Nothing fancy in this podcast just an update about what has been going on in my Linux World. I am now a member of the Gentoo PR Project as a staff member. What this means is that I am not a developer for Gentoo, just a staff member to help out with Gentoo. The first thing I did was put together a page for the Gentoo 10 year anniversary, yes Gentoo is celebrating a birthday. I am going to be talking about a lot of different links, so instead of saying all of them during this podcast, if there are any topics you would like more info or a clearer explanation, please visit linuxcrazy.com for all the links

LINKS:
My Gentoo PR site
http://gentoo-pr.org/
Gentoo Anniversary page
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20090722-anniversary.xml
Screenshot contest
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/2009-screenshot-contest.xml
Screenshot Contestants
http://gentoo-pr.org/node/6
http://gentoo-pr.org/node/7
http://gentoo-pr.org/node/9
Contest Forum Post
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-780092-highlight-.html
Gentoo GuideXML
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xml-guide.xml
Robin H. Johnson (robbat2) interview
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/20090724-robbat2-interview.xml
Perl 5.10 testing
http://pythontoo.com/?q=node/22
Bash
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
Gentoo Development Guide
Tools Reference
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/tools-reference/index.html
Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible
http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Command-Shell-Scripting-Bible/dp/047025128X/...
Touch Typing
GNU Typist
http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/#TOCdocumentation
Klavaro
http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Three typing tutors and a boy
http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/146602
PulseAudio
http://gentoo-pr.org/node/8

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

After talking with Ben (yngwin), I found that there really wasn't anyone working on documentation related to LXDE inside of Gentoo. So, I decided that I would write a HOWTO for getting it installed and configured. I finished the document this morning, and uploaded it to my Developer webspace. You may see a working copy of the document there, and if you want to see the xml, you have two options. Firstly, when looking at the finished copy, you append the following to the end of the URL:

?passthru=1

making the full URL:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~nathanzachary/documentation/lxde_1.0.xml?passthru=1

and that will show you the XML. Secondly, you can view Bug 281345, and click on the attachment. Hopefully the documentation team will pick up the guide in the near future, and commit it. The only holdup that I can foresee is that LXDE is still available only through the testing (~arch) branch.

|:| Zach |:|

I have made several changes to the Openbox HOWTO. There were many typographical errors that I didn't catch the first time around, and package links that weren't added. Here's a full list of the updates for version 1.4:

• In code listing 2.5, changed the $ to # as the operation requires root actions.
• Added a note to the 2.5 listing about becoming root before the command.
• In code listing 2.6, fixed the typographical error (7gt; instead of gt;).
• In code listing 2.6, made the
• In code listing 2.8, fixed the typographical error (extra > in closing tag).
• In code listing 2.8, fixed the typographical error (missing closing ").
• Added a link to the package information for conky before code listing 2.10.
• Added a link to the package information for feh after code listing 2.10.
• Added a link to the package information for nitrogen after code listing 2.10.
• Removed the library dependency bug reference for nitrogen.
• In terminals section, changed "customized" to "customised" for consistency.
• In file managers, fixed typographical error for Nautilus (a "bit" heavy).

If you would like to see the new document revisions before it gets committed to the official documentation repository, it is available on my Developer webspace. You may also view the XML for version 1.4 via Gentoo Bug 256693.

|:| Zach |:|

It is with sadness that we as Trustees bring forward this news that we have recently received. Ferris Ellsworth McCormick, better known as fmccor, has passed away unexpectedly on the 5th of August. His family does not wish to be contacted. We have expressed our gratitude for his contributions on behalf of the Community.

Ferris studied mathematics in college at Indiana University, graduating in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts. Later he entered into the Law school at the University of Michigan, earning his Juris Doctor degree in 1991.

He passed the bar in Michigan that same year and has continued to be an actively certified Lawyer with the State of Michigan since then. He was also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Ferris joined Gentoo on April 16th 2004 as part of the sparc team and improved sparc support for the entire open source community. Within a year he also joined the Developer Relations team to help with mediation of any issues that might come up between people. As time went on Ferris continued to expand and assist Gentoo in many ways including assisting with the User Relations team and growing to become the Strategic Manager of the sparc project. Finally, he became a trustee and the Vice President of the Foundation assisting in getting the foundation back into good standing.

While it is too late to say in person, the Foundation would like to thank Ferris once again for all that he did for both Gentoo and the Open source community. He will be missed.

Please join the community in eulogizing Ferris in our forums here.

This is a quick note for anyone using compiz, that x11-wm/compiz-0.7.8-r3 will allow KDE-4.3.0 and that the KDE use flags were updated now that KDE-4 has become the "default" KDE version and that 3.5 is approaching its final days.
As such, the kde use flag will add support for KDE-4.X and the kde3 use flag will add support for KDE-3.5. So be sure to check your use flags for compiz.
I plan to move compiz-0.7.8-r3 from the overlay to the tree in a few hours.

Following my attempts to deal with bug 259715, I broke libcompizconfig again - bug 278146. Although I've masked libcompizconfig-0.8.2-r2 sometime ago, it was unmasked long enough to break the config files for enough users. If you still have ccsm / compiz failing for you, you need to downgrade to libcompizconfig-0.8.2 and to remove the contents of ~/.config/compiz/compizconfig/. I'm still working on removing the bundled iniparser from libcompizconfig.

After having recently reinstalled Gentoo on my main production machine, I thought I would look into some theming to make things more aesthetically pleasing. I installed a bunch of GTK themes that I ended up not liking, so I got rid of them. I use Openbox with a bunch of LXDE applications installed to ease the process of customisation. One such application is LXappearance. Getting rid of the unwanted themes from the LXappearance menu wasn't all that difficult. I simply went to /usr/share/themes and removed the respective folders. However, I couldn't seem to get the unwanted icon themes to go away. If I'm not mistaken, icon themes are usually installed to /usr/share/icons. When I went to manually delete the icon theme folders, however, there were no such directories. Hmmmmmmmm...

Since searching the web didn't yield any significant results, I thought I would go to the source code and figure out just what happens when one installs an icon theme using LXappearance. In /usr/share/lxappearance there is a script called install-icon-theme.sh, and it contains the following line:

export XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local/share";

That lead me to check that respective directory. Bingo, there were my icon theme folders. I simply deleted the folders, and the respective icon theme choices were no longer present in LXappearance. I was simply excited as it was my first success of the day.

|:| Zach |:|

Post from PostBot on my G1.

Nice app. I wonder if it will make me post more?

So, I’ve lately not been blogging or generally doing anything other than being lazy. Now that the next semester of college is starting to ramp up in the near future I’ve decided to attempt to jump-start my productivity. The first step was updating my machines into a usable environment which meant clobbering portage blockers and such until I had my world fully updated to the latest ~amd64 and my developer chroot to the latest stable amd64. The latter was a bit more work, with tons of perl blockages and fetch restricted packages on the java side. All in all not too bad, after a series of

emerge -avuD world --keep-going; revdep-rebuild; dispatch-conf

the chroot was sane again and ready for developer work. Now I can stop slacking so much and help squish some amd64 bugs. (Also, why isn’t –keep-going default? Sigh, maybe I’ll just alias it along with nice and ionice.)

