I'm still trying to decide where I wanna go with my media browser/frontend solution -- if I'm going to write my own or keep hacking on MythVideo. I only have one really nagging issue left now, and that is that the file structure presented is static once you enter the "Watch Videos" menu. I'd like it to be dynamic (that is, upon entering a new folder, check the contents again) so that I can add stuff like symlinks to series that I'm currently watching, or whatever. Doing that is pretty tricky.

I spent a few hours last night digging through the code, trying to find out exactly how the code is operating and what it's doing. What I learned was that, well Myth was doing exactly what I thought it was -- it builds a file list upon first entering, and then it doesn't examine it at all until you re-enter the video browser through the main myth menu. (I wish I had a decent screenshot about now, it's a bit confusing if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

There's a couple of problems with this approach, in my mind. First of all, the time it takes to actually load the mythvideo plugin grows in relation to how much media you have that it needs to parse. That is, it iterates over *every* single file that is in your media storage, and adds it to one variable. It's essentially like running find on your filesystem, saving it into one variable, and then when browsing, just using that snapshot that you took.

The simpler way, in my opinion, would be to just refresh the directory structure and metadata for the directory you are in. While I was poking at it, one thing I tried was to get the directory scan to not go more than one level deep. That reduced the startup time from about 8 seconds to less than one. Nice.

Ideally, I'd like to change it so it just updates the directory scan as it enters a new one, progressively growing the variable as you jump around the directory tree, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in the code (and if someone wants to help, that'd be awesome). MythVideo calls fetchVideos() only when first entering, and not anytime after that. The real problem is that it in turn calls about eight other levels of functions that eventually get to scanning the directory tree. I could probably hack it together to pass the current directory I'm in and update the directory scan from there, but again, I'm so limited in my C++ skills, at this point it's just code and guess. So, I can find and explain the problem, but not fix it myself.

Fortunately, it's a minor wish list item of mine, and so it's not a show stopper. I can live with not being able to do it, and it's probably just a matter of me learning how to code a bit more that I could figure it out. On the plus side, I'm learning more about the internals of the code, and each time I go in there, I find a few small inefficiencies that I can cleanup myself, which is fun. Making progress, I suppose.

Just a short comparison after the initial report: The shipped Debian takes 60 seconds till the Gnome desktop appears, while the LXDE of my Gentoo installation needs 40 seconds. Of course less features (or cruft) is available with the latter, so no real benchmark. Also Ubuntu has formed a team to do a port to the Loongson CPU.

The kernel provided by Lemote is 2.6.31-rc5 and I used the attached configuration to succcessfully built and run the kernel on my Loongson 2F-based Yeeloong netbook.

