Okay, until dsd_ have time to update the feeds, I'd like to point the Gentoo/*BSD and multimedia updates followers that my new blog is at http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/ , that is my main Gentoo/FreeBSD box. It's going to be a stability test, too.
Now, waiting for it :P
So, even tonight I wasn't able to sleep. And this is bad. I had to sleep in the afternoon, that is even worse. But not like I can do much about that right now. I have to say I haven't even _eaten_ today. Sigh.
I spent the night fixing a few things here and there for Gentoo/FreeBSD, looking at what has to be done and stuff like that.. oh, thanks to Jeffrey, now the new stage is on the mirrors, I'll also look forward for providing an update VMX possibly.
But what I started doing this morning was a masochistic decision most likely. I tried fixing PAM bugs, starting from the infamous PAM 0.99 bump.
Well I have to say the build system is drastically improved since last time I tried (especially since it was completely broken that time), although there are still a few issues to solve.
I decided that this time we won't be applying a full load of RedHat patches to add this and that, I'd rather see more ebuilds for things like pam_console that are needed by utopia for instance.
Big fat warning: sys-libs/pam-0.99.* at this point in time is not supported as stable nor ~arch. It _will_ break your system most likely. vixie-cron stopped working for me until I rebuilt pam a second time for instance. There are less modules, as there are less patches. Everything still using pam_stack.so is going to break as we don't (and probably won't) ship that any further.
That said, I can use some test on this. I know that the userdb module links to libdb1.so in /usr, I'm going to move that out on its own ebuild actually, it's pretty obnoxious as it is now. I'll do that in the next days. I won't revbump it every time or we'll end up having a -r300 sooner or later, so you'll have to take a look at the ChangeLog or to my CIA stats page.
Also, I was able to nail down the list of PAM related bugs to 20, of which 11 are requests for new packages and 2 are version bump. Not bad at all for a mostly 1-man team. But of course I _do_ need some help. Also because most of those 11 new packages are interesting, but I can't manage all of them by myself.
I've also committed another --as-needed fix. I'm considering dropping -hashvals and -Bdirect in favour of using 2.16.92 binutils, as that should allow me to use --as-needed with wxGTK (and thus to write a check for ld version so that I can filter those only on older versions). I still have to decide on that. Update: I started wondering a bit, and I checked, binutils 2.16.92 already have support for -Bdirect, while the hashvals patch still applies, so I'll go with that now :) Update 2: more coffee, thanks, -Bdirect is not supported, I just checked the wrong binutils-config...
Ah, at the end, I ordered the two books from Amazon, €60 and shipping the first week of june... quite an ass of shipping but well, I can't find anything better. I hope at least that the work I'm going to do will compensate these costs. I was hoping also to use the $5 gift certificate that I got some time ago for answering an IBM's survey.. too bad it only works on the American Amazon.com and not to .co.uk, of course using that is no-go for me, too high the costs, would be paying more than $5 for the shipping :)
Okay, third blog entry in less than a day, but this is worth a small note.
Do anybody remember that xine-lib makes amaroK and any other frontend crash when trying to play/access an mp3 file when mad is not enabled?
Well, this behaviour is gone. xine-lib will just refuse to play it.
How did I fix that? Well with a big help from Ian Monroe of the amaroK team who gave me the backtrace to work on. Now is really fixed, yeeeee! :)
Again many thanks to Ian, and now I can be happy for today.
Update: seems like today is really xine-lib's day. Another big thanks then, this time to Mark Kretschmann, also from amaroK team ;) He reported to me (some time ago actually) that xine-lib wasn't playing authenticated HTTP streams, and helped nailing down the problem, today I had time to try the patch and it does really work now, xine-lib-1.1.2_pre20060328-r1 plays authenticated HTTP streams just fine.
Okay, so tonight I wasn't able to sleep. It's been a while my sleep was intermittent, and tonight was a "no" night. For this reason, I spent the whole night fixing stuff and bumping. Some things are worth noting as might be of help or relieve to the users out there in the outer space.
First of all, new version of vlc: 0.8.5_beta3, or rather test3, that's another prerelease of 0.8.5 version; unfortunately no patches dropped, which means no new fix for things I was fixing myself are fixed yet. It could have been worse tho. Also, DirectFB support is now fixed, with a newer patchset to add a missing AC_ARG_WITH in the configure.ac that seems to have been overseen by upstream in both test2 and test3.
To fix DirectFB support in VLC I had to actually merge DirectFB, which came down to fix libmpeg3 that was badly broken. It was one of the worse makefiles I ever seen in my life. It builds, it's not pretty, it's hackish, but it builds fine, that's enough for me, brr. I'll be glad of removing directfb and libmpeg3 from my system soon.
I merged a patch I had for tvtime to disable xinerama extension into main portage, as Obz seems to be away and upstream sleeping. It's not much of a change anyway.
Old rtorrent/libtorrent versions are gone, live happy with a smaller tree. I also cleaned up my overlay for the ones using it, it now has quite a few packages less, as they are all more or less fixed in main portage tree.
For the cycle "I'm the only one playing FloboPuyo?" ( ;) ), I've added my patch to install a .desktop file with an icon to games-puzzle/flobopuyo, now if you're in games group you'll find it directly on your menu (if you aren't, TryExec will prevent you from seeing the entry anyway).
I bumped KScope as now the legal concerns are fixed. But this is not the usual ebuild that builds and install as it is the sources, you'll get additional value by your friendly neighborhood ebuild maintainer: it moves the .desktop in the right directory to figure on stuff like enlightenment and it installs a sample kscoperc configuration file that already has the paths to the programs it uses, no need to run the autodetection code at all! :P
For the Gentoo/FreeBSD side of the things, I have fixed the clock init.d script so that it actually runs adjkerntz instead of using hwclock, so from next freebsd-baselayout release it will be an actual init.d script rather than a dummy script. Yuppie! :) Also a big thanks to swegener who suggested me to use /etc/cron.d to put the crontab needed by adjkerntz -s to work correctly.
