That's not the first post about elog, previously Gilles (eva) posted an excellent entry about that (he was a slightly angry probably ). All these entries are published in order to warn users and they have its importance...So based on that fact it would be really nice if users start reading them

Last week, I did read at least 4 bugs about a problem due the newer version of shared-mime-info (which includes a new database format)... If you as users would read your elogs, guess what? Yes you would find the solution in elog messages.

Important...why ?

When a developer has a important message to deliver to a set of users for a given package, usually he uses elog (elog is logged => no excuses..).
Consider the previous example with shared-mime-info, you will have a lot of problems when you try to open some files (typically gnome/kde startup) which would have not happened if you have a look at your logs.

awesome... but how I can read them ?

That's seriously simple :

1. If you're a geek who loves GTK+ based applications (like me ) have a look at elogviewer
2. Use eread (c.f: man eread)

But for our sanity and peace in our souls "READ THEM" before you post a bug .
That will help us a lot, by implicitly reducing the number of useless bugs, and in this way, we will not have to repeat things 50 times.

have fun with gentoo

edit: many thanks to scarab for typos & grammar

Again today I was hit by Stunnel's excessive logging behaviour, causing my log files to grow rapidly with messages like:

stunnel: warning: can't get client address: Bad file descriptor


Which is caused by my Wifi going offline, I fail to see why Stunnel should log hundreds of lines each second if the network is unavailable....

In my five minute search I couldn't really see how I could get Stunnel to change logging behaviour, without disable logging alltogether.

However I finally figured out how to suppress repeat messages with Syslog-ng, like Metalog did back in the old days when I used that. Stunnel from 2.1.1 and up has a suppress(X) option that is not documented very good. With the suppress option Syslog-ng will apparently suppress repeat messages in X second intervals. You can use it simply like this:

destination messages { file("/var/log/messages" suppress(30)); };


So with a bit of luck I should not be hit by Stunnel logging again.

Having been a crazy ‘zen-sources’ user,  I really miss those kernel patches nowadays. So I took up the bug 288512 and zen-sources are again available for all Gentoo users[1]
I haven’t committed them yet on portage tree because I want to ensure that they are safe enough for everyday usage. So until then, you can get them via a new overlay hosted on github

• git clone git://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources.git

or via layman

• layman -a zen-sources

Special thanks to Brandon Berhent for providing the initial Gentoo ebuilds, and for developing the zen-sources

Thanks Brandon

Have fun with your brand new kernel sources[2]

[1] http://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources

[2] http://www.zen-kernel.org

I just got finished watching The Voyage Home on Blu-Ray.  It was nice.  I haven't seen that movie in too long, that I can remember.  I think my interest is fading though.  I stopped the movie at least four times that I can recall to go and do something else.  That's actually pretty common for me, to leave a movie and come back later (which is why I loathe Blu-Ray's lack of universal resume play), but for a movie I like so much, it's a little odd.  Comparatively, I think I watched all of Star Trek III through non-stop.  Oh, well.

The movie was good.  I wasn't really paying attention the video this time though.  It was nicer, though, than the DVD.  One thing I managed to notice this time around is that while they did a good transfer, they didn't bother cleaning up the material at all.  That is, the age of the special effects really shine through when it is shown in such clarity (and in fact, I can remember noticing some of them when I watched it in the theater as a kid ... that's one thing I'm proud of, I got to see all the Star Trek movies since IV on the big screen when they were originally released).  They could have cleaned it up a bit, but didn't bother.  Again, I'm gonna gamble and say that they will probably have an "improved" release version in a few years or so.

I think I need to give the Star Trek movies a break for a bit.  I'm running out of steam.  Well, that, and I hate watching movies knowing I'm gonna review them later.  Sometimes it makes me watch them more critically instead of being able to enjoy it.  That wasn't the case this time though.

Alright, I'm tired, and it shows, so I'll just end it there.  It may be a while til the next Star Trek movie though.  I just checked my queue, and it's Insurrection.  I actually liked that one, too.

I love this movie.  This underdog of a Star Trek film ranks high with me for a lot of reasons.  For one, the whole thing is mostly just kind of a slow-moving backstory, going into character depth quite a lot.  Sure, it would have made a good episode, but it's drawn out, and done well.  It's not as exciting or thrilling as the others, but it stands as a good drama.  I love it.  And watching it on Blu-Ray was great, too.

The colors in this one reminded me a lot of watching The Motion Picture.  I noticed this time, that the most vibrant colors are always present when they are docked somewhere, either at the space station, or the interior shots of the ship.  That's where the variety is and it really shows off how crisp and clean the transfer is.  It just looks great.

This was also one of those films that just kept taunting me, wishing I had a better surround sound system (in fact, I bought a new center speaker this weekend, but I had already watched and sent back the movie.  Doh!).  I really liked the score ... heck, I love everything about this movie.

The Search for Spock can best be described as filler material.  It bridges the story of bringing Spock back to life immediately after he died in Wrath of Khan, and it also is the launching point for the events in The Voyage Home.  In fact, that's the part I like the most -- that Star Trek II through IV are all one big story, told sequentially and chronologically in order.

I should get Star Trek IV either today or tomorrow from Netflix.  I can't wait for that one, either.

My verdict for this one though would definitely be to buy.  It was so good.  The colors were great, and smooth, and vibrant, and it just looked like a well done upgrade.

Yeah, this bug is back again. Turns out the code that fixes the paths in gcc's own .la files was broken on new version installs. This means that everyone in stable that updated to gcc-4.3.4 and anyone in unstable that updated to 4.4.2 in the last week or so should resync their portage tree and rebuild gcc now.

See https://bugs.gentoo.org/283761 for the poop.