CONFIG_MIPS=y
CONFIG_MACH_LOONGSON=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SPARSEMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_LEMOTE_YEELOONG2F=y
CONFIG_CS5536=y
CONFIG_SYS_HAS_MACH_PROM_INIT_CMDLINE=y
CONFIG_CS5536_MFGPT=y
CONFIG_UCA_SIZE=0x400000
CONFIG_RWSEM_GENERIC_SPINLOCK=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_OPROFILE=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_FIND_NEXT_BIT=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_HWEIGHT=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CALIBRATE_DELAY=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_TIME=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CMOS_UPDATE=y
CONFIG_SCHED_OMIT_FRAME_POINTER=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_HARDIRQS_NO__DO_IRQ=y
CONFIG_DMA_NONCOHERENT=y
CONFIG_DMA_NEED_PCI_MAP_STATE=y
CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_SYS_HAS_EARLY_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_HOTPLUG_CPU=y
CONFIG_I8259=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_ISA_DMA=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_ISA_DMA_SUPPORT_BROKEN=y
CONFIG_CPU_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
CONFIG_IRQ_CPU=y
CONFIG_BOOT_ELF32=y
CONFIG_MIPS_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=5
CONFIG_CPU_LOONGSON2F=y
CONFIG_CPU_LOONGSON2=y
CONFIG_SYS_HAS_CPU_LOONGSON2F=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_32BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_64BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_CPU_SUPPORTS_32BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_CPU_SUPPORTS_64BIT_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_64BIT=y
CONFIG_PAGE_SIZE_16KB=y
CONFIG_BOARD_SCACHE=y
CONFIG_MIPS_MT_DISABLED=y
CONFIG_CPU_HAS_WB=y
CONFIG_CPU_HAS_SYNC=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_HARDIRQS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_IRQ_PROBE=y
CONFIG_CPU_SUPPORTS_HIGHMEM=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_HIGHMEM=y
CONFIG_ARCH_FLATMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_ARCH_POPULATES_NODE_MAP=y
CONFIG_SELECT_MEMORY_MODEL=y
CONFIG_FLATMEM_MANUAL=y
CONFIG_FLATMEM=y
CONFIG_FLAT_NODE_MEM_MAP=y
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_STATIC=y
CONFIG_PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED=y
CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS=4
CONFIG_PHYS_ADDR_T_64BIT=y
CONFIG_ZONE_DMA_FLAG=0
CONFIG_VIRT_TO_BUS=y
CONFIG_HAVE_MLOCK=y
CONFIG_HAVE_MLOCKED_PAGE_BIT=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_MMAP_MIN_ADDR=4096
CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y
CONFIG_NO_HZ=y
CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS_BUILD=y
CONFIG_HZ_1024=y
CONFIG_SYS_SUPPORTS_ARBIT_HZ=y
CONFIG_HZ=1024
CONFIG_PREEMPT=y
CONFIG_SECCOMP=y
CONFIG_LOCKDEP_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_STACKTRACE_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_DEFCONFIG_LIST="/lib/modules/$UNAME_RELEASE/.config"
CONFIG_CONSTRUCTORS=y
CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL=y
CONFIG_BROKEN_ON_SMP=y
CONFIG_LOCK_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_INIT_ENV_ARG_LIMIT=32
CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="-fauli"
CONFIG_HAVE_KERNEL_GZIP=y
CONFIG_HAVE_KERNEL_BZIP2=y
CONFIG_HAVE_KERNEL_LZMA=y
CONFIG_KERNEL_LZMA=y
CONFIG_SWAP=y
CONFIG_SYSVIPC=y
CONFIG_SYSVIPC_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_POSIX_MQUEUE=y
CONFIG_POSIX_MQUEUE_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_BSD_PROCESS_ACCT=y
CONFIG_BSD_PROCESS_ACCT_V3=y
CONFIG_TREE_RCU=y
CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT=64
CONFIG_IKCONFIG=y
CONFIG_IKCONFIG_PROC=y
CONFIG_LOG_BUF_SHIFT=15
CONFIG_GROUP_SCHED=y
CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED=y
CONFIG_RT_GROUP_SCHED=y
CONFIG_USER_SCHED=y
CONFIG_CGROUPS=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_DEBUG=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_NS=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_FREEZER=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_DEVICE=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_CPUACCT=y
CONFIG_RESOURCE_COUNTERS=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR=y
CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP=y
CONFIG_MM_OWNER=y
CONFIG_RELAY=y
CONFIG_NAMESPACES=y
CONFIG_UTS_NS=y
CONFIG_IPC_NS=y
CONFIG_USER_NS=y
CONFIG_PID_NS=y
CONFIG_NET_NS=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y
CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE=""
CONFIG_RD_GZIP=y
CONFIG_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_ANON_INODES=y
CONFIG_EMBEDDED=y
CONFIG_SYSCTL_SYSCALL=y
CONFIG_KALLSYMS=y
CONFIG_HOTPLUG=y
CONFIG_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_BUG=y
CONFIG_ELF_CORE=y
CONFIG_PCSPKR_PLATFORM=y
CONFIG_BASE_FULL=y
CONFIG_FUTEX=y
CONFIG_EPOLL=y
CONFIG_SIGNALFD=y
CONFIG_TIMERFD=y
CONFIG_EVENTFD=y
CONFIG_SHMEM=y
CONFIG_AIO=y
CONFIG_VM_EVENT_COUNTERS=y
CONFIG_PCI_QUIRKS=y
CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK=y
CONFIG_SLUB=y
CONFIG_HAVE_OPROFILE=y
CONFIG_HAVE_SYSCALL_WRAPPERS=y
CONFIG_RT_MUTEXES=y
CONFIG_BASE_SMALL=0
CONFIG_MODULES=y
CONFIG_MODULE_FORCE_LOAD=y
CONFIG_MODULE_UNLOAD=y
CONFIG_MODULE_FORCE_UNLOAD=y
CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y
CONFIG_BLOCK=y
CONFIG_BLOCK_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_NOOP=y
CONFIG_IOSCHED_CFQ=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_CFQ=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_IOSCHED="cfq"
CONFIG_FREEZER=y
CONFIG_HW_HAS_PCI=y
CONFIG_PCI=y
CONFIG_PCI_DOMAINS=y
CONFIG_ISA=y
CONFIG_MMU=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_ELF=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC=y
CONFIG_MIPS32_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_SYSVIPC_COMPAT=y
CONFIG_MIPS32_O32=y
CONFIG_MIPS32_N32=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_ELF32=y
CONFIG_ARCH_HIBERNATION_POSSIBLE=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SUSPEND_POSSIBLE=y
CONFIG_PM=y
CONFIG_PM_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_SUSPEND=y
CONFIG_SUSPEND_FREEZER=y
CONFIG_HIBERNATION_NVS=y
CONFIG_HIBERNATION=y
CONFIG_PM_STD_PARTITION="/dev/sda2"
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_TABLE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_ONDEMAND=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_POWERSAVE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND=y
CONFIG_LOONGSON2F_CPU_FREQ=y
CONFIG_NET=y
CONFIG_PACKET=y
CONFIG_PACKET_MMAP=y
CONFIG_UNIX=y
CONFIG_XFRM=y
CONFIG_XFRM_USER=y
CONFIG_XFRM_IPCOMP=y
CONFIG_NET_KEY=y
CONFIG_INET=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTICAST=y
CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER=y
CONFIG_ASK_IP_FIB_HASH=y
CONFIG_IP_FIB_HASH=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTIPLE_TABLES=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_INET_AH=y
CONFIG_INET_ESP=y
CONFIG_INET_IPCOMP=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_TUNNEL=y
CONFIG_INET_TUNNEL=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_MODE_TRANSPORT=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_MODE_TUNNEL=y
CONFIG_INET_XFRM_MODE_BEET=y
CONFIG_INET_LRO=y
CONFIG_INET_DIAG=y
CONFIG_INET_TCP_DIAG=y
CONFIG_TCP_CONG_CUBIC=y
CONFIG_DEFAULT_TCP_CONG="cubic"
CONFIG_FIB_RULES=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS=y
CONFIG_CFG80211=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS_OLD_REGULATORY=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT=y
CONFIG_WIRELESS_EXT_SYSFS=y
CONFIG_LIB80211=y
CONFIG_MAC80211=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_DEFAULT_PS=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_DEFAULT_PS_VALUE=1
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_PID=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_MINSTREL=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_DEFAULT_PID=y
CONFIG_MAC80211_RC_DEFAULT="pid"
CONFIG_MAC80211_LEDS=y
CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH="/sbin/hotplug"
CONFIG_STANDALONE=y
CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD=y
CONFIG_FW_LOADER=m
CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=y
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE=""
CONFIG_CONNECTOR=y
CONFIG_PROC_EVENTS=y
CONFIG_PNP=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LOOP=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_CRYPTOLOOP=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_COUNT=16
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_SIZE=8192
CONFIG_EEPROM_93CX6=y
CONFIG_HAVE_IDE=y
CONFIG_SCSI=y
CONFIG_SCSI_DMA=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=y
CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG=y
CONFIG_SCSI_WAIT_SCAN=m
CONFIG_ATA=y
CONFIG_ATA_SFF=y
CONFIG_PATA_AMD=y
CONFIG_NETDEVICES=y
CONFIG_NET_ETHERNET=y
CONFIG_MII=y
CONFIG_NET_PCI=y
CONFIG_8139TOO=y
CONFIG_8139TOO_PIO=y
CONFIG_8139TOO_TUNE_TWISTER=y
CONFIG_WLAN_80211=y
CONFIG_RTL8187B=y
CONFIG_INPUT=y
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV=y
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_SCREEN_X=1024
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_SCREEN_Y=768
CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV=y
CONFIG_INPUT_KEYBOARD=y
CONFIG_KEYBOARD_ATKBD=y
CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSE=y
CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2=y
CONFIG_SERIO=y
CONFIG_SERIO_I8042=y
CONFIG_SERIO_LIBPS2=y
CONFIG_VT=y
CONFIG_CONSOLE_TRANSLATIONS=y
CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_HW_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_DEVKMEM=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_NONSTANDARD=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_PCI=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_PNP=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_NR_UARTS=16
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_RUNTIME_UARTS=4
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_EXTENDED=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_MANY_PORTS=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_FOURPORT=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_ACCENT=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_BOCA=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_EXAR_ST16C554=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_HUB6=m
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_SHARE_IRQ=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_RSA=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CORE=y