As I was there, I also noted that kerberos support, although present in sys-freebsd ebuilds, too, is untested, and I have actually no clue how to test it, so I've masked the use flag until someone can finally test it, knowing what it does and how.
8:26 local time and I haven't slept. Good, eh?
So a few more updates, although today was a bad work on my 'daily job' as I had to recode a good part of one of the utilities I was asked to develop when I started the job to integrate it with existing code. I hate adding stuff to others' code, especially when it's missing.
I was able anyway to provide a few updates for my beloved users :P
The first that can be seen is the presence of ALSA 1.0.11 final in portage, and dropping the whole list of release candidates that had to be added to portage just because of the kernel needing them. They are likely to be marked stable soon as they are needed for 2.6.16 to be marked stable, too, so if anyone feels daring to help me, please try them on a stable system. Many thanks, really.
Now from the Gentoo/FreeBSD side I continued my work to get the crosscompile environment, but I'm afraid this will take a while. For instance I'm probably going to merge, for 6.1 version at least, freebsd-lib and freebsd-headers as they don't make much sense divided as they are right now.
Unfortunately this will require fixes to crossdev as we won't have the same two-packages setup as Linux has with linux-headers and glibc.
I'm also going to fix the clock setup sooner or later, I'm getting tired of having it out of sync with my main system, one CEST and one UTC. This will go in a baselayout update I'm going to roll out with a new stage next week, as I found quite a bit of problems in the old stage when I installed it on farragut.
By the way, for who was wondering what I am keywording ~x86-fbsd on the tree, it's mostly what I use, either because I test with that or I'm using the box for. Farragut is going to be my testbed for Ruby-on-Rails so that's why I keyworded it, and I use PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
And last but not least, for who's wondering the fate of pam-0.99... Azarah is having little if any time lately, so he's probably not going to wokr on that soon. Myself, I think I'd need at least two to three days to get pam in a shape to be p.masked in tree, mainly because there are plently of minor glitches and gentoo-specific patches that needs to be ported and possibly fixed to be merged upstream. So I suppose unless someone else steps up, it will have to wait till I get time to hack at it, which means after my current job is finished and before the next one is started.
It's in my TODO list, but not in my priority list, as I'm focusing as much as I can on Gentoo/FreeBSD lately, until I can get a few more devs to help, and to sound/video applications and libraries as they needed a lot of fixes. Joking bit: oh you can of course always bribe me to change the priority of pam ;)
So, I've already tried in the past to get a working crosscompiler to FreeBSD from my amd64 box, mainly to distcc stuff.
Unfortunately, to have that working last time I had to install the headers manually, I had to mess with crossdev and overlays, and I only got the C compiler working, not the C++ one.
This time, I'm trying to fix all the stuff up so that I can actually have a decent crosscompiler that can be installed by the usual crossdev actions.
Up to now, I messed with freebsd-headers and partially freebsd-lib, freebsd-mk-defs and a few more stuff. It's not yet straightforward to fix it up, and lots of stuff had to be changed and edited and conditioned, but the results are promising.
I do have FreeBSD's headers merged fine using sys-freebsd/freebsd-headers ebuild, and that's fine. I have a stage1 compiler, that means I can actually build c programs with it. I'm trying to fix freebsd-lib so that it actually merges in crosscompile.
Right now you still need at least sys-devel/pmake and sys-apps/mtree installed manually (a huge thanks to tigger for mtree, or I should have tinkered to add that myself) before running crossdev, and also freebsd-mk-defs are needed for the headers to be installed correctly. The latters has to be keyworded via package.keywords, too.
I'd actually like to be sleeping right now, but I'm waiting for freebsd-lib to at least start to _try_ to build something...
Oh and for those who followed my little rant about shipping costs, I'm probably going to buy the two books from Amazon, as one commenter suggested. The shipping aren't low but they aren't too high, either. Buying only the Agile Web Development with Rails book from Amazon with their shipping costs I'm still paying less than buying the same book (in English) from an Italian e-bookshop.
Still, I'm considering what to do, as it's still €60 to pay now for two books I'm going to receive no idea when :/
Indeed.
Today while I was thinking over the code I wrote for my programmer's job I iterated over the whole list of bugs for sound@ to try to nail it down a bit. This allowed me to cut my own list off 39 bugs. Some of them closed, some of them reassigned, some of them renamed to "bump/stable request" so they are off my radar.
I'll spend some more time tomorrow on a similar note for media-tv bugs.
This happened while farragut is building the system, as now I can build on Gentoo/FreeBSD without making my system go starving because of VMware. And this is really good for me.
Now there are a few things that i need to fix in the baselayout, then I'll probably roll out a new updated snapshot the next week, as I found quite a few problems while building out of that stage.
Anyway, now I'm waiting for a friend to submit a bug for ALSA on PowerPC that I have to fix, and then I'll see to spend some more time on fixing stuff.. damn I should get a life!
Oh by the way... for the first time for what concerns me, I was able to get a fix for a security bug 9 months before the advisory is released ;) You can be safe with xine-ui on Gentoo :)
Finally, after quite a bit of time. What made me change my decision of using vmware-server? Well it's mainly a factor of time and an opportunity I've seen just today.
When I bought the new monitor, I bought one which had a dual input, to use the DVI with my GeForce card for a dual-monitor configuration. This has the side effect that the VGA analog input is not used... and I just never used that before, until now.
I connected the VGA input to the box I used to work with Gentoo/FreeBSD on, and now I just have to press the source button on the monitor to get its output, without need to detach and reattach the connections every time.
Now it's just matter of burning a new LiveCD and re-install Gentoo/FreeBSD on it, from scratch.
I'll do that tomorrow for sure, as I'm probably going to have not much time in the future, if I'm going to find a job that I won't do from home as I'm working right now. From one point of view that's going to take much of my time, but at least I'll be learning how to work as a helper sysadmin in a real environment :)
I'm trying to use all the time I have lately to fix the last issues with Gentoo/FreeBSD and with video and sound and so on. Today I fixed all the bugs for video I could think of. There are still a few that requires a long work, like xine-ui's freeze with horizontal scrollbars on 64-bit systems, but for that I really need more work.
