Josh Saddler

More hacking and progress made on Decibel; I've finished (for now) ironing out the dependencies. I dropped some USE flags in favor of the latest gst-plugins-meta, which already has the same flags. The updated ebuild is available here. I also uploaded a screenshot for the curious. (You can download the album itself here.)

I got in touch with Decibel upstream to let them know of my efforts to bring it to Gentoo, so they kindly linked back to my page on it.

Go on, try it out. So far it's only been tested on amd64 and x86. I want to hear back from folks using it on other architectures. If gtk+ and gstreamer are available for your arch, you should be able to run it.

The only thing thing Decibel doesn't do -- yet -- is display album covers. That's the only feature I want that I can think of.

It's simple, clean, and awesome, so try it. Lemme know what you think, and especially let me know if it runs on other architectures. PPC? Sparc? HPPA? Come one, come all.

Presenting a new(ish) package, never before seen in an ebuild: Decibel Audio Player.

Took me all night to write the ebuild from scratch and finish the documentation, but here it is. Report any problems with the ebuild by emailing me directly. Contact upstream if you have problems with Decibel itself.

Here are some screenshots. Go on, try it out!

I filed a bug to get Decibel into Portage, so follow along at bug 219329.

Kudos to the Decibel developers; they've created one slick app.

Well, my efforts to port Drivel to the newer gtk+ functions and away from deprecated libegg stuff aren't going well, despite my earlier hopes.

Spent a couple of hours tackling the issues mentioned in the libegg bug. Fortunately, two of them are moot: Drivel doesn't seem to use EggCellRendererKeys or EggAccelerator anymore. The EggRecent -> GtkRecent change seemed to be extremely widespread, so I instead took a stab at porting Drivel over to GtkStatusIcon, instead of the old EggTrayIcon stuff.

Not looking so good. I thought I'd switched over everything as per the documentation, but I got compile errors: libegg/eggtrayicon.c, line 79 or thereabouts. Apparently everything was being used for the first time without being declared somewhere? Oops. I went ahead and wiped the Portage tempfiles and all my work thus far. If I go back to it, I want to start fresh.

Part of the problem was that I just couldn't find any documentation on whether or not a given bit of old libegg code was present in gtk+, or what it was called. Another problem was there was libegg cruft all over the place. It's got its tentacles everywhere; I've no idea how to entirely clean it out. Can new gtk+ code be used with old, outdated libegg bits? Where's the documentation for it? Etc.

So even thought it looked like I'd correctly changed EggTrayIcon to GtkStatusIcon, moved all the egg_tray_icon_foo bits to gtk_status_icon_foo, and remembered to change *icon to *status_icon (and a few other things), it just wasn't enough. The compile process mostly seemed to choke on renamed gtk_status_foo_init lines. Maybe I should have left those as egg_whatever_init? I may never know.

It's my first real shot at trying to clean up code that isn't a markup language. Markup languages I know. Programming, not so much. It's educational all the same, I'm sure. Gosh, just think about how fun porting Drivel to GIO will be.

I still aim to continue improving Drivel for Gentoo users somehow.

Sometimes you swing, sometimes you miss.

What have I been doing lately?

Patching Drivel, that's what!

I like using Drivel. I never lose a blog entry with this thing, which is more than can be said when Planet Gentoo suddenly crashes when I'm submitting an entry. (Side note: are there any good graphical clients that work with b2evolution? I've yet to find anything in Portage.)

Even though Drivel upstream seems mostly dead, there are still patches to fix problems or add features floating around Bugzilla, so I've been grabbing them and testing, and if they check out, adding them to the ebuild I use in my local overlay.

So far, I've added patches & fixes to my ebuild that fix a memory leak, fix compiling with gtksourceview-2 (Thanks ecatmur! one fewer app that needs 1.x), update the Blogger login URL, and add tag support for LiveJournal. Upstream left a weird version in ltmain.sh; it was giving libtool version mismatch fits. Some judicious sed usage killed it. With extreme prejudice.

Anyway, Drivel's now much more usable. I haven't been through all the open bugs yet, but there's probably another patch or two that can be made presentable. One thing I discovered is that Drivel is using a few deprecated libraries and functions. It's got several deprecated uses of libegg (which has been replaced by equivalent functionality in gtk+), and it still relies on GnomeVFS.

Fortunately, the open bug for libegg has some info on porting to the appropriate gtk+ code, and there's also the guide to Migrating from GnomeVFS to GIO. I'm actually going to give it a shot. It's well documented, and it looks like it's nothing more than an long, intensive search-and-replace session. Right? Right? Guys? Guys?

Even if I fail utterly, well, it'll be fun to try it. Will follow up on this later.

In the meantime, you can get the updated Drivel ebuild and patches here. Just untar it in your ${PORTDIR_OVERLAY}/net-misc/ directory.

* * *

In other news, my new keyboard arrived in the mail a couple of days ago. It's much cleaner, slightly less resonant, and more interesting than the old keyboard. The Delete key got moved up near Backspace (what's the use in that?!?), so some judicious Xmodmap usage shoved the Insert key left, replacing Control_R, and I changed Ins to Del. I need my Del key right next to the arrowpad when working on documents.

The keyboard isn't as quiet as I'd hoped, but it's less squeaky than the old one, and it masses more, so it sponges up some of the resonance when hammering keys. Also, it's got 17 hotkeys, and every single one of them are correctly detected in Linux, no drivers needed (take that, included Windows XP driver CD!). More productivity, whoo!

Gnome's keyboard utility picked up the hotkeys and allowed me to assign them to various standard media key behaviors, but I chose to forgo that and use Xmodmap, since it works for both Gnome and Xfce. Xfce initially couldn't see the hotkeys, but it recognized them after I setup my /etc/X11/Xmodmap. Interestingly, Xfce correctly executes Xmodmap at login with no further setup needed, but Gnome doesn't. I had to go into the Sessions dialog and create an "Xmodmap" startup program entry.