CONFIG_SERIAL_CORE_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS=y
CONFIG_LEGACY_PTY_COUNT=16
CONFIG_HW_RANDOM=y
CONFIG_RTC=y
CONFIG_RAW_DRIVER=m
CONFIG_MAX_RAW_DEVS=256
CONFIG_DEVPORT=y
CONFIG_I2C=y
CONFIG_I2C_BOARDINFO=y
CONFIG_I2C_CHARDEV=y
CONFIG_I2C_HELPER_AUTO=y
CONFIG_HWMON=y
CONFIG_SENSORS_PCF8591=y
CONFIG_THERMAL=y
CONFIG_THERMAL_HWMON=y
CONFIG_SSB_POSSIBLE=y
CONFIG_FB=y
CONFIG_FIRMWARE_EDID=y
CONFIG_FB_CFB_FILLRECT=y
CONFIG_FB_CFB_COPYAREA=y
CONFIG_FB_CFB_IMAGEBLIT=y
CONFIG_FB_MODE_HELPERS=y
CONFIG_FB_SM7XX=y
CONFIG_FB_SM7XX_ACCEL=y
CONFIG_FB_SM7XX_DUALHEAD=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_LCD_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_GENERIC=y
CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE_ROTATION=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x8=y
CONFIG_FONT_8x16=y
CONFIG_LOGO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_CLUT224=y
CONFIG_SOUND=y
CONFIG_SND=y
CONFIG_SND_TIMER=y
CONFIG_SND_PCM=y
CONFIG_SND_HRTIMER=y
CONFIG_SND_VERBOSE_PROCFS=y
CONFIG_SND_VMASTER=y
CONFIG_SND_AC97_CODEC=y
CONFIG_SND_DRIVERS=y
CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE=y
CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE_DEFAULT=10
CONFIG_SND_PCI=y
CONFIG_SND_CS5535AUDIO=y
CONFIG_AC97_BUS=y
CONFIG_HID_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_HID=y
CONFIG_USB_HID=y
CONFIG_USB_HIDDEV=y
CONFIG_USB_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_HCD=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_OHCI=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_EHCI=y
CONFIG_USB=y
CONFIG_USB_ANNOUNCE_NEW_DEVICES=y
CONFIG_USB_DEVICEFS=y
CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND=y
CONFIG_USB_EHCI_HCD=y
CONFIG_USB_EHCI_ROOT_HUB_TT=y
CONFIG_USB_OHCI_HCD=m
CONFIG_USB_OHCI_LITTLE_ENDIAN=y
CONFIG_USB_UHCI_HCD=m
CONFIG_USB_STORAGE=y
CONFIG_MMC=m
CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK=m
CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK_BOUNCE=y
CONFIG_NEW_LEDS=y
CONFIG_LEDS_TRIGGERS=y
CONFIG_LOONGSON_PLATFORM_DEVICES=y
CONFIG_EC_KB3310B=y
CONFIG_EXT2_FS=m
CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT3_DEFAULTS_TO_ORDERED=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_SECURITY=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_JBD=y
CONFIG_JBD2=y
CONFIG_FS_MBCACHE=y
CONFIG_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_FILE_LOCKING=y
CONFIG_FSNOTIFY=y
CONFIG_DNOTIFY=y
CONFIG_INOTIFY=y
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y
CONFIG_FAT_FS=m
CONFIG_VFAT_FS=m
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_CODEPAGE=437
CONFIG_FAT_DEFAULT_IOCHARSET="utf8"
CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NTFS_RW=y
CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
CONFIG_PROC_KCORE=y
CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL=y
CONFIG_PROC_PAGE_MONITOR=y
CONFIG_SYSFS=y
CONFIG_TMPFS=y
CONFIG_CONFIGFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NETWORK_FILESYSTEMS=y
CONFIG_CIFS=m
CONFIG_CIFS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_CIFS_POSIX=y
CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION=y
CONFIG_NLS=y
CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT="iso8859-1"
CONFIG_NLS_CODEPAGE_437=y
CONFIG_NLS_CODEPAGE_850=y
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_1=y
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_15=y
CONFIG_NLS_UTF8=y
CONFIG_TRACE_IRQFLAGS_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_FRAME_WARN=1024
CONFIG_TRACING_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_KGDB=y
CONFIG_CMDLINE=""
CONFIG_CRYPTO=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ALGAPI=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ALGAPI2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AEAD=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AEAD2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_BLKCIPHER=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_BLKCIPHER2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HASH=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HASH2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_RNG2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_PCOMP=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_MANAGER=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_MANAGER2=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_WORKQUEUE=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AUTHENC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_CBC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ECB=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_HMAC=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_CRC32C=m
CONFIG_CRYPTO_MD5=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA1=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_ARC4=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_DES=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO_DEFLATE=y
CONFIG_BITREVERSE=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_FIND_LAST_BIT=y
CONFIG_CRC_CCITT=m
CONFIG_CRC16=y
CONFIG_CRC_ITU_T=m
CONFIG_CRC32=y
CONFIG_LIBCRC32C=m
CONFIG_ZLIB_INFLATE=y
CONFIG_ZLIB_DEFLATE=y
CONFIG_DECOMPRESS_GZIP=y
CONFIG_HAS_IOMEM=y
CONFIG_HAS_IOPORT=y
CONFIG_HAS_DMA=y
CONFIG_NLATTR=y