I'll try to fix also a few sounds bugs tomorrow, but mostly there are bugs for jack and professional audio/music production software that I don't have an idea of at all.
Anyway, I hope to be able to help users this way, but I'm not sure how much I can do in these limited days :|
No this time I'm not referring to the political scene in Italy, but to a practical problem.
I'll be working on a webapplication that has to be written in Ruby on Rails. I'm not exactly a Ruby expert but I know how to use it, I should be able to do what I'm asked to, so it's not a big deal, but as I'm not that used to complex webapplications, I was thinking of buying one of the books that are being written on the topic. I was mainly thinking of Rails Recipes, but as that's not yet printed, I was tempted by Agile Web Development with Rails, too. I'm not a person who likes to spend money for redundant stuff, but if there's something I like to buy is books, so I always thought that money spent on books is always money well spent.
I looked how much would they be, and it was a quite acceptable price, €33 for the PDF and the printed copy of Rails Recipes and €29 for Agile Web Development. Not a bad price after all. Unfortunately, the shipping price is really high: €21 for two books, two times the shipping for a single book. For sure, I don't have so much money to spend to buy both, and buying only one of them, with €10 of shipping is not something I much like.
I'll end up waiting for the two books to be available on Italy e-shops.
Sometimes, I'd like to live on the other side of Atlantic just to have decent shipping prices, sigh :(
A few pointers on the status of GCC on Gentoo/FreeBSD. If you've seen GCC failing to compile lately, it's because protoize was enabled by default on newer revisions of the toolchain eclass, but protoize doesn't seem to build at all on FreeBSD, I'm still investigating that, but it can take a while, so in the mean time it's disabled now.
After that, I've added a simple check to avoid patching and building PIE and SSP support on FreeBSD as they are not (yet?) supported, basically behaving like nopie and nossp were enabled by default on FreeBSD. Instead of 4 specs in gcc-config, now there are only two, one for Hardened compiler without PIE or SSP, and one for the vanilla compiler, dropping the extra specs.
Also I want to thanks Javier again for the work he's doing, he prepared a modified version of imlate yesterday, that I'll use to make sure ~x86-fbsd keyword doesn't end up remaining only on obsolete versions.
I also keyworded Xorg 7's drivers that builds on FreeBSD so that they are available for testing (for this, like other arches, I'm following the idea "it works until proved otherwise", as finding people with all those drivers would prove difficult). I'll have to fix nvidia-glx before committing xorg-x11 tho, so keep waiting for a while still :)
Now, I'm not sure if I'll be able to continue working tonight or I'll just go reading Wizard and Glass until I sleep, but between tonight and tomorrow I'll also have to work on finishing fixing up baselayout with Javier's patches.
By the way, I'm interested to see if there's someone wanting to work on the support of GNOME on Gentoo/FreeBSD: what it's needed is collaboration between Gentoo's GNOME team, FreeBSD's GNOME team and upstream GNOME developers, so that the efforts aren't redundant nor unportable... yeah it's not an easy or quick job, but it's useful, and if you are a GNOME fan, you might want to give your hand here ;)
KDE works, and XFCE used to so it might still be working already, I haven't tried yet. Enlightenment 0.16 out of portage works, I'm not sure about E17 as there's a patch needed, that I've prepared for E16 but haven't tried on E17. I'm interested in trying it actually, as it seems quite cool, for a WM, and I might want to use it as my WM of choice in testing Gentoo/FreeBSD.
Time to return to work!
So, now that the ~x86-fbsd keyword is being spread on tree, a part from fixing the dependencies on the optional stuff I haven't keyworded yet, I've started also fixing some issues with baselayout and init scripts.
I want to thank Stefano Takekawa, Robert Sebastian Gerus and Javier Villavicencio, who helped by testing and providing bug reports, init scripts and patches to base on. A new freebsd-baselayout is released, along with a few revision bumps of sys-freebsd packages: now net scripts sets routes correctly, included metrics; net.lo0 doesn't warn anymore (both of which are fixes provided by Javier); pf and powerd have init scripts (respectively Robert's and Stefano's); man pages for machine-dependent drivers are installed alongside the rest of manpages to be available to users, and other misc fixes.
enlightenment 0.16.8.1 has a patch and it's keyworded in portage, I'm trying to get a hold of someone in #e @ freenode to get the patch merged upstream, so that the live CVS version would work (and thus I could try e17 ;)), and ffmpeg is fixed (in the mean that CFLAGS are no more ignored so -fomit-frame-pointer can be used to build mmx code and free up a register to allow building).
I've also keyworded tetex that solved a couple of optional dependencies for documentation and stuff. dev-libs/check is still a problem. I'll be keywording some more stuff in the next days, to cover the possible basic needs of users, not much stuff, but at least enough to make Gentoo/FreeBSD usable :)
Unfortunately vmware-server doesn't seem to handle sound support that good, and I can't test it at all. I'll have to find time to reinstall Gentoo/FreeBSD on a real box to work on, it would also help me with the building as I can test two things at a time that way.
I'm thinking if it's worth to release a new stage, with the recent fixes to baselayout, but I'm still not sure, as there are little fixes actually.
Oh a thing.. as there was an interesting discussion about the branding of stuff in Gentoo, although the outcome is still uncertain, I'd like to be able to have something to brand with, if the branding is accepted someway, but of course most of the artwork will be for Gentoo Linux...
Now, we do have the beautiful logo that Marius Morawski drawn, would it be pushing it asking for people to prepare (possibly svg) wallpapers and kde splashscreens? :) (I say KDE because that runs already, if GNOME will be fixed, that would do too).
It's been a while since I last blogged; the reason is found in the recent Italy's elections; I wanted to avoid ending up talking about italian politics. But now elections are ended and I can restart blogging :)
First of all, start with news of the day, Daemon News published an interview done by David Stanford to.. me :) I want to thanks David and the Daemon News staff for this opportunity.
Part two, amaroK 1.4 crazyness... okay I know many people are going to hate me because of the series of bumps of amarok 1.4_beta3. Unfortunately there were a few problems with the released tarballs, regressions since the _rc we all tested, that ended up requiring a final 1.4_beta3c tarball release (1.4_beta3-r2 in Gentoo).