Besides working on Gentoo I’ll be ramping development back up on my two pet projects: GPytage and Zito.

GPytage is currently undergoing a near complete rewrite to support recursive folders and file structures under /etc/portage/. Currently reading in all the files and constructing the internal database is functional and so is a basic UI. Saving still needs to be reimplemented among a variety of other things. I plan to eventually redo all of the accelerator shortcuts into something more sane and to recode glade-based dialogs and windows into pure pygtk.

Zito is currently still in development and undergoing Internationalization refactoring. After that is done, some code tidying and perhaps UI changes are due. I’m still at a loss on how to actually package something like Zito being a java project. I know Ant can do it, but I’m still not exactly sure how to use Ant in the sense of coding a build and install file for it. Seems quite a pain setting up the XML file for Ant.

On a related note, I can say that I am fairly happy with bzr now. I used to be a large git supporter, but many git commands require extensive knowledge of syntax, flags to pass, and just isn’t as user friendly. Bzr I’ve found is very easy to work with and I have not had any problems with it so far. Most of my projects I’ve converted locally to bzr repositories. In my observation, Bzr knows what “the right thing to do” is most of the time and prevents most repository screwups.

So, a couple days in, and I'm still trying to (re)install Gentoo. More on that in a bit. First, let's talk about speed.

It's hard to tell whether or not my new SSDs are really a speedy improvement over the old software RAID1 array of magnetic HDDs. Normally, a bare-bones commandline system feels much faster than an aging graphical desktop, even on the same hardware.

I notice that compile times are slightly faster, though I've also been using tmpfs for Portage and the usual tmp file locations, so putting it all on RAM will lead to a significant speedup anyway.

Boot times are indeed quite zippy; the longest wait is for my media HDD to finish mounting -- it's on ReiserFS, which is known to have very slow mounts.

Now, let's talk filesystems.

The critical showstopper that's made me reinstall two times (and counting) is ext4. So far, ext4 has completely corrupted a whole drive (/var and /usr/portage) and made the other drive (/ and /boot) almost unbootable.

ext4 has eaten my data, hosed my system, and ruined my life.

No amount of fscking has fixed /var and /usr/portage, both on the second SSD. Did you know that you shouldn't let fsck try to resize broken inodes? apparently the resize behavior is known to be broken in the latest versions. It's known to corrupt filesystems. I didn't know that, either. I'm sorry, but what part of "production-ready" applies to ext4? Yeah, it's a new kid on the block, but it's moved out of the "experimental" status into the kernel.

That does not make it ready for your system. The first and second Gentoo installs largely didn't work because (I think) there might have been an invalid mount option. Or something could not be found. Or a superblock was missing. Or the moon was wrong. #$#^#&@ shitty unintelligible error messages. (Here's a tip, developers: don't put every possible thing that could have gone wrong into an error message, then repeat that message for every different error.)

My mount options seemed to be good after double-checking the manpage and around the internet, including kernel.org. Here was my original fstab, from when I had only one partition for / (no separate /boot):

/dev/sda1  /     ext4  noatime,data=writeback,commit=60,nobarrier  0 1
/dev/sdb1  /var  ext4  noatime,data=writeback,commit=60,nobarrier  0 1
/dev/sdb2  /usr/portage  ext4  noatime,data=writeback,commit=60,nobarrier 0 1

Livin' on the edge here. I figured I wouldn't need a separate /boot partition on my first drive, so I lumped it all into one. I did that back in 2005 and 2006 with no problems, right? Right. The rest of the options were designed to maximize SSD performance.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the system to boot. Made it past grub, the kernel loaded, but when it came time to mount /, it couldn't mount the filesystem rw. No amount of changing options worked -- adding rw to grub.conf, to the fstab options, nothing.

So I figured it must be my one-partition setup, and wiped my disks. Reinstalled again, this time adding a /boot partition on sda. Same ext4 options for /boot as for the other partitions. Rebooted and . . . nope, same errors. Now I'm also seeing a message about a possible bad option or other variable, which I can only assume was in fstab, thanks to the aforementioned shitty nonspecific error messages.

Hit up Google. Not much help. I again backed off on some of the ext4 options, tried playing with Grub parameters, but got the same results. The filesystems mostly weren't mounting, and when a few of them did, it was all readonly.

Sigh. Time to reinstall again. Set up a similar fstab, but this time I changed an ext4 option for /boot to data=ordered, based on this blog post. Reboot and . . . hey, it works. /boot gets mounted. Nothing else does, but it's a start.

I quickly booted back into the LiveCD, changed the other fstab entries to data=ordered, and reboot again. This time, the system seems to boot just fine . . . until it tries to mount /var and /usr/portage from the second SSD. *bzzt*, these cannot be mounted! Something's gone wrong. One more reboot, just for luck, then . . . *bzzt*, now there are filesystem errors! Fsck wants to fix them, so I let it run. Except it completely hoses both partitions. They seem to be so badly scrambled that even running mkfs.ext4 on them from the liveCD results in errors, some of which seem to be emitted from the libata system, which makes me wonder if now the SSD itself has also been corrupted.

I'll have to completely reinitialize and repartition that disk, now. Thanks, ext4. Thanks for hosing my data. Up yours, ext4.

I'm done trying to figure out why ext4 doesn't work. I don't care that it's supposed to be a fast file system for SSDs. I don't care that it's 40 times faster than ReiserFS to mount at bootup. I don't care. ext4 has lost my data three times now. I think my fingers are sufficiently burned to know that "the oven is hot; don't touch."

Up yours, ext4. I'm going back to ReiserFS. At least it works. It's never failed me in more than four years.

---

Update: On top of the initial ext4 errors, fsck problems, and mount issues, the Mobi drive was also going bad. Now the motherboard BIOS can't see it, regardless of which SATA port or cable I plug in. So just a day or so after trying out the device, when it was initially working for the first install (though the filesystem was throwing ext4 errors, at least /var and /usr/portage worked okay), and it finally finished failing. F***. I contacted the seller to request an RMA; I have a feeling that I'll end up having to go through the manufacturer, which will take a long time. Meanwhile, I'm without a workstation for an indefinite time, so I've set my devaway on dev.gentoo.org. I did find a couple other reports on the internets that say that their Mobis also died shortly after they arrived, so maybe there was a batch of bad drives.

But don't get me wrong, the Mobi drive dying doesn't absolve ext4 of any guilt. The ext4 filesystem still completely f**ked itself repeatedly on the system drive, the UltraDrive ME. It still refuses to do what it's told to do. But rather than continue to investigate related LaunchPad bugs on mounting ext4 rw and fsck errors, I'm going to move back to ReiserFS for the UltraDrive, and just live with longer boots. The RMA process will take awhile, so I may have to reinstall everything on a single drive and just avoid syncing Portage for awhile.