Every one of us dumb workhorses called architecture developers has its own way of scripting all the commands necessary to stabilise/test a package on its architecture, but I would like to describe how I do it, for the curious. The bug list of the architecture (x86 in my case) with all keywording and stabilisation requests is the starting point here.

Normally I install the packages in a chroot and I follow the never-uninstall-a-package policy to catch file collisions, while others keep the system lean to find missing dependencies (they probably use the buildpkg feature of Portage to keep compile times for dependencies down). To put all needed packages in the package.keywords file, I use the Gentoo Arch Testing Tool (app-portage/gatt) which does that automatically. Compile test includes up to three runs: With all USE flags enabled, then all disabled and then finally what make.conf and the profile defines. The last iteration is then tested, either by starting the program and using it for some time (games usually get a longer testing period) or by building packages that depend upon the package to be stabilised. I have a little script that extracts that information from the tinderbox' rindex and determines which package is in stable and needs to be rebuilt. Manual work includes a short glance if USE flags are needed to activate the support for that package. Installing as most depending packages as possible makes sure all reverse dependencies still build, this sometimes leads to other stabilisation requests or bug reports blocking the stabilisation of the initial package.

After everything went successfully I tell Gatt to create a script in the /tmp/ directory which is shared with my main system. From there I call that script which is quite capable and there is an extensive manual for it.

That's how your package hits stable on x86 usually. Big things like KDE or Gnome are handled differently, the script is shorter:

• Install it with the package list provided by the team (normally that's the case)
• Test it
• Keyword all packages and add ChangeLog entries (without commit)
• Run QA checks with repoman over the whole category
• Run commit with --force to disable QA checks to speed up process (it still takes hours for KDE)

My friend the reporter (who still has a job this week...) was visiting today, and we were talking about the newspaper industry, and how reporters everywhere are getting laid off.  In fact, my "home town" newspaper (the Ann Arbor News)  recently folded, fired their reporters, and became some kind of online monstrosity (named after my city with "dot com" on the end; I won't give them Google Juice by listing the name) that does nothing interesting with news, and dumps printed ads (not news or content, mind you, just ads) on my lawn all the time.  They're basically paper spammers... Anyway, we were talking, and it occurred to me that there is probably a fairly large set of out-of-work writers at the moment.  People with lots of skill, and love of writing.  What we need is a business model to take advantage of that to make everyone involved a bit of money.  What model should this be,  I wonder?Here's my idea: iTunes for ebooks, but done right.

See, ebook readers are becoming good right about now, and Kindle has shown that they can even become popular.  And people are buying iPhone and Android apps for a buck or two right and left.  What if we could come up with a way to get these writers to be able to write good content, and get that content to consumers, all at low enough overhead that you could charge a buck?  What I want is two things:  A community and a ratings system.  It works like this.

There's a community for writers, where they can collaborate on, edit, comment on, rate, and so on each other's work.  The community provides appropriate licenses (in collaboration with Creative Commons, probably), and hosting, and forums, and mailing lists, and all the snazzy web 2.0 things that fan-fic sites have.   The community also provides, and here's the important part, a store.