This is weird, because GDM is supposed to execute any Xmodmaps found, whether in the user's home or systemwide in /etc/, and if it finds both, it's supposed to combine 'em. Poke around in /etc/X11, and you'll see that multiple files try to execute Xmodmap. However, GDM and Gnome have utterly failed here. They're weird like that sometimes.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
77 cd
69 ls
63 eix
46 gvim
38 cvs
36 su
27 less
26 exit
16 rm
15 grep

Yay for gvim. I'm surprised nano doesn't appear, though. Now that the meme's out of the way, on to the docs business.

For those of you on the bleeding edge, OpenRC and baselayout-2 are now ~arch. Before you even attempt to perform the update, read the OpenRC Migration Guide written by myself, Doug, and Roy. And then read it while updating. I run systems with stable keywords, so I'm not updating until the code and kinks have settled down some, and the packages are stabilized.

As part of the OpenRC documentation changes, I've replaced references to resolvconf-gentoo with openresolv, as the latter is maintained and stable for all arches. The former is dead and will be removed from Portage at some point.

Speaking of documentation, if you're interested in helping out with an up-and-coming documentation tool, take a look at Beacon, an XML editor. It's designed to be an easy way to create and edit documentation; this makes it easy for newcomers to contribute to Gentoo's GuideXML documentation. However, it does need some more work, so contact Anant if you're interested in making Beacon usable for the masses.

In hardware-related news, I just received my silent mouse from Quietmouse.com. This thing is silent. You can't hear the clicks, but it still feels like a normal mouse. No more annoying clicks during gaming or any other computer usage! The wheel is silent too at slow to medium scrolling speeds; it has a hushed whispery noise character during rapid scrolling. Faint, but not unpleasant. It's perfect if you're a silent computing enthusiast like me. The mouse works in Linux; no special configuration needed. Works well in gaming too; it's got a nice high scanning rate. It doesn't randomly freak out the way my old Dynex mouse does.

I've also got a new keyboard on the way from NCIX. My current one's not remotely quiet anymore, and it's pretty discolored after 3 years of use. Cheap silver plastic, go figure. I'm hoping the new one is much more quiet; it took awhile to find an identical layout to my current keyboard. The home/page/del keys are right where I want them.

Quiet keyboards are few and far between, so if the replacement keyboard doesn't work out, well, it's only $7. I wouldn't mind moving to the new slim Apple keyboards; I've heard they're decently quiet, as well as being rather sexy. Rather pricey, though, at $50.

I'd take cheaper and quieter over sexy and expensive, if it comes down to it. Must have scissor-key action, and it should preferably have a laptop-style layout. Any suggestions?

Another day, another release. Another handbook written.

I'm so happy I finished writing those things. Once 2008.0 final is released, the only change I know I'll have to make at this point is changing the release name from 2008.0_beta1 to 2008.0, and as others have mentioned, that change is easy to make. Keys in the TOC allow me to make conditional evaluations in each handbook. So in the XML source, if I write:

<p>
Stage3 tarballs can be downloaded from <keyval id="release-dir"/>
</p>

This will replace release-dir with the location of the release, as fetched from the corresponding key. So depending on the handbook you're reading, you'll see something like:

Stage3 tarballs can be downloaded from releases/amd64/2008.0_beta1/stages/

Simple, but oh-so-maintainable. I don't just use keys in the handbook TOC, but I also can add conditional evaluations that pull in paragraphs, sections, subsections, code blocks, you name it. These can also be from external files, too. That's one of the things I've been doing for this release -- finding duplicate content for all arches, and moving that text into a separate external file.

One example is the text that explains block devices. Each arch used to have similar text, sometimes slightly (or significantly!) different. I unified all arches -- put them on the same page, so to speak -- by creating an external include. I first pitched the includes proposal back in March 2007, and it's finally coming to fruition with the 2008.0 release.

By using the following tidbit:

<section>
<title>Introduction to Block Devices</title>

<subsection>
<include href="../hb-install-blockdevices.xml"/>
</subsection>

<subsection>
<title>Partitions</title>

I can drop the contents of hb-install-blockdevices.xml into place, providing the same descriptive text. If it ever needs changing, rather than having to change 16 handbooks, I can change just one, and all 16 will use it. This example is taken from a file in /handbook/2008.0/, so it refers to the included file one level up, in /handbook/. The included content doesn't even have to be in the same directory as the file using it!

I'll be implementing even more of these kinds of changes in the future. They increase maintainability, increase uniformity, and, more importantly, preserve my sanity when editing handbooks. And if I stay sane, I don't retire.

Makin' good progress on the handbooks and other documentation for the upcoming 2008.0 release.

Sent off the networkless handbook tarballs to releng as promised by the deadline. Finished the Portage handbooks. Also got just about everything done for the networked handbooks, too. There's one blocker for the tracker bug, and that's something that doesn't really need to be.

Also there's some changes to make to a few of the other documents, but those aren't too bad...compared to last release.

I'm getting precisely zero help from the rest of the GDP with the release, though. That's not making me all that happy. It's the sort of thing to make someone retire, go on vacation for a year, or never work on the handbooks ever again and everyone is screwed because no one's left to work on 'em.

That being said, my stress levels are much lower this release. Much, much lower.

Which is good, since my sciatica has flared up since getting injured at SCALE a couple of weeks ago, making it almost impossible for me to walk sometimes. Excruciating pain at times. I'm starting to get better, but it'll be several more weeks before I'm "well."

SCALE

It's been a coupla weeks now since SCALE 6x, so it's about time for an after-action report.

My wife and I arrived Friday night after suffering a two-hour delay because of heavy traffic. The 405 was the worst. LA traffic always gives me nightmares.

Saturday morning came far too early, but at least we were already registered. We got there the same time as omp, who'd brought a Windows-using friend along as a booth slave--er, volunteer.

Our booth setup included a giant Gentoo poster, omp's desktop rig, and one (occasionally both) of my laptops, displaying Xfce. It was more popular than the extremely minimal openbox desktop, so HAH! We gave out lots of bribes--snacks--and even more LiveCDs. It's too bad we didn't have flyers, business cards, shirts, or other Gentoo swag this year. Lots of folks were asking for them. At least we gave out snacks'n'luv.

