes : it's all about colors
• Help the migration to Moose

If you're interested, contact me. The source is here

As Linux-Mag points out (Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked) using gcc optimizations for "omg, teh speed" is not all that practical. Sure, I'll add some compiler flags here and there as long as I am compiling everything anyway but I don't consider that a feature of Gentoo Linux.

I actually prefer Gentoo for the package management and customization via USE flags (even with the headaches that they cause sometimes).

Recently, Aaron Plattner from NVIDIA announce libvdpau 0.2, which a wrapper for driver specific VDPAU implementations. You may have noticed that nvidia-drivers shipped a libvdpau.so library for a while now for apps to link against while placing their actual implementation in libvdpau_nvidia.so. Newer ebuilds of nvidia-drivers will no longer install libvdpau.so, nor any of the headers and install will rely on this being installed. Other applications, like MythTV will instead depend on x11-libs/libvdpau.

In addition to this change, there’s a new package called vdpauinfo in the tree. Some people might know it from the NVNews forums as vdpinfo. However, Aaron got the author’s permission to add it to freedesktop.org and rename it to vdpauinfo to match the library.

As always happens when we see a new xorg-server release people start to wonder why the Gentoo ebuilds for nvidia-drivers have blockers for the new release. To help clarify this I’ll post an ASCII table showing the current support.

driver series   maximum ABI
-------------   -----------
71.86.*         2.x
96.43.*         5.x
173.14.*        5.x
190.*           6.x

xorg server     video ABI
-----------     ---------
1.7.*           6.x
1.6.*           5.x
1.5.*           2.x

As you can see from the above, the 71.86.x series has gone into very limited maintenance mode. I would be surprised to see very many updates, if any at all to it in the future. However, for users of the 96.43.x and 173.14.x series, NVIDIA has confirmed to me that there will be an update to the latest xorg-server ABI change. This update though does not have any definite dates so I can’t provide any. I recommend users of that series stay with xorg-server-1.6.x releases for the time being so they can have a smooth X experience.

I had this genius idea about using sshfs with rtorrent. I thought that this use case would fit best in situations where you have good bandwidth but not much diskspace, such as my linode VPS (review). So, I'll attempt to share my findings in this regard.

If you are not familiar with rtorrent. You just need to know that it is a powerful, lightweight bittorrent client. It has a "watch" feature that watches a directory for new torrents, and obviously it can put downloaded files in a specified location. I tried both of these with sshfs.

First, I was having trouble with rtorrent just 'freezing' up when I put a torrent file in the sshfs accessible watch dir. I didn't quite know what was wrong here. Research led me to rtorrent bug 322 and that sshfs did not support filesystems without mmap properly. Darn. More research led me to a recent kernel commit that looked promising. Low and behold, reboot my host with 2.6.31.x kernel and rtorrent works with sshfs watch and destination directory. Yay.

Well, not so fast...

The performance is quite poor with the destination directory on sshfs. This is to be expected because now your download speed for torrents is limited to the download speed of your final destination. But, rtorrent was only giving me a sustained speed of 1/4 of that demonstrated with a simple file copy to the destination. I speculate that this is from the rtorrent overhead or maybe fragmenting? Not sure exactly and I don't care. My solution to this was to use the rtorrent "move on finished" feature that downloads the file to local disk and then moves it to sshfs destination after it is finished. Amazingly, this works quite well.

My testing scenario was the following:
-79MB Gentoo 2008.0 install cd torrent. With the complete sshfs solution, it took ~6 minutes to download (to the sshfs destination) and then 5 minutes to check the hash. So, roundtrip of 11 minutes from start download to seeding. With the on_finished solution, it took 1 minute to download (to local disk) and 1 minute to check the hash and move to the sshfs destination. For a roundtrip of ~2 minutes from start of download to seeding.

In conclusion, this isn't the perfect solution because you impose a large bottleneck into the mix and unintended I/O activity on the local disk. However, it works for me and what I am doing. Maybe it will give someone else some ideas in the future.

http://cia.vc/stats/author/eva

My CIA profile went from about one commit every 17.35 housr to one every 16.56. The difference does not seem big but the calculation is diluted on about 6 years due to a KDE dev sharing the same nick. This amounts to 158 commits tonight.