The store would support Kindle, Sony's reader, Plastic Logic's reader, at least one decent iPhone app, at least one decent Android app, at least one decent Pre app, and at least one decent blackberry app.  Probably a Windows Mobile app too, but that's a pain.  Buyers would be able to rate things, tag things, and link things.  Each book would link to the authors community page, so that people could follow and interact with their favorite authors.  Authors, subjects, tags, and so on, should have feeds that you can follow: blog-like, twitter like, and so on.  Integration with other services (such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and so on) would be a plus.Prices should be low; $.50 - $1.

The idea is to encourage people to buy.  Overhead should be low: 5-10%, maybe.  Some works could (and probably would) be given away, as teasers or other incentives.  There should be no DRM; it wouldn't help, and isn't really necessary.The point of the store/community should be convenience: get things for your device easily and cheaply, support people providing your content, and get good content our the deal.

The point of this whole thing is to make an opportunity out of the failure of the newspaper industry: we have a surplus of talented, professional, skilled writers, who need money.  We also have the beginnings of devices that make reading ebooks a good experience.  Let's put them together, and allow the fans to help pay for the works of the writers.

So I recently have been trying out the various different terminal based emails clients to see if any of them were suitable to my needs. Sadly I have to report that I have yet to find one that does everything I need of it.

The first client I tried was alpine. I have to say setting up the program and using it was really easy. Adding accounts was a snap and it was decently performing. Sorting into threads was a bit slow but I suspect that was gmails fault. However, alpine falls short in showing me if I have new emails in folders other than the main Inbox or the folder I have open. I didn’t find a quick at a glance type view listing all the folders and an unread count next to them. Bummer, I really need this. I can’t simply open every folder to check if there’s new mail as some of them are very large and take a long time to open. Alpine gets brownie points for being able to use vim as an editor by default, but looks like I need to keep looking.

The next client I tried was cone. Cone seemed very familiar to alpine and was slightly easier to set up and get going, but lacked as many configuration options that alpine had. I also have to say the colorscheme it chose on my urxvt terminal wasn’t exactly pleasing to the eye, but bearable. I was extremely pleased that cone’s folder list did list unread message counts and did almost everything I asked of it. I could even use vim in the place of leaf if I wanted. The wall I hit, however, is deal breaking. It’s not even particularly cone’s fault but from google’s refusal to follow IMAP standards. As such, I cannot mark emails as read when using cone on my gmail IMAP account. Shame, this is all that I found on the net about it. I figured if I could just get cone to fire off \Send when it should have been marked read by gmail anyway would work but I just can’t quite grasp the internals of cone. Sigh. I tried to hack cone’s sourcecode to implement sending UID STORE +FLAGS \Seen but couldn’t get it working. The functions weren’t documented and my knowledge of C was lacking so I was just clobbering things together. I gave up after it would open a message and simply segfault.

Next I attempted to try mutt. Mutt seems overly complicated for my needs and I don’t think it would play very nice with over 5 IMAP accounts. It’s configuration is a nightmare and I gave up after barely just getting one account functioning.

So for now I’m still using Claws-Mail which is the best graphical client I’ve tried so far. There are times when I don’t have access to a graphical display , however, and wanted a nice email client in a terminal which is why I started this search. Would also be handy as I could ssh in from anywhere and read email with a terminal email client.

Now that I’ve wasted half a day stabbing email clients I suppose I should start reading my unread email :/

Before the netbook-boom called 'mini notebook', Lemote now promotes it as netbook (what it really is). The specialty of that little thing is the hardware: Not an Intel Atom or some AMD CPU, but a 900Mhz Mips chip. Honestly, after my disaster with something ARM-based (NSLU2, it still is bricked and will never be revived I think), I wanted something more end-user friendly and the Lemote is just that. Equipped with a full-fledged desktop installation (the Debian mipsel variant) it allows installing Gentoo with few problems. Chrooting and installing the stage tarball from Zhang Le gets you off quite fast. The provided kernel did not boot, but Le gave me a newer one, which worked just fine after creating some missing device files (console, tty* and pty*, see man mknod). Meanwhile I have compiled my own kernel and the system just runs with LXDE...so finally a possibility to have the third Gtk-based destop installed. Gnome on sol (the big iron desktop), Xfce on the main lappy (called terra) and LXDE now on mars. Performance is good, for surfing and mailing it is more than sufficient, compile times are ok (even GNU Emacs runs), but the battery is way too small (1.5 hours only, but a peak of 14W consumption, while having 12W during normal surf sessions).