The major change since this release is that xine is no more optional. Upstream decided that one between helix and xine engines had to be built for amaroK to be considered complete, and being helix available only for x86, I did go with xine. If you want gstreamer backend you can select it, but it might not be available in final release as it lacks proper (upstream) maintenance. Xine works in most cases tho, just remember to enable mad useflag if you want to play mp3s.
From the Gentoo/*BSD part, I want to thanks Mike for adding the ldhints patches to Gentoo patchsets for binutils 2.16.1-r2 and 2.16.91.0.7, and Nick Clifton (from upstream binutils) who applied that patch on upstream, too. This means that right now binutils from HEAD supports FreeBSD completely out of the box! Yuppie! Well --as-needed seems not to work, I have to fix that, but that's lower priority.
I'm still working on baselayout, as there are still troubles, for example rc-daemon doesn't work as intended, and currently all the filesystems are checked twice (this is fixed in SVN thanks to Javier Villaviciencio who reported it), and dhclient fails to set routes. Most of this will be fixed soon tho :)
Also, Xorg7 works, KDE 3.5 works too. kdebase-meta, kdenetwork-meta and kdegraphics-meta are (almost fully) keyworded and works fine. I had to add a last minute fix to mesa to get rid of -ldl from .la files installed, so if you have it installed and have problems linking due to libdl missing, run the following command: sed -i -e 's:-ldl::g' /usr/lib/libGL{,U}.la /usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/libGL.la, and that it will fix it.
sdl seems to work, too, so I'm going to keyword it together with flobopuyo (my favourite game and what I've tested a lot with ;) ) later on, although you need the patched libusb 0.1.12 from the overlay if you have libusb already installed, as 0.1.11 has a bad bug that makes libSDL fail to find the usb joystick support on FreeBSD and ends up failing because of undefined symbols on the final library.
Right now I've talked with UberLord and I might know what the deal is with dhclient, but I can't test it right now, I'll wait for arachnist to test, and in the mean time I'm going to bump alsa to 1.0.11_rc5, sigh.
Anyway, the binutils patch merged upstream is really a milestone for me... next step, patching gcc to recognise the extra format strings added by FreeBSD while using the right FreeBSD target :)
I'd like to contact some FreeBSD developer to submit the patches to build freebsd-lib and -sources with binutils 2.16 but I'm not sure who to send them to :(
I really want to thanks the VMware guys for their vmware-server... today the beta2 was released, and tonight I was having a few issues with vmware-server itself, so I decided to update it and see...
I was about to curse for a while, as it was really giving me hard times with slowness, but then I seen it had somehow started also another virtual machine I didn't need. I started the Gentoo/FreeBSD 6.0 VM and.... magic! the "negative runtime" warnings that were coming up during the boot phase are now gone! Great! Thanks VMware.
Anyway, the stage is now on my home on dev.gentoo.org, waiting for one of the mirrors' admins to pick it up and put it on mirrors.
Right now I"m testing Emanuele's patch to build freebsd-lib with newer binutils, I hope vapier will merge my patch into binutils for tomorrow, that would really help.
Anyway, now it's 2:27 and I _really_ need to sleep as last night I haven't sleep at all (and slept only during the afternoon, 11-16).
It's fortunate that I can conciliate the work on Gentoo/FreeBSD with my actual job, if I were to have a way more committing job, I would have to drop most of G/FBSD maintenance, and that would be bad at the current status :(
So, as I promised to a couple of users before, I'm going to provide an updated Gentoo/FreeBSD 6.0 stage this week. What will figure in this updated stage? Lots of new shiny things :)
First of all, the new baselayout, where the net script actually works for routes, too. It still has some glitches, for example stopping cups or openntpd causes a termination :( but this is still a minor problem. Consider this is still experimental so please submit any bugs you'll find in Bugzilla.
There's also an updated version of binutils, 2.16.1-r2 fixed with the FreeBSD patch; I was almost going to provide a 2.16.91.0.7 version, but then I remembered that I still have to patch freebsd-lib to build with it with the patch kindly provided by exg :) (who also explained me how to fix these kind of issues, thanks exg).
There will be a newer GCC too, but that's not much useful. It will solve two big issues, namely the libarchive/bsdtar merge and expat's soname change. You'll also find a couple more packages, like cronbase (used by freebsd-ubin to have cron.daily directory, as locate now has updatedb working without periodic) and pidof, new dependencies added when sanitising ebuilds for main tree merge.
Oh yeah this will also be the first stage only using ~x86-fbsd keyword, the first one using in-tree packages (although you still need the overlay). It will featurea also vim, for the pleasure of its users.
Please note that currently the ~x86-fbsd tree is _not_ complete, there are things like tcp-wrappers that are even in system but if enabled will ask you to keyword stuff ~x86, and USE=doc and USE=test are not yet fixed... I'll do that time allowing.
There's also a new portage in the stage, although when 2.1_pre8 goes out I'm going to strictly require that on profile, if antarus is kindly enough to implement per-package use.masking in it :)
Anyway, I hope to be able to prepare updated stages more quickly in the future, even if vmware-server has still issues..
I think that, after an year, we really had big improvements. I had a bit of a mess up last fall, and with newer versions of xorg it wasn't working anymore, now thanks to Xorg upstream and the modular release, we actually have a working Xorg, and I started keywording stuff so that it won't disappear easily. Right now it's possible to have a quite minimum system but working fine... well minimum depends what suits you, it _does_ have most of xorg keyworded and kdebase, too....
Oh well ;)
Okay a multimedia update, someone will hope this is going to be my last (or one of the last) blog entry, as seems like whatever I do, I break something (in their dreams maybe, who knows).
I've committed to portage, under package.mask, vlc 0.8.5 test2 . Please give it a try and report of any problems found, either to me via bugzilla or directly upstream.
I hope there won't be anything particular, but testing it is not a bad idea, also because it started to use libtool now.
Okay I think this is just a quick update about it so that people will know about.