On a good note, OCZ (the company that makes the Vertex, an identical drive with an Indilinx controller), has been experimenting with a homegrown beta firmware that lets the drive do online garbage collection in the background. This is important for keeping the performance of the drive as fresh as when it was first used, even after it gets filled up with files and repeated (re)writes. The firmware is still in testing, but I'm hopeful that it'll make it out the door soon. Hopefully the same firmware features will find their way to my Super Talent drive -- and hopefully the TRIM command will also be implemented in the firmware.

Of course, the only Linux filesystem I know of that supports TRIM is ext4 . . .

Today I stumbled upon an interesting band from Norway: Katzenjammer (MySpace, last.fm). They got an refreshing mix of genres combined with great vocals and quite some instruments. Besides that they are currently on tour and selling their debut album (Le Pop)… Definately worth to check out…

Since I already use evolution for my calendar needs on my laptop, I thought it would be ideal to also use it for email. So I went through adding all of my email accounts tediously to evolution and all seemed good as they started to sync.

However, suddenly multiple folders failed to sync on my gmail IMAP account. I tried to refresh the account and download everything again but Evolution fails out on downloading all of my email. So I open up the debug log and see errors like Incomplete server response: no information provided for message 1401. Wonderful. After some googling around, I found this bug which describes my exact problem.

Good right? Nope! Unfortunately it looks like an ancient bug that no one cares to fix and it’s “working as intended” as far as I can tell from the responses. This effectively terminates my ability to use Evolution as my email client as I don’t have the time or patience to go through 500 broken emails and deleting them manually just so Evolution doesn’t throw a wobbly over a corrupt email.

If anyone knows a fix for this problem I’d love to hear it, but as far as I can tell I’m effectively barred from using Evolution for email without manually going in and nuking crap off gmail. Quite disappointing really, considering almost every other email client such as Claws Mail or Thunderbird does not have this problem.

I'm not sure if I'm getting older and more cranky, or am just starting to wake up to the fact that so much of media that is presented is not really what I asked for or what, but this time it's terrestrial radio that is on the chopping block.

One thing I am sure of, it's a sign I'm getting older because I'm starting that phase where I'm unimpressed with music with arbitrary lyrics. I think to myself, "what the heck are they even talking about?" My tastes in music have always been a bit volatile though ... every few years, I'll completely shake up what I want to listen to, and I guess the turning point has finally hit again. I just didn't think it'd hit me so hard.

I was on the way to work this morning, and had a CD in the player (more on hardware specs later), but I switched to the radio. First of all, listening to the radio in the morning is a huge gamble that you'll find anything worth listening to. It is, of course, always that way since most of the airtime is devoted to commercials, but in the morning, there is also morning shows. I loathe morning shows on the radio. They are, in my opinion, the *lowest* form of mass media entertainment out there. A couple of DJs guffawing to themselves over the air, while running stupid contests and commenting on the stupid "news of the days" stories on the wire. Mostly, I just can't stand the pretense, that they treat their audience like everyone is involved in this big insider's joke and we are all just laughing along.

Anyway, that wasn't the thing that ticked me off. What ticked me off is I switched to a different channel, and I heard the same song for the 800th time playing. I was so sick of hearing it even being played, again, that I just shut off the radio in disgust. For good, this time, I decided.

The whole business market around over the air radio is totally whacked, in my opinion. The only explanation I have for the reason they keep playing the *very same* songs over and over again is because they don't want the idea of the top 40 songs to die off. Now, from a business standpoint, I can understand that approach IF it was easier on their supply and demand chain -- that is, you want to produce a large number of records that will sell, and create them en masse so you can project good sales and get a good return on your investment. That would be well and good, but it's totally out of sync with the way music works now. Thanks to the Internet, all music can be easily distributed and deployed to everyone on the planet at the same cost. So, the rationale should be -- instead of selling as much as one album as possible, let's sell as much *different music* as possible!

That is, in fact, one of the reasons I absolutely loved XM Radio when I first signed up for it years ago. They would constantly play new music I had never heard of, and I was always taking notes to write down what artist and song I had just heard so I can get myself a copy. But, XM was having serious cash flow issues, and it looks like the way they started to fix that problem was by bowing to the more traditional method of just playing the same songs over and over. I remember more than once finding the same song playing on three of my preset stations *at the same time*. That's about when I knew it was time to jump ship. I don't miss XM, I miss how it used to be.

Obviously, this whole situation could be solved if I had Internet access in my car, but I doubt that'll be happening for the next 10 years or so, so it's up to me to find a solution in the meantime. Right now, I've just got a CD player in my car, the stereo is the still the same one as the stock one that I bought it with. I've started looking around for stereos, but I was pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. The last time I looked at the idea, years ago, was when they were first starting to get support for iPods. I have an old Nano that I play with every now and then, but it only holds 4 GB of data, which is a drop in the bucket compared to today's MP3 players. Plus, the hardware and the company is very much against sharing and openness, so syncing it with Linux is not worth the pain and hassle.

I've since found in my more recent research, that there are radios on the market now that you can directly plug in a USB stick. That would be awesome, since you can buy a 32 GB stick for not a lot of money. There are also some that have support for MicroSD, but they cap out in size limit pretty quickly right now too.

Either way, I gotta get something soon. I needs my music.

As a postscript, I wanna point a couple of things out. I don't want to make it sound like I'm complaining, because I'm not. I'm more upset with the state of mass media in general than I am with anything else. Listening to the radio, like watching over the air television, is free, and I don't expect too much out of them in the first place. It's just my opinion, however, that things have gotten so out of control. They have been the dominant pipe for media input for so long, that they long ago stopped caring about what consumers wanted since there was no alternative. Thank goodness that the Internet is slowly breaking up those archaic fiefdoms, and I'm glad to see them go. If nothing else, choice is finally starting to drive market forces again. It's obviously been painful to watch the old school businesses try and adapt, but they either will, or die. I can't imagine I'm the only one bothered by the whole scenario.

The second thing that makes me sad is that I have to spend so much money just to avoid being constantly bombarded with advertisements and less-than-mediocre playtime. I realize that what I'm really doing is buying into luxuries, but the fact is, unless I wanna listen to classical music on the radio, there's no station to tune into where I won't hear a car dealer's advertisement every 7 minutes.

There's a lot of parallels to me building up my own library at home of TV shows to watch. Sure, it costs a lot more building up my own collection, but the convenience and reward of never having to hear another forced advertisement or commercial again is absolutely priceless. Plus, you can set the standard of quality yourself and cater to it how you want. The entire process is driven by personal taste.

Now, get off my lawn.

So, I have to go to traffic court next week, and I'm a bit freaked out about the whole thing. I got pulled over the other night for speeding (which doesn't really bother me, I got ticketed for 10 over), but the real shocker was when the officer came back and said "You wanna explain to me why your license is suspended?" My jaw totally dropped and it took me a few seconds to even respond since I had no idea *why* it would be suspended to start with.

Turns out I made a stupid mistake -- I need to send in a medical form signed by my doctor that states I can drive. The reason I need to do that is that I take some prescription meds, and when I got my renewal notice in the mail last year, they ask if you are taking anything regularly, so I answered yes and put my info down. I figured that was the end of that. Except that I got a longer form in the mail asking for more specifics and demanding that the doctor sign it, and I had to send it in before I could get my license. Well, poop, more paperwork. I took care of that, and got my license okay.