~arch is now at about 85% of completeness for Gnome 2.28.1, a few commits are missing due extra complexity (hey it still took my 3 hours to do that). Beware that this release still has a few rough edges, especially policykit migration buts. So if you get cut, please come to bugzilla but do not expect sweet words and attention if I see comments like "dude why do you keep on breaking ~arch". It's ~arch, beat it.

The new server I had setup few weeks ago got hacked, brute force ssh attacks being made from it... I had spent some time setting it up, and now I'm bored.

So, I decided to migrate my blog to a hosted solution. As I'm a big fan of movable type, I decided to give Typepad a go. So this is yet another rebirth of my blog (I think it's the 6th time now).

I'll use that opportunity to catch up with the Perl blogging Iron Man competition.

More to come about Perl and Curses::Toolkit, my baby :)

In this podcast I talk about my progress learning Bash for Gentoo ebuild development.

LINKS:
Bash By Example
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bash3.html
Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible
http://xrl.us/bfzigo
Learning the Bash Shell
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009656
Gentoo Tools
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/tools-reference/index.html
Sed By Example
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/l-sed1.xml
Bash Guide
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide
Grep
http://www.panix.com/~elflord/unix/grep.html
Awk
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

Benjamin wrote a comment on my last post, and I'll share my answers here because those questions come up every now and then, so it's better to try to inform everyone. (That and I never write on this blog, so this is a perfect excuse to do so)

If you assume compile problems, why is that thing unmasked?

Xorg-server 1.7 is not getting stabilized, it's just getting unleashed onto unstable. Unstable means exactly that. Of course we try to do our best and we won't release something we know will break. The idea behind unstable is for users to test the new and shiny stuff before it hits stable.

If you don't want to help fix bugs, use stable. It's as simple as that.

I've always been irritated by the way the xorg team handled masked/unstable/stable releases, as even rc's were unmasked at times.

Releases in X-land are tough. The numbers almost mean nothing. For instance, the last stable version in the 1.5 series was 1.5.3-r6. And despite the apparently stable version number, it currently has 80 patches to make it run smoothly.

On the opposite side, the current stable server is 1.6.3.901-r2, which is indeed a "pre point release" only has a couple patches. And 1.7.1 doesn't have any patches.

So don't let the version number fool you, they mean almost nothing.

As for what we put in portage, well X is a complex piece of software. It used to have more than a million lines of code and it's been getting some tough love these last 2 or 3 years. And up until recently, drivers were a mess. I had shivers every time a new driver was released : "How many systems will this break?" was a question I asked myself over and over.

There are probably a lot of people who put the xorg-server in package.keywords because they needed/wanted feature X/Y or because it fixed some bug for them (it did for me). So now I get a release that possibly breaks build in unstable?

Again, unstable is for power users who are not afraid of filing bug reports if something breaks. We try to make sure that things don't break every day, but Gentoo being a source distro with billions of possibilities (USE flags, CFLAGS, arches, packages, ...),you can't reasonably expect us to try every possible combination.

So we ask for you help (via bugzilla) in return. Gentoo is a community distro, after all.

So there, that's it for today, I hope y'all know a bit more about how we manage X and unstable packages.

Right now at work we’re currently having an issue with branch offices and SVN. We’ve got a machine with some decent power with decent disk space handling our SVN repos. We’re running a 1.6 version repo that was dumped and reloaded with 1.6 so its using the newer format fully. However we still have employees at branch offices that often complain about the poor speed of SVN. Oddly the biggest complainers were Windows based devs and people using obscure (at least to me) GUI SVN tools. Currently our branch offices are all linked back to our main office over a VPN link with a dedicated 1.5mbit up and down to each remote office, with a possibility to burst up to 80% of total VPN bandwidth. A few complaints were attributed to poorly coded SVN clients (i.e. one employee’s client would perform an ‘svn log’ on the top level of the repo and filter out the correct level of messages on the client side). However the complaints have remained constant. To mitigate our guy handling our infrastructure configured SVN hotcopy repos at the branch office servers that allow everyone to get their data off those SVN servers (repo UUIDs were sync’d) and then commit back to the main office.

To remedy this I’ve created a new capability in SVN trunk. I’ve called it ‘commit-redir’. Basically a branch office employee can now checkout their code from a local SVN repo and commit as they normally would to that server instead of having to go through the time consuming steps of switching back to the main office repo. Transparent to them, the client advertises the ‘commit-redir’ capability to their local server, which then sees that its a read only mirror and replies back with the correct URL they should present the commit to. The client takes this response and re-submits the commit back to the main office. Net result, employees can enjoy the full speed of having a local mirror of SVN except when committing. They don’t have to jump through loops to use that local mirror and commit back.