(Another quote title, although not of the same continuity than the two before, this time it's Meitantei Conan ;) )
So seems like the recent breakage due to expat changing soname from libexpat.so.0 to libexpat.so.1 shown to some fellow devs and to other advanced users that --as-needed can be useful. I had a total of 9 files linking to libexpat, and I just needed to rebuild fontconfig to have KDE still working, no rebuild of qt, kdelibs or any kde package at all.
Many people asked me about --as-needed lately, so I started providing more often my --as-needed fixing guide link, as that tries to summarise more or less what you have to know about that flag and the way to fix packages not supporting it. I wish to thanks antarus who cleaned it up, as it used to suck grammatically more than it sucks for the content.
Still there's who likes to be prissy about these things, wondering why that guide is in qa as "--as-needed is rice"... oh well, if --as-needed is rice, then hardened is rice too, selinux is rice, mips porting is rice..
I don't see how someone can define rice something that makes the linker work as it should have done rather than following blindly what a developer (that might not even know how a linker work) told it to do.
Anyway, I hope that the attention that --as-needed got recently will help with the efforts to fix the packages that doesn't work with it so that we can actually start suggesting that to users, as that limits the breakage in case of soname change to the actual packages making use of the changed library, rather than almost the whole system.
Oh a side note, I'm sorry for the wrong patch in drkonqi/kdebase I committed tonight, seems like I was half asleep when I decided to change from the patch full name to ${P}... anyway now with that patch you're able to get decent backtraces with drkonqi also when using splitdebug, be happy! :)
(again, a quote from a TV Series I like, this time Scrubs...)
Okay so I've found my problem with the mouse I was having before, /dev/sysmouse does not work, the right device is /dev/psm0, although xorgcfg doesn't recognise that, I might have to tell that to the Xorg guys.
Anyway, now that the problem is solved, I've keyworded also xf86-input-vmmouse that's the driver I'm using right now.
After keywording the part of xorg I actually installed and thus made sure it works, I wanted to restart the work on KDE, while I'm still validating sys-freebsd ebuilds so that i can put them on tree in the next days.
I've keyworded quite a bit of the dependencies, but I'm now waiting for Qt to build. I'm sure it works, it always worked, but I have to compile it first.
Although sys-freebsd is still to be committed, I managed to keyword the base system and most of the important utilities we have, like portage-utils, screen, vim, and so on. gcc and binutils 2.15 are keyworded, 2.16 requires the patch that Mike hasn't merged yet.
I have to say that I have left as RDEPEND.badindev most of the dependencies for doc and test useflags, as I don't have time to test these right now. I also haven't use.masked stuff I didn't know already broken (like java for example), so you might get problems, they'll be fixed, somehow.
I actually miss working on a real machine rather than a virtual one: a virtual machine is easier to monitor the console of, but it shares the compile power with my own workstation and that's pretty annoying on the long run. I might reinstall the box I have here sooner or later, but right now going to move the monitor connection from one box to the other is really not the case, especially as from today I'm working pretty hard on my paid job.
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Its been crazy the last few days with Gentoo's infra. I helped setup this planet site for dsd over the weekend and will be released in a few days. So far it seems to be working great! The next site I've been helping bring to life is the scripts repository site. This site will help bring together any scripts that people have created for Gentoo. Ian Leitch has been great to work with to get this site up and running. Now he'll finally be able to test it in a better format :)
Another project I worked on lately was helping setup a box for Brian Harring for the xdelta project he's working on. He'll have a server all to himself to torture and see how things go.
Its been crazy lately with all the service migrations for Gentoo infrastructure. I'm just glad that most of gone smoothly! I'll be glad when we get all the services off of eagle so we can finally move that server to its new rack. Finally got around to getting Planet Gentoo setup for dsd and it looks sweet! I can't wait for us to nail any issues with that and and have our users start using it. It'll be a great addition to Gentoo for sure.
On Saturday I visited the folks at Salford uni to attend the Gentoo UK 2005 Conference. There is a fine write-up on it in this weeks GWN so I won't elaborate on this too much, but I would like to extend my thanks to all of those participating in the event this year. It was a pleasure to meet those dev's I've never met before in person. Shouts out to Tim, Tom, Dan, Stuart, Rob, Stephen, and although I never recognized you on the day Marcus! If there is anyone I have forgotten, my apologies and shouts to you too!
Gareth Bult of Flash Linux fame spoke about the technical limitations of USB keys, which I found most interesting, and also (indirectly) raised a few points which I would like to rant about. Documentation! Everyone knows our documentation team do a great job and our handbooks are nothing short of superb, however there are so many other documents which we look after which are terribly outdated or have not been made aware of. Hopefully the planet is a good push towards the aggregation of information, although I for one will be making more of an effort to keep documentation well organized and up to date. Daniel Drake (dsd) spoke about his views of the kernel, mostly the 2.6 branch and its organization and touched on a few nice subjects. Monolithic vs. Modular for example. I felt a little embarrassed that I attended and didn't put in any talks of my own so I must apologize for that, however I thoroughly enjoyed Dan's talk and he would have shown me up anyway ;) Something I would like to add however is that in the coming few months I am going to make a more conscious effort to keep the project page updated and our TLP roadmap accessible. With 2005.0 still being up-in-the-air I am going to hold off however. Unfortunately I missed most other peoples talks in full as Stuart and I ran off to the side-room together! But from what I hear Rob only swore once, so way to go! All in all, thoroughly enjoyable.
On a different note I went to Alton Towers on Friday and even the weather held out! It was a lovely day, and it was an awesome amount of fun. Anyone who's going, I recommend staying the night in "The Bulls Head Inn" its just down the road, and the breakfast is fantastic. I think I went on every ride coming close to 4 times or so. Hex was the biggest dissapointment but numerous goes on Oblivion and Nemesis made up for it :)
Gentoo wise, there are several things coming up in the next few weeks with Kernel. There is of course the 2005.0 release which has been prepped for and requires further work once released to clean up old packages in the tree and so on. There has been some excellent progress made in migrating all the older sources to kernel-2 and older kernel module ebuilds to linux-info/mod eclasses. I will also be auditing our version detection mechanisms in the eclasses to ensure the recent move to a more refined upstream release scheme will be sanely catered for, and also addressing any issues which may have popped up from my recent unipatch change. Which reminds me, I am actually going to finish that re-write soon so devs can expect a much more powerful unipatch syntax and speed-ups. I would also like to welcome Carlos Silva (r3pek) on board! It's going to be a pleasure working with you.