We won't be doing a revbump because this wasn't version specific. It just sucks that no one noticed the problem until a new version was released.


edit: if you're still getting errors when building, such as

  /bin/grep: /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/libgomp.la: No such file or directory
  /bin/sed: can't read /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/libgomp.la: No such file or directory
  libtool: link: `/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/libgomp.la' is not a valid libtool archive

where "4.4.1" is the previous version of gcc you upgraded from, run

  # fix_libtool_files.sh <old gcc version>

The last news I wrote about the Ebuild mode for both GNU Emacs and XEmacs is some days old and covered version 1.10. Meanwhile we added some functionality that will greatly improve your user experience. All detailed changes are to be found in the shipped ChangeLog file, but I want to give a rough overview about the most important features and the main contributor.

• faster and more elegant code (ulm)
• a manual in Info format (fauli), see C-h i under section Gentoo or Emacs, needs fine-tuning, patches welcome
• support for GLEP 42 news items (ulm)
• add skeleton support for ebuilds/news items from scratch (ulm)
• keep eselect mode in sync with eselect features (ulm)
• keep keywords in sync with eclasses and adding new ones, like mono and kde4 (fauli)
• reinstate compatability with GNU Emacs 21 (ulm)
• support for eblit files (ulm)

Now I want to move the spotlight onto the skeleton modes: Pressing C-c C-n in an empty file with ebuild extension, or whose file name matches the GLEP 42 requirements for a news file, will guide you through the creation of a new ebuild. You are asked for the needed items and with the tab key you can often choose from a list with sane entries. Especially news item creation gets easier as this is a seldom task for developers and thus error-prone while being a good measure to communicate important changes to users.

Ok guys, buckle up, I've finished reviewing Gnome 2.28 ebuilds except for the gnome-shell stuff. Now Gnome 2.28.1 is expected on wednesday so we can start bumping like crazy to be half-decently on time this time (feels like we'll never be done with the catch-up). There are still quite a few problems with packages as noted in my papers and files under status/ in overlay but upgrade experience should be smoother.

If you are about to test the overlay, please keep us posted on your problems (or your non-problems too) by contacting us on #gentoo-desktop or by filling bug reports. Thanks again to everyone who kept the overlay updated during 2.27 cycle.

edit: fix typo thanks to remi.

I got a chance to see Where The Wild Things Are last night, opening night ... I was really excited about this film.  From watching the trailer I thought, oh man, this looks cool.  A story about a little kid that just doesn't adjust well growing up, and is having a hard time.  That's what I figured anyway.  And the movie followed that theme, a bit, but for the most part ... it was just weird, and I have no idea what just happened.  At the same time, though, I can't get it out of my head at all.  It was very impressionable.

The human part of the story was really incredible and very moving, and they could have made a movie just out of that part, it was so well done and they were on a great roll.  When he sails off to the island and finds the monsters though, things just get weird.  I won't get into details because I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but suffice it to say, it was not what I was expecting in the least.  The general feeling I got the whole time was confusion.  I was sitting there thinking, "what the heck is going on?  and why?"

So, I'm not really sure what to say about it, much less figure out what my opinion is.  I thought it was a bit too .... serious, and a bit disturbing at times.  I dunno.  Weird.  Go see it, though.  Everyone else seemed to enjoy it around me.

Edit: Read Roger Ebert's review.  I generally agree pretty closely with what he writes, and in this case, he puts exactly what I'm trying to say into words much better than I do.

Disclaimer: Please correct me if you know better. Thank you.

Back in KDE 3 I’ve been using WIN+D repeatedly to minimize all open windows (”show desktop”). In KDE 4 the “show desktop” feature seems to have been replaced by “show dashboard” (CTRL+F12), which is quite a different thing and not what I want.

As missing the minimize-all hotkey started really bugging me I invested a little time to find out if this is really the end. Luckily it’s not though I can only present a workaround rather than a “real solution”.

The easiest (only?) way to assign global hotkeys to programs in KDE 4 is adding an item to the KDE menu. So if we had a program/command to trigger a toggle on “show desktop” we were done. I found a tiny Bash script to do that:

#!/bin/sh
target=on
if xprop -root  _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP | fgrep '= 1' ; then
    target=off
fi
wmctrl -k ${target}

(requires xprop and wmctrl, i.e. x11-apps/xprop and x11-misc/wmctrl in Gentoo)

Put that in a file called toggle-show-desktop.sh or so, make it executable and add a KDE menu entry for it:
(The Menu Editor can be found in the contect menue of the “KDE button” also know as Application Launcher Menu.)

My next post/rant on KDE4 will probably be about the removal of vertical gradiants as desktop backgrounds. No, I don’t wat to do that with Gimp. Seems like I’m the only one ever having used it. Anyway…

I've been prodding at the concept of the new network script in OpenRC-0.5, and I'm at a loss to try and see why Roy has decided to toss the old network config system away. The new system doesn't have a lot of capabilities, and most significantly totally loses the ability to restart a single interface without affecting the rest of the system. If it's just for a rewrite, then I'm not too worried, but unless all the functionality is still there, I'm worried we are going to move backwards with it.

At the same time, I don't think many people are aware of how powerful the "old" network configuration mechanism is. The net.examples file is only the start, once you start mixing in the pre/post calls, there's a lot of power. It's capable of some feats that I don't see used even in certain parts of the Gentoo documentation^[1]. I've put together some of my gems of conf.d/net, and if you have some, I'd love to hear them. Leave a comment or email me the scripts, along with a description.

Configurations available

• Easy to maintain HE.net (Hurricane Electric) IPv6 tunnels - Download
• Running two ISPs at home (basic multi-homing) - Download
• "Enterprise" multi-homing setup, with 4 paths to the Internet - Download

Hosting

I've also started a bit of storage in my Gentoo webspace for these collected works of network configuration, with a bit more documentation.

Notes

1. The Gentoo docs have this for IPv6: Gentoo IPv6 Router Guide, Tunnel Configuration. You could bring it up manually, or you could just take the IPv6 config above and use it straight with your variables filled in. Volunteers welcome to help merge that config into the Gentoo IPv6 documentation.

I got my Google Wave account invitation yesterday. After a few hours I actually found some people to talk to (this preview is still in its baby stages).