Wireless internet sucked throughout the weekend. Apparently it was the same for everyone. Spotty, minuscule bandwidth, and nameservers couldn't be reached. Made it hard to demo things that needed internet access, such as emerging packages, looking up our homepage, or highlighting documentation.

One of our users, calculus, was around much of the time to help out; was nice to see him at SCALE again this year. And wormo made an incognito appearance, too. To all the users and everyone else who stopped by and asked questions, gave feedback, or just chatted -- thank you. You're terrific. I'm always excited to meet a Gentoo user in person. It's like "Really? you use Gentoo? No way!" We were possibly the least-known distro there (tied with Foresight and Damn Small Linux?), certainly the least commercial one. The other distros were all heavyweights: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Fedora, etc.

Still, we had lots of traffic. Several people wanted to know what's up with Gentoo in regards to our recent legal status issues, so I provided the news in-person, and that seemed to go over well. Curiously, none of the enterprise-level folks were much interested in our legal status. They pretty much all said the same thing: "We're not worried. All the technical development is still there; nothing's changing." It was only the individual users who had all kinds of worries and needed the explanation. The corporate sector wasn't worried at all: "As long as it's still being developed."

There are plenty of pictures of our booth around the 'net in reviews and photo sites; you just have to look for 'em.

I had a blast at SCALE. I plan to attend next year, too.

ebuilds

Lately I've been poking random ebuilds from the tree, posting updates to Bugzilla, creating new local ebuilds, asking for keywords/stabling, and so on. It's a lot of fun. A fair amount of edgy experimentation, but that's what my new laptop is for. Things like wicd that I'd like to see in the tree, or the latest version of brasero.

burning apps

Speaking of burning software . . . brasero seems to be the only actively developed gtk+-based application. Everything else hasn't had a release in years. Xfburn, gnomebaker, graveman, xcdroast....you name it. That's not good news. Brasero is a good choice for my Gnome desktop workstation, but I wouldn't even think of putting Gnome on my laptop, which is a pure Xfce machine. And yet I hate the idea of putting K3B on my laptop even more, because of the ugly, ugly Qt and kdelibs dependencies.

I went ahead and installed brasero on my laptop anyway, since it's gtk+, and it can work with DVDs. None of the other apps I mentioned support 'em. That added 33 huge Gnome deps, including (ugh) nautilus. The irony? K3B only wanted 18 total packages. Still, it's uglier. That's what counts, right?

So thinking about this sad state of affairs for gtk+-based burning apps got me thinking . . . what would it take to create a new one? Something fast, with minimal dependencies, and gtk-based.

gtk

I've skimmed the gtk tutorial and the reference manual before, but only as a passing curiosity. Today I really took a shot at figuring 'em out. This is where I ran into the cliff known as "C programming."

I'm not a programmer. I can do markup languages, I can do some bash, some javascript, little things like that. But I've never been trained in OOP. Or any kind of programming, except some BASIC in elementary school and college. My degree is in theatre, not computer science!

Still, I'm determined to make what headway I can with these gtk+ guides. I've started to see what does what, and why. And some of the necessary parts of an app. Now I need to find out how to get that button press to do something, like . . . burn a CD. Copy a disc. Save an iso. And so on. For that, I've been poking at the source code for Xfburn, libburn, and brasero. This is all still just a bit over my head, but I'm trying, at least.

I've already partly answered my own question of "Why aren't there more up-to-date gtk+ burning apps available?" because I created a sample task list.

Writing a graphical app is a huge undertaking. What burning backend will be used? cdrtools, cdrkit, libburn/libisofs, dvd+rwtools are all possibilities. Same goes for the media types used in writing audio discs. The app has to handle notification (possibly via dbus), disc drive status/detection, set/get write speed, and a dozen other critical tasks. Oh, and it needs to be translatable (those pesky .po files that take up space), and it really should make use of autotools. What other libraries will it use? Will any of its features be optional compile-time switches? Got to add those too. Where will the project be hosted? What VCS? And so on.

Lots of stuff to do. No wonder brasero's the only active gtk+ burning app. And that's too bad, too. It has a ton of dependencies that folks using Xfce or just a WM don't care to install. I'd like to see the huge gap between "brasero" and "nothing" filled by a low-dependency, fast, capable application. I just don't think I'm up to the task of creating it all by myself.

Off to SCALE. Gentoo, represent!

See you there.

Right, I'm almost done setting up the Thinkpad.

The keyboard is still taking some getting used to -- I hate having the Fn at the far left, where the Ctrl key should be, and I hate not having the Del/Home/End keys vertically aligned with the right edge of the keyboard. I also keep forgetting I have a working middle mouse button for Firefox. Too used to having to Ctrl-click tabs on the Toshiba. And . . . I love the scroll function on the synaptics touchpad. Love it. The pad itself I don't use much; I'm too used to trackpointers. Plus it's too easy to turn a drag motion into a sudden click. I do like the IBM trackpoint more than my Toshiba; the IBM one is more accurate and has a nicer surface.

Fingerprint use: for the time being, I've uninstalled fprint, and installed thinkfinger instead. Why the switch? Because thinkfinger works out-of-the-box with SLiM, and pam_fprint doesn't work with it at all. If it worked with SLiM, I'd switch back. Also, thinkfinger's enrollment seems to work better. I'm getting far fewer rejected scans. I'd like to file a feature request bug with fprint upstream to get SLiM supported, but its bugtracker mails aren't getting through to my devmail. dsd, you reading this?

I still haven't bothered playing with hdaps yet or finding out why it thinks my disk is unsupported. While on the subject of disks, it occurs to me that I really should have created a /usr/portage partition and formatted it as ReiserFS. ext3 is just too slow for Portage ops.

I at least solved my networking issues by adding a couple of required modules and undoing parallel startup. I also fixed a typo in conf.d/net. I don't plan on using NetworkManager any time soon, as it requires lots of Gnome dependencies. For now, I added a second network block to wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
        key_mgmt=NONE
        priority=-9999999
}

I haven't tested it yet, but I think this should work for unsecured public access points. Actually, I think this was probably in wpa_supplicant.conf before I deleted everything and added my own config.