What happened, though, and I had no idea, is that you have to send one in every year after that, too. I probably would have known that except that my address on my driver's license was still at my old address -- I had moved a few months after getting it renewed and forgot to update it. The officer kept saying, "they would have sent you something in the mail if it was suspended," and I just replied, "I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have missed something like that."

So, I have two charges against me -- speeding, and driving with a suspended license. Getting my license reinstated was simple. I just had to go to my doctor the next day, have her fill out a new form, and dropped it off at the driver's license division and was cleared to drive again right away. Oh, and I updated my address at the same time.

I have to go to court now, and I have no idea what I'm gonna plead (probably either guilty or no contest), but I hope I at least get a chance to explain myself. I'd never *intentionally* drive without a suspended license (it was revoked back in March), it's just that I had no idea, and I probably would have if I had my address updated. So, I have no idea what to expect, and of course, being the nervous type that I am, all these fear-mongering scenarios race through my head. Not really looking forward to this one.

On the plus side, my driving record is mostly really clean -- I've never been in an accident before and I think this is only the fourth or fifth ticket I've ever gotten for speeding ever since I started driving, so maybe it won't be that bad. I just hope I can explain to the judge that I'm a dumb cluck who forgot to do some paperwork, and it's probably not a good idea to demote me to just skating to work after that.

KDE 4.3 has arrived

Lots of behind-the-scenes fixes, a new pretty (debatable) default plasma theme and various new stuff across the board make kde 4.3 an exciting release!

Gentoo ebuilds were available the moment tarballs were released, thanks to the hard work of our Gentoo KDE team

However, since 4.3 brings some new packages (and dependencies), we’ve hard masked the ebuilds until everything gets the proper keywords.
You can follow the keywording progress in bug 280312.

Instructions on how to unmask kde 4.3 after the screenshot

unmasking & installing kde 4.3
kde 4.3 might be masked but it works fine on x86 and amd64 (for other archs check the bug above).
to install it, you can easily unmask it using the unmask file provided in the kde-testing overlay, [kde-testing]/Documentation/package.unmask/kde-4.3

if you don’t have / don’t want the overlay, you can grab the file here.

you can also use a command similar to

# unmasking kde 4.3
wget -O /etc/portage/package.unmask/kde-4.3 'http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/kde.git;a=blob_plain;f=Documentation/package.unmask/kde-4.3'

to automatically save the unmask file to your unmask folder (if you use folders)

for those using stable gentoo, there’s a similar keywords file

# adding kde 4.3 in package.keywords/
wget -O /etc/portage/package.keywords/kde-4.3 'http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/kde.git;a=blob_plain;f=Documentation/package.keywords/kde-4.3.keywords'

troubleshooting
if you’re trying to upgrade from kde 4.2, but portage gives you nice little blocks, there are a few things you can check:

• make sure you’ve synced the tree and kde-testing overlay (if using it) :p
• make sure the unmask/keyword files are correct and up-to-date
• check that you don’t have any 4.2 versioned kde-base/* items in /var/lib/portage/world
• check that you don’t have any 4.2 versioned sets in /var/lib/portage/world_sets
• emerge -avDuN world — you’ll probably get some messy output but all blocks should be automatically resolved

if you hit any issues feel free to leave a comment, check the gentoo kde 4 guide (should be up-to-date soon) or visit us @ #gentoo-kde (freenode).

enjoy your shiny new kde!

share this post:

a) just saw the almighty Hip in Saskatoon. best concert ever.
b) drove four hours home on Saskatchewan "highways" in the middle of the night, having to watch the road for wildlife the entire time (had to slam on the brakes for 3 deer, 5 raccoons, 2 badgers, a cat, and a pillow (?!)), with a hangover. worst headache ever.

still worth it.

Earlier today Calchan blogged about amending GLEP 39 here. During the council meeting I voted against council being able to change the document and on deciding a process for changing it. Why? First I think as the developer population voted the GLEP I think they should decide about the changes as well. Secondly I think we don't need to decide on a process because we already have one. Using the existing elections team and votify is enough when needed. If council members think we are wrongly skipping items in meetings, I challenge them to step up and take chair in the next meeting making sure items are properly handled.

I'm going to go ahead and assume you have all read the summary of the last council meeting. It can be summarized even further.

• We decided the #gentoo-council channel would be moderated during meetings. Developers and users have plenty of opportunities to tell us what their opinion is prior to and during the meetings.
• We confirmed Thomas Anderson as the council secretary and clarified that the role of the secretary is limited to posting the logs and summaries of council meetings.
• The council decided it wasn't competent to decide how GLEP 39 should be amended.

Some would say that it isn't much. And I wouldn't disagree. I wished this council could be someday called the council that slacked less but we're apparently not taking that direction. Let's see if we can change that. By the way I encourage everybody, anybody, to post discussion topics to the gentoo-council mailing list and debate there.

What I really wanted to discuss today is amending GLEP 39, and more exactly how to proceed. This GLEP serves in certain ways as our constitution and is more critical than any others. It was written almost 4 years ago and as such relects the situation as it was back then. It has been criticized a lot, many want or wanted to replace it at some point in time, some even went as far as writing replacements for it (count me as one of them), but I have yet to see something that is worth discussing in public.

Now, I'm not going to say that it's perfect. No text of that kind can be even close to perfect. My point today isn't about discussing what should be kept in it and what should be changed (don't worry though, I'll discuss that soon), but to make sure we agree on the fact that we need a mechanism to modify it. And by extension replace it if we decide so someday. Not that it wasn't ever amended in the past, it was, but in a way that I can't imagine satisfies the whole developer community. Don't extrapolate from what I just wrote that I disagree with the changes or how they happened, quite the contrary actually. But I talk to a lot of you and many tell me they believe that since GLEP 39 was the result of the vote of all developers, any change to it needs to be again voted by all developers. I disagree with that simply because GLEP 39 itself has provisions that would imply the contrary. However, all opinions need to be taken into account, especially when the same one comes back often.

So, what happened during that last council meeting? One of the questions was whether the council could decide on a process to amend GLEP 39. The vote ended up saying no. The next item on the agenda was then to organize a vote of the whole developer community to decide, since the council declared itself incompetent. Strangely enough this item was skipped. How can that be interpreted? Frankly, I'm not sure.

Someone argued that there was no point bothering with how to amend GLEP 39 since we could always organize a quick vote of all developers. I see two issues with that. One is that we had just voted that we couldn't decide on a process, but arguing that we can always use an all-developer vote is precisely deciding on a process, and it's inconsistent. The second one is that GLEP 39 was already amended a few times, and each time without an all developer vote. I don't seem to remember anybody complaining about that. So there must be at least a significant part of the developer population which is happy with not having to vote on changes of GLEP39, and is comfortable with the "vote out the bums" clause.

Most probably what happened is that we were running late with the meeting and the item was skipped because it didn't seem important to your new council. Yep, you heard me. Your new council doesn't really care about what you think on amending GLEP 39. If you think your council should care more then let it be known.