I have to say, I was impressed. You chat (and it updates) in real time. You can embed stuff like Google maps, Google searches and Youtube videos (and the list will surely improve since it seems to support Google gadgets). It really feels like next-gen email combined with a messenger

It is called a preview for a reason though. Sometimes you need to refresh the browser and at other times your waves go crazy and you can’t use them for a while. It also tends to eat up lots of CPU if you have a lot of participants and media content. But its Google, so we know its all going to be fixed really soon

Below you’ll find an embedded wave I’ve added using the Wavr Wordpress Plugin (you need to have a Wave Account).

Well done Google!

Vor rund 14 Tagen schrieb ich über die anstehende Auflösung des Förderverein Gentoo e.V. – nun 14 Tage später sieht erst einmal vieles danach aus, als wenn auf der kommenden Mitgliederversammlung ein neuer Vorstand gewählt werden kann und zumindest die Auflösung (vorerst?) vom Tisch ist. Die angedachte Mitgliederversammlung am Wochenende 07./08.11. in Bottrop findet ebenso nicht statt. Anstelle dessen wird voraussichtlich im Rahmen des 26C3 in Berlin (vermutlich am 27.12.) eine außerordentliche Mitgliederversammlung stattfinden. Alle Mitglieder des Vereins werden selbstverständlich zeitig hierzu eingeladen.

Ich möchte mich ausdrücklich bei denen entschuldigen, die mir in den vergangenen Wochen Mails mit Hilfsangeboten etc. zukommen lassen haben – ich konnte nicht alle Mails beantworten, aber es tut durchaus gut, zu sehen, dass auch andere noch ein Interesse am Verein haben. Dafür Danke!

Möglichst kurzfristig soll die Webseite des Vereins ein Facelift erhalten und ab dann im Idealfall regelmäßig mit frischen Informationen versorgt werden.

It's over 1AM again, and I'm still not finished with Gnome 2.28 review. I've spent quite some time this weekend and tonight looking at what was wrong with gnote, gnome-system-monitor, gparted and a few other c++ apps suddendly starting to crash after I updated glib on Friday. Turns out something in the mm stack is doing something wrong so I filled Gnome bug #598209.

Updated to epiphany-2.28 since I got sick of epiphany-2.26 crashing when I wanted to make it remember a new password. Turns out it's not as nice as I would have thought a nearly two years efforts would be. Lots of problems where loading of a page would stop in the middle of the process. I had to install firefox to fill bug reports and access the pages that fails. That's quite a regression but upstream is now aware of it through Gnome bug #598115. Hopefully it'll be fixed for Gnome 2.28.1.

I also spent some time cleaning up unneeded revisions in tree since I had to occupy myself when building all those c++ bindings. So where are we now, a bit less than 41 packages to go for review and about 80% of completeness on my gnome 2.28 status page.

So, my efforts to get a small Mini-ITX system capable of playing back HD content so far has not been successful.  And, as is usual with stories of my hardware adventures, the problem always lies with something totally unexpected.  Here's the story so far.

At the end of September, I finally plunked down some cash and got a Zotac GF9300-D-E Mini ITX motherboard from Amazon.  The board is a bit older, but it's loaded with features.  It's got an onboard Nvidia 9300 video card, with HDMI output along with both SPDIF ports.  On top of it, it is a socket 775 Intel chipset, so that means I wouldn't have to bite the bullet and go with a sluggish Atom again.  Don't get me wrong, the Atoms are nice for general computing, but I still don't think they are really up to the job for dedicated video playback.

So, I got one of those, along with the same 35W Intel Celeron CPU that has been working so extremely well on my first Zotac Mini-ITX that is only capable of SD playback.  I don't want to knock that board either, because it has been doing extremely well.  I've been very happy with it since day one.

The board arrived, and I immediately set it up and got everything plugged in.  I took out my old Zotac and rested the new one into the Silverstone HTPC case.  I've got an LC19 which is actually big enough to hold a Micro-ATX board -- really, this thing is huge -- so a Mini is comfortable and capable enough to slide right in there.  There's a lot of things I like about this case.  It's top cover is covered with ventilation holes so you don't have to worry about the board overheating.  In fact, the original Zotac was running so efficiently, that the CPU fan would rarely turn on.  It was great.  I do have some issues with the case, though.  There's no reset button, which would have been nice, and the power supply has always seemed a bit flaky to me for some reason.  I can't really pinpoint what the problem is, but it just seems a little cheap to me.

Anyway, I plugged in thew new HD-capable Zotac, hooked up all the cables, and hit the power button.  The CPU fan started spinning briefly, then stopped completely.  At first I assumed it was like the original board, and it the smart fan meter was kicking in and it was just powering down because it was running cool.  Except that the board wouldn't POST.  I wasn't getting any video output at all.  I took everything back out and meticulously checked all the connections, and they certainly looked fine.  I made sure all the connections were secure on the case as well, and they seemed good too.  A bit puzzled, I put it all back together and tried again, with the same result.

At this point I figured that maybe it didn't like my RAM configuration, so I took the module out of the first row, and set it into the adjacent one.  After doing that, I hit the power button, and then *nothing* happened this time.  The fan wasn't even spinning up at all.  Crap.

Finally I did what I should have done the first time around, and I grabbed a PC speaker component and plugged it into the motherboard.  I've had tricky motherboard issues in the past, but my last line of defense was always the BIOS beep codes.  Once I interpreted those, I could fix the determined issue and be on my way.  I was expectantly hoping that the same would hold true here.  I plugged in the speaker, turned on the computer, but nothing.  No POST, no initial fan speedup, and no speaker codes.  At this point I assumed the board was DOA, so there was nothing I could do for it.  I did have *one* last sneaking suspicion though.

The new Mini-ITX motherboard also had a 4-pin CPU power plug, but I wasn't plugging anything into it.  The manual casually mentions plugging it in, but I had assumed that it was optional -- only because my previous Zotac ran perfectly fine without plugging one in, and because my case, while the power supply has a 4-pin port, didn't come with a cable.  So I always assumed I didn't need one.