My desktop and development environment are just about complete; got my keys imported and my firewall setup and everything. Still haven't setup my system for Bluetooth or audio production yet. Or games.

As promised, I've made my working kernel config available. For all you Intel X3100 users, this may be of use in setting up uvesafb. Also, if you've got an IPW3945 ABG network card, this may be useful if you're using the in-kernel iwl driver. I've enabled the appropriate statistics options to use powerTOP, which is a very nice way to monitor power usage. I get about 2.8 hours doing basic wireless internet, docs work, etc. with my screen almost at full brightness. Not bad. I think I waited too long to get an Ultrabay battery; SCALE 6x is less than a week away!

Speaking of SCALE, I'm going. So I should probably get tickets & registration for me and my wife, yeah? Oh, and a hotel reservation. My new laptop has been such a distraction.

I've discovered a really unusual bug/behavior. I removed alsasound from the boot runlevel, in case I'm running on battery. Now, unless you blacklist them, your sound modules will still get loaded regardless, taking that much more power (even with aggressive soundcard power management enabled.) So what I had been doing was starting and stopping the ALSA initscript once my desktop was loaded. Here's the bug:

Starting and stopping ALSA this way actually kills all GTK theming in Xfce. The decorations revert to GTK defaults, the window colors go to their GTK defaults, the panel becomes ugly, you name it. All I have to do to re-apply the default (pretty) Xfce GTK theme is open one of Xfce's configuration utilities. Any of them. Isn't that bizarre? I have no idea why the hell that happens. Every time I stop ALSA. It's a minor nuisance, I guess.

On thinkpad_acpi and hotkeys:

It's a known bug that the brightness hotkeys don't work, but echoing values directly to /proc does. There won't be a fix for this any time soon, either. I've been in contact with upstream, submitting reports to their database, etc. Still have to go through and test the rest of my hardware (Bluetooth, etc.) and submit another report, but the outlook is not favorable for hotkeys. I still need to find a good program that will recognize the Fn-Home/Fn-End key command for brightness adjustments. xbacklight works, but I need keybinds to call it. Xfce has a built in keybind program, but it can't see Fn key combos. I'll have to find a sane xbindkeys setup (or similar app); there's probably something on ThinkWiki or the Gentoo Forums.

Signing off for now . . . maybe I'll see ya'll at SCALE? Come on by the Gentoo booth! Devs, users, groupies, etc. are all welcome.

I'm still busy setting up my Thinkpad R61i. In many ways, this thing is more of a pain than the ancient Toshiba it replaces. That's part coincidence, and part "I-really-want-to-do-this-right" and part "I-really-want-maximum-power-save-and-avoid-risking-hardware-damage".

One of the few bits of hardware that didn't take hours of setup was the fingerprint reader. I lucked out and got a working UPEK TouchStrip, vendor ID 0483:2016. It works for console logins and su to root. fprint is awesome!

I'm using stable amd64 mostly, except where I need the latest ~arch packages for hardware functionality. I used a stage3 tarball from Daniel. So nice to have an up-to-date stage.

The capacious-yet-quiet hard disk came preloaded with Vista Home Premium. Ugh. I used a Sidux LiveCD to shrink it and shove it off to a corner. Why did I use Sidux? Because they seemed to be the only distro whose LiveCD offered a 2.6.24 kernel, which meant....wireless installation! Wrong. Lies. They use .23, no iwl3945 drivers anywhere. I had to get out my ridiculously short ethernet cable. Bother.

On the Gentoo side, I ended up going with ext3 for / and ext2 for /boot. This is most unlike me, as I'm normally a ReiserFS man. I figure 1) it's possible that if something does go wrong, it may be easier to recover with ext3. 2) I can try out ext4 later. 3) Fewer packages to emerge; e2fprogs is already part of the system set. As far as usage goes ... ext3 is perceptibly slower for certain operations, but it also feels much faster when mounting.

The whole configuration process is still ongoing, with a few major problems:

1. Masked and unstable drivers for X. Still only xorg-x11 installed; no Xfce4 yet. At least I have working hardware acceleration with the X3100 chip, using xorg-server 1.4 and mesa 7.0.2.

2. Wireless. Day and a half to get it mostly working. At boot, it seems to associate with my WPA access point, but then goes inactive immediately. Unfortunately, it seems to take the service with it, so things like netmount and ntp-client don't start. Now, the device is actually associated and has retrieved its IP address. But it's an unresolved headache as to why it does all this but still doesn't consider the service "started". This is with kernel 2.6.24, in-kernel iwl3945 modules, as well as crypto modules. Once Xfce is running, I plan to undo most of my networking config files and just use NetworkManager or some other tool to do everything. I hate having to manually edit conf.d/net just to change from my home network to public access points in libraries, coffee shops, etc.

3. uvesafb. Day and a half to figure out. Apparently I needed a weird/unintuitive setting or two in my kernel config. Works now at native resolution, 1280x800.

4. hdaps. Apparently my harddrive isn't supported? It's possible the folks at IBM refurbished the laptop with a non-stock drive.

5. thinkpad_acpi. Not all buttons are working yet, specifically screen brightness. That's despite following the basic instructions at ThinkWiki on kernel module parameters. I haven't really delved into it yet, though. At least the thinklight works.

6. Touchpad & trackpoint. I figured out just an hour ago why the trackpoint wasn't working. Though the protocol was set to "IMPS/2", I had to change the driver to "mouse". So now both work in X. Will post config later. My hope is that the middle button works properly once I get Xfce and Firefox installed.

That's it for now. I haven't done much else besides get the bare necessities working for the console environment.

My goals are as follows, in no particular order:

1. Complete desktop installation & configuration.
2. Setup low-latency/realtime system and applications for music recording and editing.
3. Configure system to draw as little power as possible, regardless of activity. I really want at least 3 hours out of my existing battery, even though I'll also be buying an UltraBay battery.
- setup laptop mode for just about everything, including hard drive, CPU, wifi card, soundcard, bluetooth, screen, optical drive, reduce interrupts, etc. I'm really nervous about hard drive settings in particular, as we all know what happens to it under too-frequent spindowns.
4. Figure out how to turn off the darned green LED light by the optical drive. It's killing me.
5. Did I mention power efficiency?
6. Get the rest of thinkpad_acpi and all the nifty hotkeys working. I want hotkeys that work, unlike my Toshiba's nonworking keys.
7. Setup Gentoo development environment, GPG stuff, etc.
8. ???
9. Profit.