So there is my first ever blog post! And I would just like to take this opportunity to thank Dan and all else involved for their dedication and initiative which made Planet Gentoo. It truly is an excellent tool!
So its been a little while since I last posted so let me update you all.
My Girlfriend (Claire) and I are looking around for a house, making the big move in together. I never realised how stressful just looking is! We have seen a fair few that we like, and have arranged several viewings but time will tell. I've also got quite addicted to "Ladette to Lady" on TV. I didnt realise watching stupid pompous old grannies and crazy young girls would be so entertaining.
Oh, and then there is my car. The accident magnet. As some of you probably know some stupid woman crashed into it, which I had to claim for an so on, and I have just now (after months of waiting) recieved the estimates. Well, I sat down for my dinner the other day and the door-bell rang so I went to see who it was. Some kid (good on him for not running off mind) appologised for riding down the road, losing control and crashing into the side of my car. It left a rather tidy scratch all down the rear passenger-side panel, and also a nice dint. Less than impressed :(
Also, no idea how many people have seen this but its pretty awesome. Basically, 18 real life taxi cabs fitted with GPS and split into teams of three. You pick a "team" as your online monopoly piece and when a cab is near/on your property after the round is up, you get paid rent. equally you pay rent in the same way. Very cool!
Anyways, on a more technical note I've been playing with the Asus PUNDIT-R's as a solution to running Asterisk with some difficulty. The digium card (TE110P) is based on a well documented, open card with open specs. Problem being there is just enough variation in it to make it a pig. Once you enable the spans on the card, the card will begin to send interrupts (in a frequency similar to the timer) and also enables DMA access. now, the IDE bus on this machine has a faulty DMA as it is, and also it appears a faulty (IO/L)APIC implementation.
Im still in the process of trying to diagnose as to why the box will hardlock under minimal load exactly, but it is almost certainly to do with the way it handles DMA, and more than likely it just clobbers userspace memory regions which will then be over-written by userspace, which then currupts kernel-space and hangs.
However, if anyone has any experience with these boxes, this hardware, and asterisk please give me a shout and let me know how you got on. I have even tried forcing interrupt allocation to the BIOS in a check to ensure sensible sharing.
for those faithful following my heartbreaking drama story of a car and its owner, there is still no progress been made. The weather is getting wetter, and my poor baby is trying to hold the fort against the elements to prevent itself from rusting, and although I fret I have began to come to terms. Still no news about claiming for its repair yet, and still no news about making a statement but I suppose thats just slack police :)
A few things happening in gentoo land.
modconf has been removed, excellent. Its been in the tree (same ebuild, only trivial changes) for 2 years. It had come to the decision of keeping it, and bumping it to working or dropping it. After brief discussion, the latter prevailed.
bugs #85410 and #84856 are closed. Anyone having problems with unipatch working on something other than base10, and madwifi not building if you use KBUILD_OUTPUT things are looking up! :)
bug #77190 has been closed. Anyone who was setting a LANG/LC_ALL variable which screwed up unipatch should now be working fine without needed to mess with anything.
And, plenty more to come. All in all, I don't have a great deal to add really. Only thing worth noting is I'm not feeling well and if things get much worse my availablity might become a little awkward.
So, all in all this has been a fun weekend. The weather has held out which is good, I have a new car (new Hyundai coupe UK US: works under epiphany!) which I've been driving around a lot all week.
I've been on the phone every day to Manx Telecom (my ex-employers) recently trying to arrange for my internet access to be reconnected. One of the perks of working there was free ADSL, however for some anomaly it was never added to my line. Therefore, it was ceased and I have had no internet access for almost a week. Apologies to those waiting on me for stuff with Gentoo, but the above explains my lack of activity this past week :)
I've also been dabbling a lot recently in the new multisync cvs builds, uclinux updates and a couple of other goodies. Hope to push some of it to the blog/tree soon. On top of this I'm going to commit nicer support within detect_version for the newer kernel scheme, something I've wanted to do but with 2005.0 and my lack of net access its had to wait.
For all of those awaiting a more permenant fix to bug #85559, this has now been done. Hopefully you vanilla-sources users (specifically) will benefit from a big bandwidth saving.
Also on a similar note, there has been a lot of confusion recently about 2.4/2.6 kernel versions and headers. Let me clear this up.
Many moons ago portage didnt have support for cascading profiles, although the 2.5 kernel had just been made 2.6 and progress was being made on stabalising support for it in Gentoo. The issues we had meant that we had to rename the 2.6 versions into a new package. For example: linux-headers contained 2.4, and linux26-headers contained 2.6.
This meant that managing the dependancies within ebuilds was awkward and amongst other things, far from ideal.
It was also an illogical seperation of what is fundementally the same thing. You dont for example see vim5 vim6 etc, you just have vim.
Now then, what we did recently, with the help of cascading profiles was amalgamate these packages into their relevant counter-parts. Therefore, we now have vanilla-sources-2.{0,2,4,6}* and linux-headers-2.{4,6}* and it is up to the profiles you run to manage which versions should be unmasked for you.
As part of this move we also moved to 2.6 by default for many architectures. As a result, and in true gentoo philosophy, you will find underneath your profile either a 2.6 or most likely a 2.4 subdirectory. If you link your profile to that directory instead then you will no longer be forced to update to 2.6, however I do encourage you to upgrade if you have no valid technical reason to stay.
So with this concludes:
emerge yourfavourite-sources will emerge 2.4, OR 2.6 depending on your profile. Most likely 2.6
emerge linux-headers will merge the appropriate headers.