I decided to see if that was the issue, instead of sending it back, and trying my luck to see if I could still solve the problem.  So, I went off to Monoprice and ordered three of the cables (for 85 cents each, I love you, Monoprice).  In a rare show of patience, I waited almost a week for them to arrive in the mail before resuming my experimentation.

With my new little cable, and honestly the last piece of the puzzle at this point that I could try with this case, I plugged it in and hoped for the best and ... nothing.  Still no initial fan spin, no POST, no love.  I took everything out and replaced the original Zotac (with the same RAM, too), plugged everything in, and of course, it started up just fine.  So, at least I know the case and power supply are still okay.

It's about this time that I finally realize that perhaps I should try my second Mini-ITX case instead, a Morex that I got from Logic Supply.  At first I kind of scoffed at the idea, since the Silverstone is by far the better of the two, and if it didn't work in that one, there was little chance it'd work in the economic model.  I was wrong, though.  It powered up just great, and worked fine.  So, now I'm really lost as to why.  I still suspect that there is something funky about the power supply on the Silverstone case, and I'm currently toying with the idea of replacing it myself.  It'd certainly be cheaper than getting a new case.

So, I decided to move my hardware setup around, and keep the new Zotac in this smaller case.  The only problem was that it didn't have as good an airflow, with the only real ventilation on the sides.  That would (and does) work fine with my fanless VIA C7s, but not here.

After setting up the system and playing around with the box, I was extremely happy with the performance.  I watched all my HD trailers in 1080p a couple of times each, with VDPAU and the picture was gorgeous.  It was great, and would have worked wonderfully if the motherboard wasn't running so hot.

The problem was that the heatsink on the northbridge (I think that's the right term, I'm not a total hardware geek) would get really, really hot.  The CPU itself was running really cool, since it had its own fan, it was just fine.  I didn't realize there was a problem until I came in to watch TV shortly I think the day after I had set it up, and the box was turned off.  It was just after all the intial setup and testing stages, so I assumed that I had just turned it off and forgotten.  But as I was watching some video, it shut itself off.

I took the top of the case off to see if I could figure out what the problem was, and that's when I nearly scalded myself touching the heatsink.  It seemed kind of flimsy and cheap to start with, and I was kind of surprised to see how crappy it looked, finally giving it a good look, and comparing it mentally to the other Minis I have.

I rebooted and went into the BIOS menus to see what the temperatures were looking like.  The northbridge was running at 66 C, which is 150 F.  Again, I don't know too much about hardware, but I was pretty sure they're not supposed to get that hot.  I left the top of the case off to let it cool down, and kept it running.  Coming back later, I saw that it had dropped to 48 C.  I rebooted, went back into my OS and watched plenty of video, and it was chugging along great since then.  So, it seems like it just needs some good airflow, and will probably be reasonably happy.

That leaves me with the problem of what to do next.  Technically, I could leave it in the Morex case, without a cover and expose it to dust and who knows what else is floating around my house, or I can try fix the Silverstone case just so I can use this board.

At this point, I'm a little tired of throwing so much money towards the problem, especially when it all should have worked in the first place.  Add to that that the new Mini-ITX I got is really the first-generation of this type of arrangement, and the nvidia ION is the one that is replacing this.  Aside from the Intel Atom CPU, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it, and so I'm also considering replacing it with that one.

I'm still not sure what to do, and part of me is leaning towards a third option -- wait for a year or so for the hardware specs to improve.  I'm not dead-set on having HD capable playback just yet, and it's more in the realm of "would be nice to have" instead of "really useful" right now.  Besides, even before I could start getting some content, I need to expand my server's capacity issues, as my media storage is almost at 100%.  I think I have something like 40 GB free space left.  Even then, I still need to get a Blu-ray ROM so I can rip my movies, and I only have about 12 Blu-rays right now to start with.

So, everything right now just tells me to wait.  Which is real shame, considering this board is very nice -- once it's given the proper TLC.  I think this is one of those situations where I would really like the whole thing to work out, but I imagine at the same time that the issues that are causing me problems right now, will only give me headaches later on down the road.  It's probably better to just cut my losses now and save up for something better later.

In preparation for layman-1.2.4 the repository has been converted from subversion to git. The new repository can be found at git://layman.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/layman/layman

solar was asking about release statistics, so I grabbed the current data from Bouncer. The nearly 34k releases for 10.0 is just in the 5 days that it's been out. I included the various architetures that were part of each released 'product', to make some degree of comparision possible.

• 2008.* has the LiveDVD's pulled from mirrors due to size complaints.
• bt-http-seed was an (failed) experiment with a set of mirror URLs for trying to load-balance Bittorrent's HTTP seeding
• Bouncer really needs replacing, but there's nothing really good to do so that I'm aware of. mod_sentry isn't nice. Other suggestions welcome. Should support products, architectures within products, seperate check/serve URLs, detailed hit recording for analysis.

After numerous bug fixes and enhancements the Ten Team would like everyone to try out the 10.1 release.
Downloads
Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 x86
Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 amd64

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any BUGS you encounter.

Thank you for your support.

So I’ve been noticing that along with the previously mentioned problem of GNOME not knowing when my AC power is plugged in or not, my battery’s life seems to have been cut in almost a third. I used to get approximately 3 hours of runtime on battery, but lately I have been getting just about 1 hour. The time to charge the battery to full has also increased by a pretty significant amount of time than I remember.

GNOME’s battery applet and acpi -V show the battery doing fine up till about 65% charge and then it just plummets to 5% battery and low battery warnings appear. That’s quite a drastic drop.

For instance, here’s some of the graphs from GNOME today of my battery:

5 minutes later:

Looking at those graphs makes me believe that my battery may be standing on its last leg, but I’m not really that knowledgeable about laptop batteries.

Is it time for me to start looking for a replacement battery at this point? Or is there possibly some way to salvage this battery. It’s not really that old, about a year old if I remember correctly. Is it worth trying to recalibrate the battery or is it just shot? Any help is appreciated.