I'll post more in the coming days, and (if I still have the strength) I'll write up some installation notes and configuration information, probably in my devspace or on ThinkWiki. Not much info out there on the R61 series.

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. In spite of the rain that's deluging the county. Why? Because my Thinkpad R61i arrived today.

I lucked out in three critical ways:

1) Shipping condition. Not a scratch; it's like it was never used.
2) Trackpad. I booted the x86 2007.0 LiveCD, and it seems to think that it's a real Synaptics device. I mean, scrolling on the pad was enabled and everything. Though it did decide that the top middle button, when pressed, should be an M key.
3) Working fingerprint reader. While lsusb isn't present on the LiveCD, some poking around /proc/bus/usb/devices showed a vendor ID of 0483:2016, which is supported by fprint, and presumably by thinkfinger as well.

I only had time to boot it up and quickly check the hardware specs before heading off to work. Will post more on it later, and I think I'll write up some installation notes and stick 'em in my devspace too.

Happiness is an awesome laptop. This thing is so quiet. Lightweight, too. And it seems to have hardware that actually works in Linux. Sure, the keyboard layout isn't satisfactory, but I can probably work around that with keybinding. It's otherwise a dream machine. Well, mine anyway.

I want to take it to SCALE in a couple of weeks, but now I'm worried about it being stolen. Figures. I'll at least bring along my ancient crappy Toshiba laptop as a booth demo machine. That worked last year.

I finally picked out an acceptable laptop and managed to win it on eBay, after trying unsuccessfully for several days, losing out at the last hour. I also spent many hours hunting through online shops; I almost went through Lenovo.com's store, but customers are reporting terrible experiences with 'em, so I went with eBay instead. No word on shipping; I assume it'll go out via priority USPS tomorrow.

I snapped up a new Thinkpad R61i for just over $600, counting shipping. That's $200 more than I originally planned to pay, back when I was still looking for the ultimate low-end laptop, like a $399 Acer Aspire or Everex StepNote.

On paper, the Thinkpad should be fully supported in Linux, though I won't know about the integrated fingerprint reader until it arrives. Lenovo recently decided to use a slightly different UPEK product that seems to be missing crypto logic, so there's no support for those kinds of readers whatsoever. They won't work with binary drivers (like bioapi), nor with thinkfinger or fprint. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! (Pun intended.)

The specs:
CPU: C2D T5250 1.5ghz (Yes, I'm aware that this may make me somewhat of a traitor to my fellow AMD enthusiasts)
GPU & screen: Intel X3100, 15.4" widescreen 1280x800
RAM: 2GB
HDD: 120GB
Networking: Intel gigabit LAN & 3945ABG wireless

For the first time ever, I'm actually up in the air about whether or not to install 32-bit or 64-bit Gentoo on the thing. I've been doing enough reading over at ThinkWiki and other places to consider a 32-bit installation. Since there's only 2GB of RAM in the machine, I don't have any particular hardware reasons to go 64-bit. And some of the audio applications I intend to run on it aren't keyworded amd64, or just plain don't work on 64-bit CPUs. It's been giving me and my desktop headaches.

I think one of the first upgrades I'll be making will be to order an Ultrabay battery, as well as check the included battery. I need something with long life at a reasonable cost. I'll probably have to shop at Lenovo's store to get the battery, so I guess "reasonable cost" is right out. Which means that, according to resellerratings.com, if it ever arrives, it'll be in a few months. Joy.

But hey, that can't diminish my enthusiasm for actually snagging a (great?) laptop at a great price. Happy belated Christmas to me!

Once the laptop arrives, I'll see about getting a USB-to-MIDI cable so I can put the thing to use as a digital audio workstation. So much fun ahead!

I definitely want a ThinkPad. Since my previous entry, I've done some serious scouting around for one. I want one. I do.

I'm really attracted to the R61 series (R61, R61i, R61e), but I've just uncovered some scary problems with the recent models:

1. Wireless issues: seems iwlwifi doesn't work for some users, and/or they use ndiswrapper.
2. Fingerprint issues: the R61 series will likely come with a fingerprint scanner that is completely inoperable in Linux. There's an open bug for supporting it in fprint (dsd's awesome project; go check it out), but I'm not hopeful. The manufacturer is entirely uncooperative. Why, oh why did Lenovo switch to them?!?
3. Touchpad issues: seems that some later-model 61s are shipping with an ALPS pad, rather than the tried-and-true Synaptics. Users are having to resort to all kinds of hackery to get the useful features out of their pad.

So, though I still want a ThinkPad, I'm now having second thoughts about an R61. I want some kind of ThinkPad, though. Basically, it needs to have all its hardware functional purely with open-source drivers, or something resembling open-source. This is going to be a Gentoo development laptop, so said drivers should be in Portage.

Requirements:

1. Physical dimensions: minimum 15.4" screen; weight no more than 6.5 pounds, ~5 pounds preferred.
2. Working wireless: open-source drivers (Intel desired; Atheros is close enough). Absolutely no ndiswrapper!
3. Intel X3100 graphics.
4. Working Synaptics trackpad. I want one that can do scrolling and all the other nifty tricks it's famed for.
5. Working ACPI. This means the buttons and Fn combinations work, as well as the fan (which had better be cool & quiet).
(Possibly optional)
6. Working fingerprint scanner. Really. One that works. Now that I know some ThinkPads have 'em, I want one. Seems like an awesome feature!

So . . . since I've only studied the R61 series, what other ThinkPads are worth investigating?

Back again. Started to really get back to work on Gentoo, with more documentation commits, bugfixes, etc.