IF you are upgrading from 2.4 to the newer 2.6 as part of this move, PLEASE PLEASE ensure your new kernel is installed and running along side your new 2.6 headers, since there are several reports of random segfaults occuring with 2.6 headers on a 2.4 kernel.
If you find that its installing a version you dont want, then just relink your /etc/make.profile to ${PORTDIR}/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.0/XX where XX is 2.4 (or 2.6 on different archs in some cases).
Hopefully this has now brought some clarity to the situation :)
So shortly following the purchase of my new car, I was driving home at a very reasonable speed, when all of a sudden a newly passed driver in a citroen ax came around the blind corner too fast hitting the car in front of me. So, I swerved to not get hit by the spinning AX, and bits of the cars were flying all over my bonet.
I rang 999, done the normal stuff - luckily everyone was completely fine. Anyways, checking the damage to my car and it was nothing worth crying over I left and went home. While at home I saw that it had ripped big chunks out of my paintwork all over my bonet, door panels and bumpers.
After spending a good half an hour on the phone to a police officer dealing with the accident, I think he finally believed me and so I took it to the local station so that they could check it. Now all I need to wait for is something to happen to pay for the damage to be repaired before it starts to rust!
And to add to the annoyance, the only reason I drove away from home in the first place was to pick something up from a shop which rang me to say something I wanted was in, only to find by the time I got there they were mistaken!
So, anyways, Gentoo stuffs.
kernel-2 changes have gone in to better accomodate KV_EXTRA and family.
linux-mod changes have gone into the tree to take over the pcmcia work from pcmcia.eclass, and pcmcia-cs changes will be made soon.
instead of it now working out and patching a load of odd pcmcia sources, it just tarballs up the pcmcia-cs sources at build time, and uses that for the future. Please please please dont delete /usr/src/pcmcia/pcmcia-cs-build-env.tbz2 once these changes go in or you might experience problems :)
Aside from that, nothing new to report.
So its been a while since I last blogged, and I've decided to give in on that whole "I promise to blog more often" routine which just doesn't work, but after having a few things happen recently which someone might actually like to read about, I decided to write a new installment of my crazed thoughts to entertain those religeous few :)
I've been looking for a simplistic, yet powerful Podcast client for quite some time now, without any of the ones i've found (iPodder/Juice, Rhythmbox etc) being simple and specific enough. I fairly recently came across monopod which I wrote an ebuild for (0.3) and after finding a bug open for it on bugzilla, submitted it to portage.
At the same time, I decided to clean up v0.4 and got right into mono development. So far I've fixed up the deprecated code, fixed and partially re-worked the iPod support, cleaned up a lot of smaller UI niggles and started writing a plugin system fairly similar to Banshee's to support automatic sync to iPod, daap, etc etc.
I've been in touch as well with Edd Dumbill and hope to start putting more time into turning monopod into a very convenient lightweight, but extensible podcast client. Of course, the fact that Banshee (which is awesome by the way, thanks Aaron) is actually getting a lot of attention from people writing podcast plugins for it means that monopod might end up being fairly short-lived. But obviously it has its purpose and I would never encourage playback support in it by standard anyways.
Anyways, on a totally different note Tim (Plasmaroo) lisa (lisa - funnily enough) and I met up in York for a bit of a gentoo get-together with a few other people on Saturday. It's nice to catch up with people face to face, and Tim's ability to shout russian in Pizza Hut impressed me! We met a rather interesting poet in the bookstore and ended up chatting about the ups and downs of (iirc) Jasper, XML, XSLT, Why not to use JavaScript, and then participating in some amateur filmography at the top of the stairs! :)
It was fun, hope to do it again sometime. The opportunity will come sooner than expected too with an unofficial meet in manchester shortly and a Gentoo UK gathering planned sometime near late May/June in London. Of course, everyone will be welcome and all interested parties should express their interest by badgering George (cokehabit) on #gentoo-uk ;) - I'm curious about rough numbers as I'm sure George is as well.
So, I could go on for a while with all the things I've been working on recently, but instead I'll give it a break and leave some beef for the next few days :)
Also to note, David Nielsen (Lovechild, some of you may remember him from his gentoo days) has been sexually abusing a lot of the UK developers recently. Word of warning for those tempted to visit us in London ;)
Looks like dual core G5s aren't that far off, if you take the update to MONster to be any indication. If you all remember last year the 970FX definition showed up all of 3 months before the machines hit the shelves. Apple has a tendency to only do major product releases three times a year, Mac World Expo in San Francisco, WWDC and Mac World Expo Paris. If the past is any indication of future results it looks like they are trying to push for production machines by WWDC in June. With the recent updates to the ppc64 kernel, and new fun stuff like AGP and iMac-G5 patches coming down the pike it looks like ppc64 is going to grow fast from here on out. Now if I could only get multilib working...
Just a heads up, I'm working to bring the Gentoo hardened profile to a ppc64 near you. A big thanks to solar for putting in the time to help me with this. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programing.
Some preliminary PaXtest data (no toolchain or noexec/pageexec yet):
Mode: blackhat
Linux Strife64 2.6.11-hardened-r1 #4 SMP Wed Mar 16 21:08:23 EST 2005 ppc64 PPC970, altivec supported PowerMac7,2 GNU/Linux
Executable anonymous mapping : Killed
Executable bss : Killed
Executable data : Killed
Executable heap : Killed
Executable stack : Killed
Executable anonymous mapping (mprotect) : Killed
Executable bss (mprotect) : Killed
Executable data (mprotect) : Killed
Executable heap (mprotect) : Killed
Executable stack (mprotect) : Killed
Executable shared library bss (mprotect) : Killed
Executable shared library data (mprotect): Killed
Writable text segments : Vulnerable
Anonymous mapping randomisation test : 24 bits (guessed)
Heap randomisation test (ET_EXEC) : 14 bits (guessed)
Heap randomisation test (ET_DYN) : 32 bits (guessed)
Main executable randomisation (ET_EXEC) : 20 bits (guessed)
Main executable randomisation (ET_DYN) : No randomisation
Shared library randomisation test : 24 bits (guessed)
Stack randomisation test (SEGMEXEC) : 32 bits (guessed)
Stack randomisation test (PAGEEXEC) : 32 bits (guessed)
Return to function (strcpy) : paxtest: bad luck, try different compiler options.