Assuming all goes well today (I don't fall into an alternate universe), I'll be taking part in the Utah Open Source Conference a bit.  There is going to be a *nix Distribution Round Table discussion, and I'll be representing Gentoo Linux.  Yeehaw.

Please be sure to hold your applause until the end.

Acutally, to be honest, I'm a bit nervous, since I have no clue what I'm going to say, and I don't do well with crowds.  Should be interesting.  Maybe it'd be a good time to pitch Ubeantoo.

Lately I have been experiencing an annoying behavior from Gnome. I am on my laptops battery fairly often being a student, so going into powersave mode and the like is a must. This normally isn’t a problem and basically just works when I plug into/out of AC power.

In the past few weeks, however, I have been getting problems from Gnome. I will unplug the AC power and Gnome won’t recognize it and won’t adjust all my settings to conserve power. Sometimes after a few minutes Gnome will realize it, but there have been occurrences where I have drained the entire battery flat and it still believed it was plugged in. Sometimes suspend/resuming will cause it to realize it is in battery mode but not always.

So far I have not found a solution for this or an absolute way to poke Gnome to realize it’s on battery power. I’m hoping it will just magically fix itself in the next few days.

Well, there's not much I can say about the second movie, since I got less than 15 minutes into it, and was so unimpressed, I gave up on it.  I probably should have given it a bit more time, now that I think about it, but I already sent it back to Netflix, ah well.  So, this will probably be a crappy review.

But, my video review is this -- it looked just like the DVD transfer.  It was nice, but nowhere near the picture quality of the first motion picture.  Not even close.  I could tweak my TV of course, and make the colors a bit brighter on the whole, but it just didn't have that Blu-Ray HD look and feel to it at all.

Maybe I got the wrong one, who knows?  There are *already* three versions of the movie out (one, two, three) on Blu-Ray.  It's possible that they are all the same version, just repackaged.  I'm pretty sure the one I got was from the first link.  Which, if that's the case, bummer, because they gave the video a 4.5 out of 5.  Hmm.  I'll probably  need to give it another chance sometime.  Maybe I just wasn't in the mood to watch it.  Who knows.

It's been mentioned, and I haven't done the research since I'm not really picky about this part, that the Blu-Ray version was not the director's cut of the movie.  Having seen the movie so many times, I don't doubt I've seen both versions, but I don't remember anything different standing out, so I have no idea what I'm missing.

Anyway.  I'll probably come back and visit this one again sometime.  The picture just looked grainy and dull to me, and I wasn't ready to sit through it if it wasn't going to the visual overhaul I was expecting.  Hopefully the next two do a bit better.

Happy Tenth Birthday, Gentoo!

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the immediate availability of a new, special edition LiveDVD to celebrate this monumental occasion. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• System packages include: Linux Kernel 2.6.30 (with gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup 3.1.3, BASH 4.0, GLIBC 2.9, GCC 4.3.2. Binutils 2.18, Python 2.6.2, Perl 5.8.8, and more.
• Desktop Environments and window managers include: KDE 4.3.1, GNOME 2.26.3, Xfce 4.6.1, Enlightenment 0.16.8.15, Openbox 3.4.7.2, Fluxbox 1.1.1, TWM 1.0.4, and more.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: OpenOffice 3.1.1, G/Vim 7.2.182, Abiword 2.6.4, GNUCash 2.2.9, Scribus 1.3.3.11, GIMP 2.6.4, Inkscape 0.46, Blender 2.49a, XSane 0.996, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox (Minefield) 3.5.3, Arora 0.7.11, Opera 10.0, Epiphany 2.26.3, Galeon 2.0.4, Seamonkey 1.1.17, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.5.9, Quassel 0.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.23, Claws Mail 3.7.2, Ekiga 2.0.12, Qtwitter 0.7.1, irssi 0.8.13, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.1.1, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, DvdAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.2, FFMPEG 0.5_p19928, GNOME-MPlayer 0.9.7, SMPlayer 0.6.6, and several others.

The Gentoo-Ten LiveDVD is available in two flavors, a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64-only version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-10.0 will work on x86 or x86_64. If your arch is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64 boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64bit kernel and install a customized 64bit userland while using the provided 32bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-10.0 version is for x86_64 only.

Please select your architecture to be redirected to a mirror for download: x86amd64

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any bugs you encounter.

In addition, we have some exceptional new artwork from Ben Stedman, and Gentoo Developer Alex Legler.

Thank you for your continued support,

Gentoo Linux Developers, The Gentoo Linux Foundation, and The Gentoo-Ten Project

In overlay news, we are currently at 75% of completeness for the 2.28 release. Currently reviewed 46 ebuilds, at bit less than 55 to go.

In other news, if you get strange gnupg related failures, head over to bug #275291. We will apply patch when someone from gnome herd has a chance to get around it.

Update: fix typo

Gentoo/PPC team is here to make sure packages are marked stable and are keyworded as soon as possible and without breaking the tree. Unfortunately, we can't manage the flow of bugs coming and the list is growing too quickly.
Stabilizing and keywording is a big work. Fauli have explained it a few weeks ago in a blog entry.

So if you have a PowerPC and you want to help, you can and we will appreciate it !
First of all, look at the Gentoo/PPC testing doc. Some things may be outdated, consider essentially the procedures.

I've made some bug lists to make the life of everybody easier:
- stabilization requests
- keyword requests
- security bugs

Please, refer to the Gentoo/PPC testing doc if you want to help on one of these bugs.

Do not hesitate to come see us on #gentoo-powerpc on freenode.

Woot! Happy Birthday Gentoo. As part of the Birthday party today we announce the winning screenshots.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest. There were 54 entries using 5 different window managers / desktop environments.

The Winners

1. Quick23t Compiz Fusion
2. ashtophet Fvwm 2.5.27
3. Integer Fluxbox

For all the specifications and cool details please visit the winners page.

discuss this!

Gosh, just look at all the buzzwords in the title!

As you may have guessed, I'll be talking a bit about the recent developments on the FOSS drivers for RadeonHD cards, specifically for R700 cards. And some other hardware stuff.