Also started using some new gtk+ applications: beandog added my ebuild for brasero-0.7.0 to Portage, and I got drac to keyword asunder-1.0. I've been meaning to ditch k3b for awhile now, so I finally unmerged it, and started cutting down on the number of dependencies. I still need qt for Rosegarden and Hydrogen, bah! In the meantime, I now have a pair of decent disc writing & ripping tools for my CD collection. Still a couple of bugs, though -- brasero doesn't seem to like writing single-layer DVDs (though dual-layer works fine), and asunder's mp3 encoding flat-out doesn't work, at least so far on amd64. Still doing further testing on x86. Also, it's rather slower than most other tools out there. At least FLAC, wav, and Ogg work, though I already have those through sound-juicer. Now that I've got mp3 encoding working in sound-juicer, I'll use it until I can figure out asunder. I'm working actively with upstream to get this worked out; major props to Andrew for being so responsive.

On the laptop front, I've found some possibilities. The hard cost limit is still under $600, but I've found several intriguing models in the $380 to $500 range. Originally, I was set on finding a used Everex StepNote of some kind and installing the developer edition of Zonbu on it, then using that stepping stone to turn it into my usual Gentoo environment. Don't get me wrong; the price on the Zonbu notebook ain't too bad, but for almost $500, I think I could do better. There are still used/refurbished StepNotes out there for only $400. There's also an Acer model or two at that price range, but they're usually out of stock at online merchants, as well as being only 14.1".

Side note: former Gentoo developer plasmaroo (Tim Yamin) works for Zonbu, and has been doing much to get that tricky VIA hardware working & other things, so congrats to him. Perhaps he's one of the reasons why Zonbu went with Gentoo as their base OS?

I've also found a couple of interesting cheap dual-core Gateway laptops such as the ML6720, though no real information can be found on their Linux compatibility.

I've been kind of hoping that my new laptop would be dual-core, but that's just asking for reduced battery life. It'd make compiling faster, but at the cost of power, heat, and definitely price. If I stay closer to $400 I won't need to worry about future-proofing with dual-core; I'd just buy a new laptop at a similar price point sometime in the future. Single-core desktop usage & development ain't that bad on a laptop, right?

Just tonight I found some extremely attractive Lenovo notebooks. Intel X3100 graphics and boast up to 4.5 hours battery life. Now, this last bit is flat-out amazing. I was all gung-ho on getting a cheap VIA-based notebook like this one because of the 3-hour battery life, and it is an alternative to Intel. Hey, I have an AMD workstation. But the Lenovos I'm looking at . . . sure, they're more than $400. And some of them are only Celeron chips (historically underpowered).

But man oh man . . . I found some new & used Thinkpad 61-series models that look good, as well as some Lenovo 3000 N models. And they're 15.4" widescreens. Light. Acceptably thin. They even have CD/DVD drives, which is almost optional for me. One's even dual-core.

So now I have to figure out how much money I really want to spend -- $400 to $600 is really a huge price gap; there are far too many features and choices available for any given manufacturer.

What's really starting to sway me over to Lenovo, despite my earlier post, is whether or not the integrated wifi, pointer, and fingerprint reader are in solid working condition. Specifically for the R/T/X/61 & 3000 N series. And whether the rest of ACPI, hotkeys, power management, HDAPS, and disc drives work correctly. And that I can get CPU/HDD temperatures, remaining battery life, and processor speed reported in a graphical utility. Apparently lm_sensors shouldn't be used on Thinkpads, so I wonder what else would report that info. On the fingerprint reader front, dsd is working on some kinda fingerprint software. Will have to check. Will also have to find some recommended spindown & sleep settings for Thinkpad hard disks.

For features, Thinkpads are looking better and better. It's true, they do look like refugees from 1985. Ugly as sin. Ugly as a dead cow in clown shoes. Splashed with hideous bits of color here and there. But still . . . they're starting to become attractive.

So, it's a new year. With new possibilities. Like laptops. Especially laptops. Now I just have to get my wife to sign off on one in time for SCALE . . .

I'm in the market for a laptop. Been looking for a few months. The one I have is . . . too old. 6+ years old. Turned it on the other day and got a slight shock where the power cord runs into the cracking chassis at the connection between the screen/hinges and the body. Still runs, but man. Ouch. So, I'm in the market for a replacement. If I find one, it'll be my one real Christmas present. I'll be doing development on it, general desktop usage, and (ideally) the stuff described below in bonus #2.

I have the following critical requirements:

1) Must run Linux. I don't want to repeat the hardware issues of my Toshiba Satellite 2805-S603. I want something that isn't broken for Linux. This usually means excellent support for all areas of ACPI. As far as which Linux it'll run . . . Gentoo is desired. Well, duh.
2) Cheap. Under $700 (ideally under 500-600), including tax, shipping, and any upgrades. If it's really cheap; I can just buy a new cheap one in a few years.
3) Light. Ideally about 5 pounds. Lighter is better. Current laptop about 12 to 17 pounds. If thrown, will flatten most small pets. Not that I've tried.
4) Battery life. 3 hours minimum, I think. What's with today's laptops, many of which boast "Up to 2 hours!" "Up to 1.5 hours!" "Up to 5 minutes!". Are we going back to the dark ages in laptop technology? Heck, even my old laptop had almost 2.5 hours at its prime, and it sucks juice like a dehydrated Californian on a smoothie.
5) Wireless built-in. Something natively Linux-compatible; no ndiswrapper! Must work with WPA.
6) Video. Must have at least a 14.1" screen. 15.4" would be better; I'm looking for an upgrade of my current 15", 1024x768 laptop. Also, the video hardware must be able to do smooth 2D; enough for perfect DVD playback, or other video playback. Also, though I don't currently use any, the capability for smooth accelerated eyecandy is ideal. You never know; I may want it in the future. Would like to have the ability available. However, please don't throw video driver drama at me. I'd like to stay away from that at all costs.
7) Sound. Please, please let the sound work. This includes headphone and microphone jacks.
8) Portage & desktop power. My current laptop is a 1ghz Pentium3 with 128MB RAM. It's not enough to compile anymore. This is why I only sync it once every few months, if ever. It's just not enough to do anything anymore, desktop-wise. Even Fluxbox feels like too much, as well as being useless compared to my beloved Xfce. Everything gtk+ or Qt-based (including applications) runs slooowly. I need something that will make running Gentoo worthwhile. Just Enough Power (JEP) to last until the next upgrade a few years down the road. I learned my lesson about trying to "future-proof" a laptop in 2001. Spent like $2500+ for the absolute-top-of-the-line laptop bundle. Look where it got me.