Lately we updated some of the LXDE packages in Gentoo, and tonight I added a few more. We have now a practically complete LXDE desktop on Gentoo. So if you feel like trying the most lightweight desktop environment, consider to emerge lxde-meta. If you come across any bugs or other issues, please let us know. Bugs should be reported at bugs.gentoo.org. Support questions are welcome in the #gentoo and #gentoo-desktop IRC channels on Freenode, or #lxde on OFTC. You can also go to the forums.

The current version, lxde-meta-0.4.2 and its dependencies, is considered our stable candidate, so we’d like to straighten out any issues there may exist. Also, some documentation would be welcome. So if you want to contribute a “How to configure and use LXDE on Gentoo” guide, we’d be very thankful. Or if you want to help maintaining LXDE in portage, we could always use more people. So contact me if you’re interested in a herd tester or developer position.

We also have an overlay with live ebuilds, but it is basically unmaintained. So I cannot recommend you use it, unless you want to test and update the ebuilds. If you’re on bitbucket, send me a pull request. We used to have several user contributors, but I guess they are too busy with other things now — as am I. Currently my focus for LXDE (whenever I have time for it) is to get the packages up-to-date with the latest released versions and get what we have now tested and marked stable.

So have you tried LXDE yet? What are your thoughts? And are you willing to contribute?

… I always seem to pick the expensive hobbies? Seriously. Sailing, skiing and shooting are the three primary sports in which I participate. None of these sports come cheap – both in terms of costs associated with purchasing boats/skis/guns, but in actually doing the sport – you need to pay for mooring and fuel costs for boats, you have to pay for flights and accommodation when you go skiing and you have to pay for cartridges and other costs when shooting.

I’ve recently taken up photography as a new hobby – if one shoots with a digital camera, the cost of a new camera is more often than not over £500 for a half-decent one. Let’s not even think about the lenses, which can easily sell for multiple hundreds of pounds for relatively “basic” models, and over £1000 for the “pro” models. If one shoots film, one has to pay for film and development costs. These all add up in a big way (not to mention the cost of the high-end film cameras – especially MF (Medium-Format) cameras).

One “hobby” I’ve been involved in since a really young age is reading. Okay, so at first glance reading isn’t that expensive. But when you’re finishing a £6-8 novel every other day or so (as I tend to do during the holiday season when I attempt to take a break from computers), it gets really fucking expensive. Since coming back from Aberystwyth on the 19th July (less than two weeks ago), I’ve read £73.91 worth of books. That’s almost three quarters of a hundred pounds. My wallet is crying (as is my bank account). It doesn’t help that I have another £49.95 worth of books on order… And that’s for five books alone.

I think my main issue is the fact that I like to buy my own physical books. And I like them to be new. This leads to two major problems:

1. I can’t buy books second-hand (well, I can. I just don’t want to and would probably refuse to do so)
2. I can’t borrow books from the library (see above)
3. I can’t read eBooks (they “feel” wrong)

Buggeration. Anyone want to recommend some cheaper hobbies for me? Pretty please?

On a side note, I’m starting the Infinite Summer project when my copy of the book arrives tomorrow (albeit about a month and a bit behind schedule), Infinite Jest is apparently about 1000 pages long and relatively difficult to read. Hopefully this means I’ll put buying new books on the backburner for a wee while – especially as I’ll have another 3 books to finish after it.

I'm looking for a someone to help out with Planet Gentoo if they are interested.  Specifically, we host a deployment of b2evolution and use it for the developer blogs.  As a maintainer of planet services for Gentoo, that's part of my job to take care of it ... but it drives me a bit nuts and I'd like to rip it out and tell people to use something else.

But, people do like it, and I'm losing interest in taking care of it, so what I'd like to do is give the opportunity to someone else if they are interested.  If you wanna help out with Gentoo a bit as a staffer (not a developer), I can help you take the quiz and get started.  Email me at beandog@gentoo.org and lemme know why you're interested, etc.  Main responsibilities would initially just tweaking our b2evolution install, getting some things cleaned up, maybe helping out with documentation, small patches.  Nothing major or stressful, just minor tasks that need to get done.

Figured I'd visit forums today, seen at least 4 topics about lost menus while updating gnome-menus to 2.26.2, banged head 4 times because of users not reading elog messages and doing random fixes instead of searching the real cause of the change (in changelog, ebuild, elog, bugzilla). Good thing I have added that to the migration guide that will be up for stable users.

For those of you who still don't know about elog, man make.conf.

Update: fix typo.

Today another nice thing for the Linux kernel happened, we got working VME bus drivers and infrastructure submitted to the kernel tree. Now, I don't expect it to generate as much press as the Microsoft kernel driver thing did, but it should, as I feel it's more important in a way.

The VME bus code has lived outside of the kernel for many years, and there was at least three different implementations at the same time floating around. Martyn Welch from GE Faunc took the time, merged all of them together, and rounded up the different copyright holders of the code and got legal approval from all of them to properly release the code under the GPLv2.

Now as someone who has tried to do this kind of thing, I know how thankless and how difficult it can be. So here's a great big thank you to Martyn and his employer for getting this work done, and taking the time to work toward getting it merged into the main kernel tree.

The patches are here, here, here, here, and a good readme for the api is here.

While Firefox 3.5 has some good improvements, it’s not all good. We geeks are quite disappointed by the decision to disable the backspace key. In previous versions backspace would take you back a page in history. Which is great when you are on the keyboard already — no need to grab the mouse. But in 3.5 this has been disabled.

Fortunately, this is a setting that you can change. Here’s how:

1. Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar.
2. In the Filter search field type backspace — this should bring up the browser.backspace_action preference.
3. Right-click on the value (defaults to 2) and select Modify.
4. In the pop-up window change the value to 0 (that’s zero) and accept.
5. Enjoy your backspace key to go back a page in history again.

For more information see the mozillazine knowledge base page on about:config.

Some more stuff that has happened recently with cleaning up ALSA ebuilds.  We (as in me, mostly) decided to drop support for the optional MIDI support in the alsa-lib and alsa-utils packages.  It originally was implemented as a hack on our end, always caused headaches when disabled, and a whole lot of ebuilds required that it be implemented anyway, so it wasn't so optional to start with.

With alsa-1.0.20, I ripped out the midi use flag completely, but instead of fixing the reverse dependencies to check for an either/or scenario, instead it was decided to just go back and change all versions of the alsa-lib/utils ebuilds and to force it on, and then drop the check on those using it.  Thanks to Samuli (ssuominen) for fixing all the applications that were using it.

If you run into any ebuilds that are failing to merge because of the dependency, that are in the main portage tree (sorry, I can't take responsibility for overlays), try syncing your tree again -- it's possible your last one was during the transition.  If you still find one that isn't working, feel free to file a bug report at bugs.gentoo.org and assign it to alsa-bugs@gentoo.org.

Another change that has needed to happen for a while, though not nearly as dramatic, is that I ripped out the really old config options in the alsasound init script: KILLPROC_ON_STOP and UNLOAD_ON_STOP which would kill process using ALSA, and unload its modules, respectively.  Like before, they caused more problems than they solved (both of which, I might suggest, could be implemented in local.stop if you really needed something like that), and I'm glad to say they are gone.