Radeon

Yesterday, October 3, I made some big ol' changes to my workstation.

I decided to try out the new video driver stack that all the kids have been talking about. Kernel Mode Setting, git Mesa/xf86-video-ati/libdrm, git kernel 2.6.32_rc1-git3. All that jazz. I wanted to see if the 3D and KMS features were really working on my RadeonHD 4550 or not. I normally run a stable graphics stack, with ~arch Mesa/x86-video-ati/libdrm where necessary to keep up on 2D acceleration and features.

This was a big leap for me. So I first consulted some of the X11 team members, remi and nirbheek, who were quite helpful. I installed the latest git-sources kernel, which at the time was 2.6.32_rc1-git3. Mike Pagano has since added -git5. Next, I downloaded the individual -9999 ebuilds for the git master packages from the X11 overlay, stuck 'em in my local overlay, and merged 'em. Only thing left to do was reboot.

Lemme tell ya -- KMS in action is awesome. The console output is just beautiful, and there's no more flickering when SLiM and Xfce load.

I did notice some minor graphical corruption of the default mouse pointer. However, the corruption isn't present when using any pointer but the default "arrow", and it also isn't seen when hovering inside a Firefox window. I was told this is because Firefox uses its own cursors. Anyway, I reported the bug upstream.

Disclaimer: I know glxgears isn't a benchmark. But folks always want to know its results anyway. I tried running glxgears, which gave me a result of over 1300FPS with desktop compositing activated. My window manager is xfwm4, so all compositing is via Xrender, not OpenGL. Disabling compositing resulted in a 500FPS boost to over 1800FPS. What's this mean? Who knows. Probably nothing. Moving on.

I took the advice of my fellow developers on IRC and installed quake3-demo. Couldn't run it, though. It blanked the screen, then a message from my LCD firmware appeared, some kind of "input not supported" or "input not detected" error. It slowly repeated the window, drawiing it from center to the top right. I had to Ctrl-Alt-Bksp to get to the console. It also locked up SLiM in the background, pegging one of my CPU cores at 100%. At this point, I rebooted just to test that KMS was still working, then called it a night.

Today, I revisited my pointer corruption bug tried the workarounds posted by Alex Deucher. To my surprise, each one worked! Booting with radeon.modeset=0 removes the glitch, though it makes each boot extremely ugly, of course. Specifying EXANoDownloadFromScreen "true" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf also fixes the corrupted pointer, though it may also be slowing down all screen drawing operations by the tiniest bit. The jury's still out on that one; it may just be my imagination. I decided to keep this second fix, as KMS is just too glorious to throw out. I like pretty boots.

I also revisited quake3-demo, since I found some pointers on the Phoronix forums that had a workaround, which is to run OpenGL applications prefixed by LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1. To my surprise, this worked nicely. I tested resolution has high as 900-something by 720. My screen is 1440x900, but I haven't felt like pushing it that far, yet. The game is fluid and playable. I need to figure out how to display FPS so I can properly record what I'm seeing.

With the success of Q3demo, I remembered that QuakeLive has recently added Linux support. I installed the add-on for Firefox and tried it out. Works nicely, though I'm also running Firefox with LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 just to be sure. As Alex Deucher and John Bridgman have pointed out on the Phoronix forums, that variable really isn't the safest thing to do, since if something crashes it can take down the whole X server, not just the application. However, it's also the only way I get working 3D games.

QuakeLive is pretty playable, though the framerates in a few places aren't smooth -- I can't tell if this is because of my card's capabilities, or the driver stack, or the whole weird idea of playing a 3D first-person shooter inside a web browser. The big problem with QuakeLive is that the sound is terribly distorted: the voices are greatly drawn-out and slowed down, like playing an old tape recorder at 1/4 speed. There are some solutions on the QL forums, but they're mainly for Ubuntu/Pulseaudio users. I haven't found anything that works for me, yet. The effects and music are okay; it's just the voices that lag horribly.

I've also installed the latest Nexuiz, version 2.5.2, in anticipation of future testing. One of these days I'll reinstall UT2004, but I haven't read any succesful reports of that game on R700 cards. There's a lot of testing to do in the future!

Overall, I'm thrilled with the new driver hotness for my ATI card. I bought it specifically because I knew the 2D support at the time was excellent, and because there would be so many good things coming down the way for other features, including 3D acceleration. (Yes, just like the latest XKCD strip. I swear, it's like that guy listens to everything I say and watches everything I do. It's really spooky!)

Hats off to all the developers for making it happen. Many thanks!

SSD

After August's fiasco with a defective SSD, I decided to use my refund from the RMA and order a different SSD a few days ago. This time I've settled on a SanDisk enterprise SSD from an HP blade server. Only cost $49, no shipping charges. Brand new. eBay for the win.

It packs 16GB of SLC flash, which makes it perfect for mounting /usr/portage and /var on it. This way I can feel free to sync whenever I want, instead of only once a week or more. My system drive uses MLC flash, so I've been trying to ease the write load on it, which means putting the high-write activity on a dedicated disk.

The SanDisk SSD "only" has sustained reads/writes at 60MB/sec, but that's plenty for syncing Portage, as the real limiter is not how fast data can be dumped to the disk, but how fast the rsync servers can send it to my box. Same for /var writes -- it's mostly just log files and some tiny temp things, as /var/tmp is already mounted on a RAMdisk. No large files that need >100MB/sec bandwidth. I'm lookin' forward to shovin' it in my box!

More hardware

Since September 28 was my birthday and all, I've been treating myself to various bits of cheap hardware. Like a replacement AC adapter for my DC PicoPSU. The current AC brick is rated at 102W, which is way more than I need, but the problem is that it spins up its tiny fan at only 50%-75% load. This means that opening up a bunch of tabs, compiling packages, playing Quake, watching large-sized Hulu videos and whatnot turns on the fan right away. And it's the world's most annoying fan. It's loud, whiny, it hisses, and it blows the bad smell of very hot electronics out into the room. Lemme tell you, hot plastic and PSU guts do not smell good.