The following are optional maximally awesome bonuses:
1) Dual-core. Excellent in and of itself, and related to:
2) DAW. Powerful enough to work as a digital audio workstation. I'm not sure if a low-end single-core Celeron or VIA processor is enough for that. And I'd need to pack a USB-to-MIDI cable, I know. I'd like to start doing some serious composing, recording, and arranging on my piano, which is currently way across the room from my desktop workstation. Much easier to take the complete portable workstation to the nonportable piano, rather than the other way around.
3) Working suspend. Not actually a requirement for my laptops. Weird, isn't it? I always just do cold shutdowns and starts.
4) 3D games! Would be nice if I could play Linux games based on the old-school ones. Stuff like Tremulous, Quake, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, and various old(er) Windows games via Wine. My current laptop can do this, though it only has a 16MB nVidia GeForce2 Go chip. Makes even some of these games painful. It's still powerful enough to kick blackace and latexer's collective butts at Tremulous! If the replacement laptop can even (gasp) deliver UT2004, I'm sold.

* * *

So. I'm hunting for a new, used, refurbished, or recertified laptop. One that meets the above critical criteria, and maybe even some of the optional bonuses. I have yet to find anything truly attractive from the big names such as Dell, IBM/Lenovo Gateway, HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Sony, etc. But it's possible I've missed something. Any suggestions? What portable computing devices have made you happy?

If Comcast is your ISP, dump 'em if you possibly can.

Find out what's up with your connection.

Packet hacking. Makes me wonder what my own provider, Cox, may have been up to. At least I don't really see them making news the way Comcast does!

Damned American ISPs. When this stuff occurs, there's usually nothing we can do about it, as there's only one provider that owns the wire running into the home. I've got no choice if I want internet service; it's Cox or nothing. But I've no complaints, aside from more brief outages than I care for, and measly bandwidth for the (slowly increasing) money. It's slowly gone up to $26.95 per month, and that gets me 1.5mbit/sec down, 256mbit up. In more normal numbers, that's 200kbytes down, and 32kbytes up, which is why I make few big changes to my devspace. Takes forever to upload or change content.

My anemic rates are typical for American ISPs. That's a basic connection by the way; it's considerably more if you want the next two levels of service, and there's no guarantee your monthly bill will stay the same. We've already had a bill hike once or twice because Cox "experienced increased operating costs" and made an extremely poor business decision by passing costs directly to the consumer. I was paying something under $20/month, it was $10/month before that, and now ... $30 for a basic internet-only package. No cable, no phone, just basic internet.

Apparently, Europe is ahead of most everyone in the world; no matter where you are, what country or city, there's something like at least 16 different ISP choices. Or so some of the guys in #gentoo-dev like to brag. And they get more bandwidth, too. I saw some statistic that said Japan leads the world in bandwidth per capita; some ridiculous number like 56mbit per person. That's one wired nation. The US is behind almost everyone; we're being beaten by some developing nations, even. Though some 3rd world/developing countries have it even worse than we do; I remember a news story that reported Kazakhstan has a real-world price of well over $1000/month for basic access similar to mine.

What are your experiences with ISPs and service levels for a given cost? What's your connection like?

This entry is the result of having to report countless identical threads, as well as just sitting back and watching what's going on in the Gentoo Forums lately. I care about the forums, otherwise I wouldn't post some tips on how to raise the quality of what goes into it, and what people can get out of it.

So, now that you know the background, here are a few important tips on being a better forumite:

1. Make sure you search before posting.

99% of the time users don't bother to search before posting their issue, which at least 80% of the time can be found in the Forum FAQs, to say nothing of being found in the official documentation. Just take a look at most of the posts in Installing Gentoo. You may think your problem is unique and no one else has ever found a solution, but the statistics and sheer numbers of posts indicate that more than likely, it's been solved before. We've such a huge community in the forums that a solution of some kind is inevitable.

So, search first, and if you do find threads on your topic, don't start a new one asking for explanations because you don't understand; it's okay to just add your post to the existing thread. That's what it's there for! The fewer duplicated posts, the better.

2. Use confcat to strip comments from config files.

Too often users create ridiculously huge code blocks for kernel configs, xorg.conf, make.conf, etc., and 99% of it is junk. We care about the options that are enabled! I stuck confcat in /usr/local/bin, making sure that's in my environment's $PATH. Such a world of difference. Instead of spamming threads and forcing readers to sort through 250 lines of comments, you can just show the 11 lines that actually matter. It saves time and trouble.

A related tip for 2 is learning how to only post the relevant parts of your Xorg.0.log. Usually, what's needed are the errors printed in the Xorg output. These errors appear on lines that begin with EE. Thus, to display only the errors when you're trying to troubleshoot your X setup, use the following command:

$ grep EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log

If you're just looking for warnings, which can usually be ignored, grep for WW. You can find descriptions of what all the line indicators mean at the very top of Xorg.0.log itself:

Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
        (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
        (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.

Use grep wisely, and avoid posting ridiculously long config files if you don't have to.

3. If you're using an ebuild from the xeffects overlay, do not report it on the Gentoo Forums.

See this thread for reasons why -- in short, ebuilds from the xeffects overlay are not supported by Gentoo developers. Use the xeffects bugzilla to report xeffects bugs, and use the xeffects forums to get help on using ebuilds from that overlay. This includes the xeffects compiz-fusion, compiz, beryl, etc. I really can't emphasize this enough: proper support for the overlay is found only on its forums and on its bugzilla; only the xeffects maintainers can fix your xeffects bugs.

If you're using the compiz-fusion etc. packages found in Gentoo's Portage tree (not the xeffects overlay packages), then you can post your issues, tips, problems, solutions, discussion, etc. to the Gentoo Forums. Note, though, that as of this writing the versions in Portage are still marked ~unstable, as they have been added very recently.

The xeffects maintainers specifically requested that all xeffects package issues be sent to them. Please honor their wishes and direct your xeffects issues to their websites, and not the Gentoo Forums.