That's about all the major growing pains for now -- that is, I certainly don't have anything else on my plate for ALSA or its related applications, other than getting 1.0.20 stable and everything previous to that version removed from the tree.

As always, we appreciate any help people would like to give.  There's still old bugs open, and it'd be good to know if they are solved or not in the latest release.

I realize some of these changes may be minor bumps for users, and if so, I apologize ... but Gentoo is always changing goals and directions, and I'm quite glad that we have the flexibility to change things, instead of being stuck with one method.  Part of growth is just shedding the stuff that doesn't work.

So, in between being super busy with Gentoo yet not having enough time to keep up with all the bugs, document updates, and project commitments . . . I've added yet another item to my plate: a fresh install of Gentoo onto a pair of SSDs.

I've never reinstalled Gentoo on this workstation; this is the original install from October 2006. I had thought about just finding some stage4/stage5 backup scripts and tips from the Gentoo Forums, but it seems to be more cumbersome and time-consuming than reinstalling. Besides, installing Gentoo from scratch gives me a chance to create an even more lean, minimal system. No more accumulated packages and cruft that I don't use, just the essentials.

And it'll let me see how good these SSDs really are for compilation times.

I purchased two: a 32GB Super Talent UltraDrive ME for /, and a 16GB Mobi 3000 for /var and /usr/portage.

The Super Talent is a new-generation MLC drive with an Indilinx controller. It's not as good in some areas as Intel's controller for the X-25, but it's better than everything else out there, and it doesn't have the chronic stuttering problems that all cheaper JMicron-based controllers suffer.

The Mobi is an older drive, "only" SATA-150. But it is an SLC drive, so I'll use it for the partitions that see the highest write activity, as SLC is more resilient than MLC. Plus, the contents of the drive are more or less throwaway, so if any corruption does develop, I can just replace it with no issues. /var sees log frequent writes, and there may be some Portage compilation in the tempfiles. I've been using a tmpfs on RAM for /var/tmp/portage for some time now, so I don't really think it will hit up the drive much, not with 4GB of RAM installed:

none  /var/tmp/portage tmpfs	noauto,nr_inodes=1M,size=2000M 0 0

See? A dynamic Portage compilation space, ready to occupy 2GB RAM if need be. During compiles, the only time I ever really see the HDDs light up is during the src_unpack (to RAM) and src_install phases.

So I've figured out my drive and partition usage, but the things that are causing the most headaches, and occupying the majority of my research time, are:

1. Which filesystems
2. Which mount options
3. Which schedulers
4. Partition alignment schemes

See, I will have two SSDs in there with Gentoo installed on 'em, but I'll also have a separate magnetic HDD for media storage, so that means a different for each drive.

For 1, ext4 is looking increasingly attractive for the SSDs. I may continue to use ReiserFS for the media drive, as it's worked very well for a few years now. But, given that the Portage tree is just lots and lots of tiny files, perhaps I could continue using ReiserFS on it? Though I would need to deactivate the journal. The Mobi drive should not have any journaling on it -- too many writes.

NILFS2 is another interesting filesystem, but it seems immature. BtrFS also has potential, especially after reading Val's excellent article, but its developers warn against using it for anything other than testing. So I'll stick with something a little more mainstream, yet not so old and cranky as ext3/ext2.

Which brings me to 2: mount options. I've only just begun to read up on suggested options for ext4. data=writeback seems to be one of the more popular suggestions. noatime is a necessity; I've used this option on every single Gentoo install I've ever had. There are several other options I need to investigate, including the dir_index variations.

If I go with ReiserFS, I'd need to research the performance differences between notail and tail. In theory, the latter option could be more efficient for packing more data into fewer blocks, resulting in fewer writes/rewrites. This is at the expense of slightly more CPU usage. notail may result in more speed, but I haven't found many detailed reports of ReiserFS usage on SSDs. One last thing to look up would be the difference between ReiserFS with the journal and without.

The next piece of the puzzle is 3, schedulers. Most of the schedulers in the kernel are designed to keep spinning magnetic disks happy. But since there aren't any moving heads or rotating disks to spin up, the algorithms that are designed for efficient, minimal motion aren't very helpful for SSDs.

The usual solution proposed is to bypass the traditional HDD seek layer overhead by just using the noop scheduler. It's a very simple FIFO-based scheduler. System requests a file, it gets it. No complex queuing up done in the kernel. It lets the extremely fast drive controller do all the work, since it's capable of getting the data where it's needed without stuttering or delays.

However, the deadline scheduler may be as good as noop, as deadline does a certain amount of prioritizing. My understanding is that it's similar to NCQ in this regard, and that using deadline doesn't have any overhead costs. Still doing the research on this.

These two schedulers may be all well and good for the SSDs, but since I'll have two SSDs, a magnetic hard drive, and an optical drive in my box, I can't use the same scheduler for all of 'em. noop would be a poor choice for the HDD, so I may use deadline or stick with the tried-and-true CFQ scheduler.

Fortunately, using different schedulers for different drives is fairly easy:

# echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
# echo noop > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler
# echo cfq > /sys/block/sdc/queue/scheduler

It's just a matter of putting these commands into an initscript to be run at boot.

The last puzzle piece (so far) is 4, partition alignment schemes. This is the most confusing one. The most headache-inducing. The most worrisome one, in that if I screw it up, I could completely hose the performance of the drives, and severely impact the wear and tear on the drive.

The OCZ Vertex is functionally identical to the Super Talent UltraDrive. Same controller and firmware, so Vertex tips will apply to my drive. The OCZ forums have proven rather useful. There's a fair amount of material at the OCZ forums, and even some suggestions by Gentoo users. Unfortunately, some of the threads are rather old, so I'm unsure how much still applies. Given that there have been new hardware revisions, new firmware shipped with the drives, and improvements to the Linux kernel stack (schedulers, libata, etc.).

Ted Ts'o has a pretty good explanation, but it differs from some of the other suggested block sizes. Also, some guides have a radically different approach.

* * *

So, four pieces to the Gentoo installation on an SSD puzzle. Lots of notes so far, and despite four months' research, I feel like I've barely gotten started. I've been thinking and planning to move to an SSD for quite awhile now; it's mostly been a matter of waiting for prices to fall. Now all the components are here, so I'll just have to dive right in and see what I find. Results will, of course, wind up here.

As Techdirt writes:

This has been said before (multiple times) but you don’t rescue your business model by “protecting” against what people want to do. You don’t rescue your business model by wasting resources trying to hold back what people want to do. You rescue your business by providing more value and figuring out a way to monetize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only hastens failure.

I’ve been saying that all along, but the old media don’t get it. If they refuse to evolve, they will go extinct, like dinosaurs.

Since release 1.3.2 Smolt comes with a tab “Distribution” to show distribution-specific information:

(The new Qt-based GUI client was introduced somewhere after Smolt 1.2 by Carlos Gonçalves, see here for details.) The currently quasi-empty tab is shown no matter what distro you run Smolt on. However, on my “gentoo” branch it looks slightly different:

I have also been working on simple extractors for dpkg and rpm to better understand the distribution specific interface that I’m introducing on code level. After all one of the long term goals is to feed Smolt statistics with PackageMapped installation data from across distros, not just Gentoo.
So if you read this and feel like bringing support for another distro (say Arch) to Smolt now is a great time to contact me.