I just ordered a replacement fanless adapter. This thing is high-quality, designed to run very cool. And it's rated at 150W output, meaning it can match my 150W PicoPSU. My max system draw is maybe 60W, but I'll have overhead room in case I ever feel like upgrading a key component somewhere.

I also bought a $40 wireless router, an Asus WL-520gU. I already have a WL-500gP v2, which I hacked and flashed with DD-WRT a long time ago. This new router is so that I can hook up my Xbox 360 to the network without having to run 50 feet of cable across the carpet. I chose the 520gU instead of the gC because the gU supports Xlink Kai, which seems prett cool to me, as I don't have a Gold Live account. Yay for tricky internets. Apparently it's pretty common to buy a cheap wireless router and put it into client mode, rather than buying the $100 official USB dongle . . . which doesn't even support WPA2-AES or any decent security. Asus routers are known for excellent open-source support, and I've had nary a complaint about my current one. Yay for Linux on routers! Yay for online gaming!

* * *

Oh yes, and before I forget, this month's Xfce desktop:

It's October, but my current desktop is so pretty (gallery link) I haven't felt the need to switch for the last couple of weeks. There's another clean version that just shows off the wallpaper in my devspace.

Happy Birthday Gentoo

The 10th anniversary Gentoo LiveDVD was made by the community for the community. It was created with the help of Gentoo developers from around the world and users alike. In this podcast I talk about some of the people and a brief discussion on how it came together.

Full Screenshot
Join us on freenode irc channel #gentoo-ten

LINKS:
Gentoo Ten Team
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dabbott/pr/gentoo-ten-team.txt
Gentoo Ten LiveDVD FAQ
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/releases/10.0/faq.xml
Forum Post
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-793820.html
Gentoo Ten Wallpapers
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/releases/10.0/graphics.xml

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

LiveDVD (released Oct 4, 2009)
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml

Download

I recently had a bit of downtime on my linode. If you are wondering what a 'linode' is, check out my review or the website. And a big thank you to the folks that used my referral code when they got setup with linode themselves, you guys rock!

So, about my recent 1/2 day downtime. It was self-inflicted because I wanted to move to a different datacenter. I moved my linode from Newark, NJ to Dallas, TX. It is quite a long story, but it boils down to a problem with my ISP (Comcast). I was only able to pull 100K/s from the Newark datacenter and 2-3M/s from the others. This was unacceptable. I tried to get it escalated past Comcast's frontline support but they kept asking me questions like "Do you use a router? If so, each computer only gets 1/2 the speed" & "Every computer is different. I'm glad that you can get 3M/s from another host, that is really good" Sigh.

At least Linode's customer server was helpful and allowed me to work around the ISP. The steps to move a linode are as follows:

1. File a support request. (My initial request was answered in 11 minutes)
2. Shutdown your linode
3. Hit the 'migrate' button, after support sets up your migration
4. Wait for the transfer. My total transfer time was ~43 minutes (~6G to transfer). This was pretty fast throughput, in my opinion
5. Meanwhile, update your DNS for your new IP.
6. Since you can queue up a boot job, I just let it go and checked in on it a couple hours later. Magic, it was online.

So, to finish the story off. Linode++, Comcast--. I wish I didn't need to do something like this, I wish my ISP was...I don't know...smart?

I've been busy collecting some really great stories from people using Gentoo in places that I really didn't expect. Some of them want to remain anonymous, which I have no issue with. But there are some gems like this one:

==========
Hey, I'm the CTO of a small company in Sweden, and this is our short 'success story' :-)

blogg.se is a Swedish blogging platform which generate 130 000 new entries, 150 000 comments and 2 500 new accounts on a daily basis. We currently (September 25th, 2009) have a reach of 2,2M unique visitors per week.

Gentoo has always been the preferred OS choice for us. We (the developers) were all attracted by its 'sane' defaults and clean approach to software deployment.

Here at blogg.se we use Gentoo for all our staging, testing and production environments. We have about 30 running instances on 32-bit, 64-bit and KVM-virtualized hardware.

Gentoo (and its wide ecosystem of utils) has been very helpful in helping us plan our environment. We use layman to distribute our own software, Metro for building custom images and a wide range of apps for maintaining our installs.

The collaborative efforts of Gentoo is inspiring and something you want to be a part of. I'm already involved through the Sunrise-overlay and hopefully qualifying as a Gentoo developer some time soon.

Johan Bergström
CTO blogg.se
===========

That's quite awesome on multiple levels, and I thank Johan for sharing this short glimpse at how people leverage Gentoo. I hope to publish a few more stories soon, so stay tuned and feel free to mail me your story!

**fixing bugs with both users and devs together.

Join us in #gentoo-bugs on Freenode, please!

I don't think I've ever written about how to rip a VHS tape before, so I figured I'd write up a quick guide since it looks like that's part of what I'm gonna be doing this weekend.  Yet another item I've long had on my todo list was to get a digital copy of some really old tapes put out by my church, since they were never released on DVD.  Fortunately, it's really easy if you have a TV tuner card.

I'm using a Hauppauage PVR-500 card, which has composite inputs on the rear, and that's how I'm capturing the feed.  That good old analog hole.  Although, ideally, the Macrovision DRM shouldn't allow that, so don't ask me how it's working.

Anyway, it's simply a matter of switching your input to the component input, and then using ffmpeg to capture the stream.

To change the input, you'll need the IVTV utitiles.  In my case, the command is:

$ v4l2-ctl -i 2

Then, with ffmpeg, you can capture the stream, just copying it and saving it in its native format.  My PVR card does hardware encoding to MPEG2 video and audio, so I can just save it directly.

$ ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -t <hours:minutes> vhs.mpg

And thar ya go.  Pretty simple.

Here's a screenshot from an old church video.  As you can see, its slightly grainy, but that's because of the source, not because of the transfer.  It would look just as good / bad on the VCR player itself, so the conversion actually works really well.

Edit: I thought I'd add a bit more technical details as far as the MPEG encoder goes.