So there you have it, three tips that will help you go far in the forums. Follow them, and you'll avoid having your threads moved to different forums, locked, duplicated, or merged into other threads. You'll also make it easier for Gentoo developers, forum administrators/moderators, and other users to help troubleshoot your problems.

After all the trouble I had with my new Chaintech AV-710 sound card as detailed in my previous entry, I decided to forgo using the Wolfson DAC and just use the regular VIA DAC and the normal two-channel line-out jack. Oh well. Was good while it lasted, but I found myself needing to use headphones and my headset far too often for the limited output options.

Also, I discovered that changing sound cards means a heck of a lot of trouble for Unreal Tournament 2004. I spent a frustrating half hour playing with ~/.openalrc settings to get it right. I went from a nice, simple config for the onboard sound to a much longer, more complicated one. I also ended up with most of the similar problems described in the Gentoo Forums, and almost none of the solutions worked. I ended up using some steps found in a post by forum vet Paul Bredbury and my own device experimentation to create working, undistorted sound with working microphone capture. Had to remove the SDL libs provided by ut2004 and instead symlink the ones available in Portage to the right spot, then I had to experiment with all the various audio device major/minor numbers to find the stereo output that gave undistorted sound:

(define speaker-num 2)
(define devices '(alsa))
(define alsa-out-device "hw:0,2")
(define alsa-in-device "plughw:0,0")

No idea what hw:0,2 is, but 0,0 and 0,1 sure didn't work! plughw and speaker-num were the only things I preserved from the old sound card settings; the first is the front-panel microphone input and the second is still correct regardless of whether I'm using headphones or speakers

Anyway, now that the sound woes are over, I spent my time today getting to some long-overdue documents. The first is something I GuideXMLified from scratch for the Science project, a complete blas-lapack guide update. The second is a document for the GDP I've been working on for a couple of months now, a Handbook Release Guide. It details the process for updating handbooks and related documentation for each new Gentoo release. It's something we've needed for awhile. This way I don't have to try to single-handedly do all the handbook updates myself at release time; now everyone will know the process. With this guide in available, hopefully the designated handbook release coordinator won't be overwhelmed even if he has to do all the work himself.

I'm still on devaway, even though I've been active enough the last couple of weeks to not be on devaway. I'm still healing. Still can't spend as much time on the computer as I used to without my eyes getting really uncomfortable and hurty.

I also injured my back, hip, and leg at work two Thursdays ago lugging around heavy boxes improperly. I was not Working Safe/Staying Healthy(tm). So now I'm paying for it by being basically crippled. Sheesh! It's truly one health problem after another with me. There are Old People who have better health. My body's slowly (or not-so-slowly) self-destructing.

To cheer myself up, yesterday I finally purchased a new sound card: Chaintech AV-710. It came today, so I wasted no time installing it. Sounds very nice; there's some noticeable improvement over the onboard Intel HDA chip on my motherboard (Realtek 883, nVidia MCP 55). The lows and highs especially are improved, but that may be due to the additional effort I put in to setting up this card in Gentoo.

The AV-710 uses the VIA Envy24HT-S chip and a VIA DAC, and while that's a great chip in and of itself, the card also has a very fine Wolfson DAC on the rear channels. So after some tinkering, I managed to get stereo 2-channel sound routed through that jack, skipping the usual analog stereo jack. I traded the green plug for the black plug right next to the S/PDIF plug, and it makes a noticeable difference. Got one of these cards and want to use the Wolfson DAC for stereo output? Edit ~/.asoundrc as shown:

pcm.ice1724 {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.ice1724 {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "spdif"
}

I also copied the file to /etc/asoundrc and /etc/asound.conf, so that it works system-wide. Only one of these is needed, though. I couldn't find any documentation on this, so I took a guess as to what might be needed. One of 'em works, though, as all my users have working audio.

Part of the setup included disabling the onboard audio in BIOS, removing all Intel HDA support from the kernel and adding the new module (ice1724), editing the various module config files and ALSA_CARDS in /etc/make.conf. I also had to delete /etc/asound.state before running alsaconf as root in order to make sure that my new card was properly setup. Previously, the old asound.state from the nVidia chip was preserved even after running alsaconf and restarting alsasound multiple times. Deleting it and re-running the commands was the only way to get an asound.state for the new card.

So now I have this exceptionally nice-sounding card for only $23. There are a few limits to my new hardware, including speaker quality (cheap Logitech X-230 2.1 speakers, $30) and software output. The problem with using the Wolfson DAC and the accompanying port is that sound isn't being routed to any of the other ports. The front audio ports don't work, and neither does the regular stereo port on the card. I haven't tested the microphone inputs on the front or the back yet. Also, only one bit of software can use the card at a time. If I'm using Audacious, I can't get any sound from mplayer or from a game or a system beep. dmix may fix some of these problems, but I'm not sure, as I haven't ever had to use it or configure it.

I may end up using the regular VIA DAC instead of the Wolfson, simply because I don't want to have to perform software switches just to enable headphones/headsets for Skype or UT2004. Much easier to just plug in the hardware when desired.

Finally, rerouting sound through the Wolfson DAC has somehow completely disabled software sound control. None of the volume sliders in alsamixer, gnome-volume, Audacious, etc. work. Neither do any of the mute functions. The only thing that works is the volume knob on the X-230 speakers themselves. Weird. So I have three tasks:

1. Determine if I'd get even better sound by upgrading my speakers
2. Figure out how to enable other ports for headphone/headset/microphone use
3. Get software volume controls working again

To sum up: life was much simpler, though not as good-sounding, before I bought my new gear. Still, I'm keeping it. I now have better playback quality and a decent line-in port for future audio recording purposes.

I've been thinking of buying this card solely for its MIDI port. It's supposedly a Chaintech AV-512, but at only $10, it's really just a knock-off imitation. It's got an old C-Media CMI 8738 chip, so it'd be useless for everything but MIDI input. Not sure if I'll get it yet. I'll have to see how well I do with figuring out basic line-in recording before moving on to anything as complex as MIDI controllers!