PS: Check my “sping” overlay for a Smolt 1.3.2 ebuild.

We are cleaning up the XFCE ebuilds via a new eclass. The current eclasses do not make maintenance any easier, like they should. Some other things on the TODO list include:

• Remove xfce-4.4 from the tree. 4.6.1 has long since been stable. Caveats: We promised mips that they could have a ~month to keyword 4.6.1. Gentoo Prefix can't easily use 4.6.1 due to the xorg-server dependency.
• Rename plugins to match what upstream calls them. For example, what Gentoo calls xfce-extra/xfce4-cpu-freq, upstream calls xfce4-cpufreq-plugin This is true of all plugins.
• Remove the meta extras package, xfce-base/xfce4-extras.

The last bullet point is where I would like to gain input on how to provide the best user experience for xfce users on Gentoo. We are contemplating on removing the meta package because: it is tricky to add new plugins to it (requires more arch team work via rev bumps). Renaming plugins will require more work because of the meta package. And finally, what is the point of this meta package (some would ask) - outdated, etc.

So some possible options:

1. Remove the meta package completely and let the user emerge what they want. We are leaning towards this one.
2. Provide an USE flag for xfce-base/xfce4 to emerge all these extras, since it is a meta package anyway. This allows arch teams to mask the use flag if they don't want to deal with all the plugins. Not a good option though, in my opinion.
3. Revbump the meta package everytime there is a new plugin added to the tree.
4. Other option that I haven't thought of?

So, what is it? What would provide the best XFCE experience on Gentoo?

Update: as reported by Fai Wong, -O1 is actually fine. Obviously, it must be some flag(s) which is(are) enabled at -O2 but not at -O1 caused this problem. However, it is not a priority ATM. Anyone who is interested in it is welcome to investigate it further.

As I have mentioned earlier, sqlite compiled with -O2 may cause xulrunner to segfault in N32 userland on Loongson. Well, I almost forget it.

So to remove the -O2 from CFLAGS once and for all, I adopted the technique described here.

zhangle@2f env $ pwd
/etc/portage/env
zhangle@2f env $ find
.
./dev-db
./dev-db/sqlite
./O2-removal
zhangle@2f env $ cat O2-removal
pre_pkg_setup() {
      elog "bashrc is removing \"-O2\" from CFLAGS for $PN"
      CFLAGS="${CFLAGS/-O2/}"
}
zhangle@2f env $ ls -l dev-db/sqlite
lrwxrwxrwx 1 zhangle zhangle 13 2009-08-01 16:10 dev-db/sqlite -> ../O2-removal

Developer Robin H. Johnson, who is a trustee board member, infrastructure team lead, spoke with David Abbott.

Robin is the backbone of the Gentoo infrastructure team which includes the forums, bugzilla, and most important, the Gentoo Portage tree.

He describes his first open source project, phpMyadmin, how he became a Gentoo developer, and the layout of the infrastructure.

"Nearly 50 percent of the infrastructure hardware is taken up by web applications, because we have a lot of separation between web applications that have a high security exposure. Admittedly some of the web services are a very big deal for Gentoo, like our Bugzilla service, running on 4 machines sponsored by the Dutch social network, Hyves. Very recently we've gotten new hardware for Forums, sponsored by Gossamer Threads. The next largest slice after that is the machines that provides rsync.gentoo.org service. Only then do we get down to individual machines for purposes. There's some cases where having more hardware as fail-over in case we lose a machine would be nice, but I think the place that'd we would benefit the most presently would be a newer mail server infrastructure, so that we can deploy heavier spam filtering."

Robin H. Johnson Interview

Recently one of our developers decided he would raise hell in one of our irc channels. "For the lulz" he said. What ensued was a rather large number of kicks which ended in a ban. I contacted him and tried to talk to him. He wouldn't agree at first, then stopped answering, and went on in another channel. I spent a good amount of time trying to reason him at around midnight my local time knowing I had an early meeting at the office the day after. He stopped and apologized a few seconds before I hit the button to suspend him.

He didn't have any really bad intentions but he still created a shitstorm. In his mind everybody overreacted but there was one thing that he didn't understand. Him behaving like this made a few people unhappy. Whether they were right or wrong to be unhappy, they were, and they showed it. In return they started filling some of your fellow devs' maiboxes, and irc queries started popping faster than it is humanly possible to answer. In short after a few minutes some of us had their screen blinking like Christmas trees.

So, kids: don't make an ass of yourselves in public, whether on irc or elsewhere. And if you absolutely have to do so don't do it in a #gentoo- channel, and preferably not with your gentoo irc cloak. If you don't do it for yourself do it out of respect for those whose task it is to try and maintain a semblance of peace on irc or on our mailing-lists. And think of all those traces you're leaving behind for the next time you'll look for a job. Think also of the image you're projecting for the whole Gentoo community. You're a developer, so if you care show yourself and your distro in good light.

And remember that we're a large project with all kinds of different cultures. Something that may seem totally insignificant and/or funny to you may (and will probably) be seen as abrasive by others. We have to operate on a lowest common denominator. That's unfortunate but there's no way around it.

Thanks for your attention.

I've just punted all the old ALSA ebuilds from the tree.  Tah tah.  I thought they needed to be in there for old kernel compatiblity, but it turns out I was wrong.  Ah well.  The less versions to worry about, the better (from a support point-of-view).

We're going to look at getting 1.0.20 stable here pretty quickly, and then remove *all* the old versions after that.

Oh, and if you are interested in helping out with ALSA bugs, that'd be nicely appreciated as well.

One other note -- I added media-sound/alsa-driver, which is the external modules for the ALSA drivers, into package.mask.  The concept is simply to add a hurdle to users wanting to use it, and to make it clear it won't be landing in stable-ville anytime soon.  However, there are no plans to remove it from the tree, either.  I know some people like to use it, so there ya go.

I'm getting to the point with my little media library where I'm running out of space, and I need to find a way to expand my diskspace a bit.  I'd like to find a next-generation solution, one that I can use as I expand from 1.5 terabytes to (eventually) 12 or so.  That's what I project the final size I'll need is.  Right now, I only need about 4.

There are a couple of ways to do this, obviously, but I'm not sure what the best way to approach it is, or the one that is the least cost-prohibitive.  Generally speaking, all I need is some *way* that I can access multiple harddrives (of various sizes, since I have old ones I can use) through one mountpoint, either using LVM or RAID (I'm not that picky).

Now I could spend lots of $$$ on a Drobos or something similar, where I just cram them into one box and let it fly, but I don't need that level of sophistication.  The idea I'm currently toying with, is just getting a bunch of eSATA HDD enclosures, and hooking those up to my fileserver.  My server currently has six internal SATA ports on it, along with one eSATA port on the back, giving me seven drives I could plug in (either internally or externally).  So that's not a problem.  I'm curious, though, how realistic getting a bunch of external enclosures is gonna be.  Typically, the drives I use (Western Digital) don't run that hot, so cooling doesn't seem like a big problem.  I already have one external SATA drive that I'm using, and it silently runs and sits on my desk without a problem.