The video is MPEG-2, and the bitrate is 8000 kb/s.  The framerate is NTSC, of course.  The picture is 720x480 in size (my snapshot above is scaled down for presentation).

The audio is encoded to MP2, and it keeps the stereo stream.  The bitrate is 224 kb/s.

For those that might have been wondering where was that guy speaking about imminent stabilization of gnome 2.26, well I was taking some time off (sort of). The Gnome 2.26 situation got a bit better in the last weeks as due to the production of a release media, a lot of dependencies we were waiting on are finally getting stabilized. You can still see progress on bug #263083, closer than ever !

Since I can't stand working on Gnome 2.26 anymore and since upstream has been kind enough to drop their new almost shiny 2.28, I started doing some QA on ebuilds in overlay before allowing them to move to the tree. Over 92 ebuilds, all of which are not necessarily interesting for gnome 2.28, I've currently reviewed 25 and that's with current 65% of completeness of the ebuild bumps, so there is still quite some work, and don't expect the overlay to be safe for use just yet.

One last word on 2.26, there will be a migration guide, it's still getting a few modifications before it all goes public with stabilization but I'm spreading the word in the hope that we won't see any new bugs concerning what has been documented.

Turned out that xorg-server 1.6 is pretty much ready for stabilization, as only a handful of bugs were reported over the testing period since last week, and they only concerned the stabilization list.

Without further ado, I've asked our faithful Arch Teams (pretty much all of 'em) to stabilize xorg-server 1.6 and friends. amd64 was the first one to the finish line with a stabilization done in under a day!

Gentoo is again back in business for X. Woo!

Now to all stable users, don't forget to read the upgrade guides we wrote :

• server upgrade guide
• libxcb upgrade guide

Don't forget, please file bugs in bugzilla.

So I've been playing with mouse interaction (I stoled some code from Curses::UI, but treid to go the extra mile), and finally I am able to handle mouse interactions within Curses::Toolkit

Curses::Toolkit can now listen to and intercept any mouse button events. You can add a Curses::Toolkit::EventListener::Mouse::Click to any widget, so that it becomes mouse aware.

By default, I think I'll add some mouse interaction to the widgets. For instance Widget::Window already have mouse upport, as I show in the video. I'll add mouse support for Widget::Button, and probably other widgets as well, at least to handle the focus.

The issue is that I fail to catch the events of the mouse moving, I catch only the button events. That's why I can't draw the windows when moving them. Ncurses is supposed to let you catch the mouse positions when moving it, but I failed to get that. Maybe it came from my terminal as well. If you have any idea about that, I could use some help here !

Also, speaking of the terminal, I use Terminal.app usually, but I failed to configure it to catch mouse events (like mouse clicks). I thought it was possible but I had to use iTerm, which in turn I fail to configure to dicplay nice graphical-like borders and corner characters. If you have any clue on either how to configure Terminal.app to catch mouse events, or how to configure iTerm to properly render special characters, please let me know ! :)

Let me introduce a new widget in the Curses::Toolkit world : Widget::Entry.

Nothing much to say about it, have a look at this video. I tried to have the Entry widget to support basic shortcuts, and behave like one would like it to behave. I still to add some stuff to it, but it's in decent shape. Enjoy.

Hello again !

Let's see what's new on the Curses::Toolkit front. Please see the previous posts for the background story.

I have finally worked out a reasonable way to have themes that allow for some advanced customization. Having a theme that defines the colors, if some text should be displayed in bold or in reverse mode is straight forward. However, having themes that can customize the shape of a widget, the way it's placed and drawn is more complicated.

It's hard to find the right balance between on a rigid widget toolkit with a very simple theme engine that allow barely any customization but is very easy to use, and a complicated theming system t hat allows full control on the shape of the widgets but is hard to manage and use, leading to no one willing to expand it.

So I went for a simple pragmatic approach : the basic drawing primitives (drawing a string, a border, a corner, etc) can be themed regarding colors and line style. For the advanced customization, i t's up to the widget classes to declare what can be customized in them. For instance, a Widget::Border declares that its border size can be customized. a Widget::Window inherits from Widget::Border, so if its border size is positive, the border ad the title which is displayed on it will be visible. The Widget::Window itself declares that its title can be placed in the center, right, left, etc.

So the widgets declares what can be customized in them, and their various methods (drawing methods, or coordinates computation) take in account these various parameters, and their parent's ones. Oh it's nothing revolutionary, and if I was implementing a graphical toolkit, it would be unmanageable, because too simple. But because we are in the ncurses world, the possibilities of customization are limited, and the level detail is lower (we are manipulating characters here, not pixels).

So I think this approach is not too bad. Besides it allows me to implement a widget at first without any theming characteristics, then add them later on when I'm polishing its rendering methods.

As soon as I'll have more widgets, I'll see if this way of doing it was a good decision :)

"Aaaaanyway" (as would t0m say), when I started this post I wanted to say that I changed the default theme and the rendering of some widgets, so here is how it looks now. Oh, yes, the yellow on bla ck is horrible, but I'm not a designer. Or a lawyer, for what it takes.

You'll see I've improved the window widget, it can now have a title, that has a nice animation if its title is too long.

Philippe Bruhat (BooK) was kind enough to host me ( and a friend of mine ) yesterday evening and this morning.

BooK is a nice guy, very involved in the Perl community : among other things, member of the YAPC Europe Foundation and YAPC::EU Venue Committee, president of the French Perl Mongers, member of various mongers groups.

He is also a very good cook, we tested his Tiramisu and home-made pizza. Thank you BooK for the stuff you do for Perl, and for being a good friend !

( that was my "loosily Perl related post while coming back from holiday" ). Stay tuned for more soon :)

As you may know, last week the French Perl Workshop 2009 took place in Paris. It was a nice conference in french, where various subjects (mostly Perl related) were presented.

I gave 2 presentations :

• one on how to build a POE::Wheel, using POE::Wheel::GnuPG as example.
• one on Curses::Toolkit. You can watch the video record here. Beware, it's in french ! :)