Return to function (memcpy) : Killed
Return to function (strcpy, RANDEXEC) : paxtest: bad luck, try different compiler options.
Return to function (memcpy, RANDEXEC) : Killed
Executable shared library bss : Killed
Executable shared library data : Killed
Yeah, even though I'm on vacation I just had to jump on the band wagon. Damn peer preasure........
10 PRINT Hello_World
20 BEEP
30 GOTO 10
Ah gotta love Apple Basic.
A little story for introduction:
At the edge of the Architecture map the intrepid programmer found the words "Here there be PowerPCs". Having no fear of these mysterious processors he set his sails to catch the wind and found that indeed the world was not flat. What he found over the horizon was a land where code was no longer bound by the tyranny of x86, a veritable paradise. The programmer set up shop and hung a sign outside his door; "PowerPC to the People" it read. As people slowly realized there was another way they broke free from their shackles and came to the new land. Welcome the programmer said, stay a while.
Ok, so jumping on the trend started by Simon and Diego here is the 'What did ppc and ppc64 do in 2005?' status update.
All told I'd say that's one hell of a year, here is to another great year for Gentoo, the PPC architecture and OpenSource as a whole.
This morning I discovered net-mail/t-prot. It's specifically designed for mutt users, but it should work with other MUAs, providing they're not one of these new fangled bloated graphical things.
Anyway, here's a URL: URL
The idea behind it was originally just to filter out classic TOFU, that is, "text oben, full-quote unten". This is a mish-mash of German and English meaning "text above -- full quote below", or just top posting to the rest of us.
However, t-prot filters out more than just TOFU. It gets rid of Outlook garbage and it can trim commercial and mailing list footers (or whatever footer you like). It can truncate RFC uncomformant signatures that are over four lines long. It does a bunch of other things too: trimming whitespace, repeated punctuation, blank lines, etc.
The best bit is that because it's just used as a display_filter in mutt, the original mail is unchanged. This means there're no strings attached, so try it out.
Just for the hell of it, here's a screenshot before (left) and after (right). Click on the images for full-size, if you're bored.
Interestingly, the person having their mail snipped by t-prot for having a huge RFC unconformant signature is also part of the ASCII ribbon campaign. It takes all sorts, I suppose.
Just got back home after my flight back from Manchester. I'm very tired, but I'll do my best to scribble down a few things. I apologise for not having any photographs, but there is a video/DVD in the pipeline.
Rob Holland (tigger^) gave a great talk on code auditing, in particular with doxygen and his work with that. The slides were a bit rough and ready (hehe), but it was excellently presented nonetheless. He didn't even swear once.
Stephen Bennett (spb) showed me and a few other people Gentoo/FreeBSD with the Gentoo init script system. Really quite impressive.
Daniel Drake (dsd) presented the kernel and user-relations projects. I think the talk will help a lot of users to report better bugs in the future, and maybe even George will sort out his DMA access now.
My talk was really rather scary for me and I was quite nervous (and unprepared!); I think it went fairly well though. The Zsh demo at the end seemed to get a few oohs and aahs.
Harry Moyes, a guest speaker from manchesterwireless.net, gave a talk on the process of setting up a charity in the UK, and the details thereof.
Also thanks to Gareth Bult for his talk on Flash Linux. It was really informative, and it looks like a very useful and interesting Gentoo-based distribution.
Thanks to the organisers, Stuart Herbert (Stuart) and Reuben Finch (grumpydog), for putting so much time and effort into the event. I'm looking forward to next year very much :).
you can find my talk in both LaTeX and PDF on my devspace. Compilation to any format other than PDF probably won't work (you'll need app-text/tetex or similar and dev-tex/latex-beamer at least, and also I would recommend dev-tex/rubber)
I recently brought two new developers on board: Joe Sapp, A.K.A. nixphoeni (gdesklets) and Jory Pratt A.K.A. anarchy (qmail/vpopmail). Both seem to be settling in well.
I've bumped mail-mta/msmtp to 1.4.0. I think I'm the luckiest maintainer in the world with the package's upstream, a chap called Martin Lambers, who:
It makes things very easy for me, and takes a lot of the nasty bits out of maintaing packages. I've gotten Markus Rothe (corsair), who is a PPC64 developer, to keyword 1.4.0 ~ppc64 too. In the next release, I'm going to try and push the current version to stable on all architectures so I can purge all the horrible old ebuilds without mailwrapper support.
I've convinced Simon Stelling (blubb) to add gtk-engines to emul-linux-x86-gtklibs. This means that anyone using the multilibbed GTK+ applications (the latest acroread, firefox-bin etc.) will not have to endure warnings about missing GTK+ theme engine modules on the command line, so long as they are using a GTK+ theme that uses an engine shipped with GNOME. Also, these programs will look a hell of a lot better.
Other than what I've mentioned, I haven't really done much. I've been enjoying winding down from school this Easter holiday. Back on Monday though.
In this post, Donnie mentioned the use of various spam filters and IMAP proxies.
I don't know about other people, but most of the spam I receive is in character sets that I can't even read. So, it only takes one simple procmail rule to filter them all out:
:0 * Content-Type:.*(big5|gb2312|euc-kr|ks_c_5601-1987).* /dev/null
It makes sense to put this sort of thing before your spam filters, as it will use nowhere near the resources.
Elfyn McBratney, beu, (by the way, good work on the marriage!) very kindly nominated me for the Gentoo council. I'm happy to accept this nomination.
Well, usual rubbish as far as reasoning goes: I feel I'd be able to communicate well between projects and developers, and I think that... well, I'd enjoy the job. There's not much more to it than that.
Good luck to the other candidates.
Spider, I would recommend media-sound/synaesthesia for audio visualisation -- presuming you're using x86. It's not at all portable.
As for the desktop side of things, one man's flashy desktop isn't necessarily anothers. I'd say stick with stock gnome as far as possible. XComposite drop shadows always look good with it.