That's not my only option though.  I'm thinking of switching out the server completely for something less beefy and much more quiet.  In fact, that's my biggest annoyance right now, is that it's loud.  I'm not sure what it is, and I really should pinpoint the source before I rip everything out and buy lots of hardware.  I'm fairly certain though, that it's just the CPU fan first and the power supply second.

If I did replace the server's hardware, then I have a few options there -- I could go with a Mini ITX motherboard that doesn't need a PSU with a fan (just get a Morex power connector that uses 120W max or something).  Since I'd be hooking up everything externally anyway, they wouldn't draw on the PSU for power, so the chipset could be really low wattage.  I'm not sure if I want to spend money on that, though.

Ideally, I'd have a place in my apartment where I could stick a server that can be as loud and as noisy as it wants, and I wouldn't have to hear it.  Sadly, that's not the case, and I doubt I'll be moving anytime soon.  So, noise pollution is a factor in this as well.

Anyway, I'm still trying to think of what the best way to go is.  There's a few directions this could take.

So i bumped dev-libs/cloog-ppl to a newer version just now. cloog-ppl (and it's buddy PPL) are new dependencies of the new Graphite framework in GCC 4.4 (still masked). They're optional dependencies, and on a whim I wanted to see if configure would fail if they were missing or just detect it and continue on. So I did this:

emerge -C cloog-ppl

Oops.

configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables

Every Gentoo user has seen this at some point. It's a very general error that can range in meaning from "you mispelled a CFLAG" to "wow you're screwed". I knew what the error here would be without looking, but for those following along at home:

/usr/libexec/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/cc1: error while loading shared libraries:
libcloog.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

(usually you would find this in the config.log of the package being compiled)

Ok, so I just hosed the compiler. Dumb mistake. Now, here's how we fix it.

halo ~ # gcc-config -l
 [1] x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-4.3.3
 [2] x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-4.4.1 *
 [3] x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-4.4.2-pre9999
 [4] x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-4.5.0-pre9999

Usually I would have three or four more versions here (3.4, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2) but this is a relatively new install. As luck would have it though, I have exactly one version that will work here. 4.3.3 doesn't have graphite support and therefore won't be linked against libcloog.

So, gcc-config 1, etc. emerge -av1 cloog-ppl.

libtool: link: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc -Wall -fomit-frame-pointer -O2 -g -march=core2 
-msse4.1 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -Wl,--hash-style=gnu -o .libs/cloog cloog.o -Wl,--as-needed 
./.libs/libcloog.so -L/usr/lib64 /usr/lib64/libppl_c.so /usr/lib64/libppl.so /usr/lib64
/libgmpxx.so /usr/lib64/libgmp.so
/usr/lib64/libppl_c.so: undefined reference to `std::ctype::_M_widen_init() const@GLIBCXX_3.4.11'

Or not. Yay, symbol versioning. Another thing every Gentoo user has run into when switching GCC versions. To make a long story short, libppl_c.so (PPL) is looking for a versioned symbol in libstdc++.so.6 from GCC 4.4. When we switched to GCC 4.3, that symbol version (here GLIBCXX_3.4.11) no longer exists. Solution? Rebuild PPL. But, this results in a similar error:

libtool: link: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-g++ -frounding-math -O2 -g -march=core2 -msse4.1 -fomit-
frame-pointer -pipe -W -Wall -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,--hash-style=gnu -o .libs/ppl-config BUGS.o 
COPYING.o CREDITS.o ppl-config.o  ./.libs/libppl.so -L/usr/lib64 /usr/lib64/libgmpxx.so 
/usr/lib64/libgmp.so
/usr/lib64/libgmpxx.so: undefined reference to `std::ctype::_M_widen_init() const@GLIBCXX_3.4.11'

As you can see, downgrading GCC versions with gcc-config breaks the linking of a lot of C++ libraries. (this is why I hate testing unstable GCC versions on KDE).

So just keep going down the line, attempting to rebuild whatever breaks next, until you actually manage to fix something. If you don't know what package a library belongs to, use one of the many utilities that may be installed on your system, like `equery b` or `qfile`, that maps a filename to package. In this particular case, dev-libs/gmp was the last package needing to be rebuilt. Next, go back up the chain - rebuild ppl, and finally cloog-ppl should build successfully. Switch back to your original GCC version, do a little dance, and go about your day.

I know I haven’t written anything here for a while but there was a reason. I finally managed to finished my thesis and done with my university studies.  Now, I am officially qualified to wreck up your systems…

Damn, I am not a student anymore .

Apart from that, I had to pack everything (~40 boxes omg ) and move out by the end of July. I am moving back to my beautiful island which I miss so much. But not for too long. In three weeks I am supposed to join the army as a radio engineer ( or something ) until  May 2010. Ok this sucks big time.

Anyway. I wont be around much but I am sure that our new (qt herd) recruits will do a great job during my absence.

When pretesting started I already wrote about the new features of GNU Emacs 23...and now it is there. About two years after the release of 22 this major step in Emacs land has been done and Gentoo provides the version as of today. Have fun, test it and report bugs (not too much, please).

I just found that, it is actually very easy to trigger the problem that the -mfix-ls2f-kernel as option could fix. Like just emerging glibc could hang the system. So if you are using linux-loongson/2.6.30/stable branch from this git tree http://dev.lemote.com/git?p=rt4ls.git;a=summary, you maybe want to line 129 of arch/mips/Makefile:

$(call cc-option,-march=loongson2f,-march=r4600) $(call cc-optoin,-mtune=loongson2f)

to

$(call cc-option,-march=loongson2f,-march=r4600) $(call as-option,-Wa$(comma)-mfix-ls2f-kernel,)

Actually, $(call cc-optoin,-mtune=loongson2f) here is not required.

BTW, glibc-2.10.1 is ready in my overlay. This version could solve the gdb issue:

Error while reading shared library symbols:
find_new_threads_callback: cannot get thread info: generic error
find_new_threads_callback: cannot get thread info: generic error

This happened previously when debugging multithread applications.

So for our Vancouver heatwave (I noted 39C away from the water today, in the shade!), it's finally claimed some of my computer hardware. Most annoying, the battery backup unit (BBU) in the newer fileserver, and 1.5 of the disks of the RAID1 array in the old server...

My website and personal email will be offline for a day or two while I ensure my backups are up to date, and redeploy to the newer fileserver (after I buy a new BBU tomorrow).

In this Screencast, I give an overview of Audacity and recordMyDesktop, the tools I use to record my Podcasts and Screencasts. If you have any questions, you can reach me at david at linuxcrazy dot com, or on freenode irc, channel #linuxcrazy.

Links
Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

recordMyDesktop
http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/about.php
http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/manpage.php

PiTiVi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiTiVi
http://www.pitivi.org/wiki/Overview

Interview with Edward Hervey about the PiTiVI video editor
http://gnomedesktop.org/node/4082

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download