Now I’ve still got some bugs in the code and some touch ups to do. We’re also not actually running the code at the office yet due to the afore mentioned bugs but I’m hoping this week to submit the code upstream and to start running it at our offices.

NVIDIA has officially blessed the 190.x driver series to replace the 185.18.x series. Release highlights include:

• xorg-server-1.7 support
• OpenGL 3.2 support
• VDPAU decoding of MPEG-4 Part 2, DivX 4, and DivX 5 depending on your GPU
• Support additional GPUs in the GeForce GT series

For more details read their release notes, here.

Gentoo has had a few different developers maintaining “unofficial” drivers in the 190.x series. However there’s a few outstanding issues with those ebuilds that still need to be resolved before they’re unmasked. I’ll hopefully push 190.42-r2 unmasked later on this evening.

Last night I installed UT2004 on my laptop, after not playing it since June. The laptop in question is an older ThinkPad R61i, with an Intel X3100 graphics chip. I know -- not the best for gaming. However, most online reports I found indicate that it's acceptable for such an old game as UT2004, so I figured it'd be worth a shot. The Intel graphics drivers have made a lot of progress in the last two years, especially on the 3D front, right? Right?

Kinda. After reducing all settings to "low" and dialing back the resolution to 1024x768 (native is 1280x800), the game is playable, but with very uneven framerates. Looking toward the middle of a map, or anyplace with a lot of action, introduces a good stutterfest; frames are down to between 8 and 18FPS. I enabled a few extra options such as pixel shaders and VBOs in UT2004.ini to add a bit more performance, but it's still marginal.

I'm rather disappointed. I'm not having nearly as great an experience as other Linux users, and certainly not as good as the Windows gamers who've benchmarked Unreal on this hardware. However, I did also catch the huge xorg-server 1.7 update as well, so maybe there have been some performance regressions since 1.6. It makes it a little hard to determine the areas that could use tweaking. I don't have anything special in my xorg.conf, just a default resolution. It's possible there's a setting I'm missing.

I'd like to try UT2004 on my desktop workstation, which has a RadeonHD 4550 card, but all reports indicate that even the latest git checkouts of the open-source drivers still don't work with Unreal. Apparently the game can't even launch, much less run at playable speeds. But as rapidly as the drivers are maturing, I'm hoping this'll be fixed in a month or so. Call me optimistic.

* * *

It looks like Abiword 2.8.0 was released today, so I wrote an ebuild and made it available in my devspace. I've been hand-writing these things for awhile. It took quite a bit of research to determine what went into the 2.7 betas, and now I'll have to do another overhaul of the 2.8 ebuild to account for the new plugin system. There's no longer a separate abiword-plugins package; they're all distributed in the base 2.8.0 archive. This means there will be a lot more tricky configure checks and USE flags, which sucks from a flexibility standpoint. Keeping the plugins in an external package was much simpler, so I'm a bit disappointed by this upstream decision.

Still, right now you can download and install Abiword 2.8.0 using my ebuild. While it needs a few cleanups, it will get you set up with a fully functioning basic Abiword install, though the only available plugin (as shown in the "Plugins" dialog) is .odt support.

This new version launches much quicker than 2.7.10, and it seems to have fixed all the rendering errors and even the crashes that happened with basic operations. Basically, you can click stuff now without worrying.

Cleaning up my ebuild is a long task, thanks to those darned plugins. Patches welcome, or I suppose you could always just wait and see what ends up in Bugzilla.

It's out there now, available in ~arch. Like always, you'll need to rebuild your drivers, just look-up the command given by the server's ebuild (use eread if you've lost the output).

This release took a little longer to unmask not because of the server (it's a nice change). It's because a lot of headers were moved around from library packages to proto packages and vice versa. The ABI of X libraries has not changed, but I'm pretty sure there will be compile errors in some packages.

If that's the case, please file bugs in bugzilla.

Thanks for reading this public service announcement.

Edit: There will not be a package.keywords list for stable users. Xorg-server 1.7 is intended for ~arch users only, at this moment. And all bugs from stable users will be closed INVALID. We will start creating lists when we want to stabilize it.