The Loongson processor seems to me as the future of the Gentoo Mips port. Supporting the old SGI machines is nice but they will eventually die out, while Lemote actively works on new machines and supports Linux as its main platform (they don't have any other choice apart from the BSDs anyway). Ordering is really simple: Either use Lemote directly (and handle all customs yourself), use KD85 (what I did, really pleasing experience, shipped from Belgium) or Tekmote from the Netherlands.

Zhang Le (r0bertz) and Stuart Longland (redhatter) wrote enough about the Loongson processor and the Gentoo support in various entries on their blogs, so I won't go into more details.

Gentoo-quebec is a project which aims to meet people around gentoo stuffs.
At the origin it was created on 1st December 2007 per 5 guys

-Laurent Duchesne
-Sylvain Alain
-Patrick Blanchard
-Éric Langlois
-Mathieu Bouchard

Providing great documentations as PDF format (generated using LaTeX ) and excellents wiki howtos pages, this is the right place to share and learn experiences.

There is also an useful and powerful forum for our community, to get feedbacks and ask all your questions, don't worry admins didn't forget an english section .

Actually I help them when I've time enough, my areas of responsability are mostly fix or write articles in the wiki, and share my experiences (and learn too) on the forum.

Gentoo-quebec always search great users with good gentoo skills, or developer who want to share their knowledges (like zmedico with portage, thanks to him).

so because you finished to read this entry don't wait and join gentoo-quebec !

Over the past weekend, I was at Sky Knights skydiving drop zone near Milwaukee, WI. The main event was the canopy relative work (CRW) state record attempts. I had only participated in approximately 25 CRW jumps before this, but I was able to add another 13 jumps this weekend. The previous state record for CRW in Wisconsin was 14 and this year we completed a 25 way diamond on our second attempt to set the new record. I was able to jump with eight CRW world record holders which was awesome and really helped me improve.

25way CRW formation

I am in the third row from the bottom on the left side. (Photo Credit goes to: Eric Bernetzke)

Well… after much building by one of the older Lemote systems, I finally have a Gentoo desktop with KDE 4.3.0 on the Lemote Yeeloong.

I’m still working on the rest of the KDE suite… and will have to track down the necessary bits and pieces for battery monitoring and other goodies… but it seems everything is working. It also is slightly more responsive on Gentoo than Debian (which I still have in a chroot).

This post is being written in Konqueror 4.3.0 on the said installation… it passes the Acid 2 test, but has a few stability glitches here and there… so far both the Acid 3 test, and Google Groups crashes it. I’ll sort this out later.

In short, this does mean I’ll be coaxing my O2 into making the same journey and making the necessary tree modifications in order to allow KDE 4.3 on Gentoo/MIPS.

I always thought that writting documentation is much more difficult than coding. This is because, writting documenation and guides, is kinda boring(?), requires a lot of our free time and it is not as fun as coding. All of these arguments IMHO are true but is documentation really needed?

During my six month Gentoo journey I faced a common problem: “I want to write a python/gnome/qt ebuild. How on earth am I suppose to do it??”

Looking through Gentoo docs I ‘ve found some guides about writting games and python ebuilds. Maybe there are more, I haven’t checked. Those guides are quite handy for anybody who wants to write a quick ebuild without making serious mistakes.

Eclasses usage is another tricky thing. Based on my experiense, I believe that the most difficult part is to understand how they work and when they should be used on an ebuild. E.g., a Qt4 ebuild doesn’t always require to inherit qt4 eclass because it might wants cmake functions to build and install. In this case, despite the fact that it is a pure Qt4 package, you need to inherit the cmake-utils eclass. That was a simple example but I believe you got the point

This blog post is a kind request to all fellow developers,  to make some time and write proper ebuild guides ( and keep them updated based according to eclasses’ latest changes ) for the sake of developers and users. People tend to believe that ebuild writting is quite hard because of all the e-* functions ( wrappers ) and ebuild  phases. Prove them wrong

ps: A Qt4 ebuild guide, can be found here

Mental note to self:

 http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

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).

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!

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