•December 20, 2011 •
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As much fun as it would be, this isn’t a post about Star Wars. Maybe later…
The dark side, in this instance, is KDE. I’ve used Gnome as my desktop environment for years now. Before that, it was Openbox. With the Gnome team’s great leap forward, I’ve decided the time is right to jump ship.
I’ll be honest, I was happy with Gnome 2.32. Everything worked to my satisfaction. And while it’s true, I could have blocked the packages in Gentoo to remain on 2.32, it would only have been temporary. The Gentoo team can’t continue to support old/legacy packages if there isn’t any support upstream. I get that. I made an honest effort to run 3.2 for a good month. The fallback mode is good, the new shell is “okay.” Even with the add-ons, it’s just not what I want. I am sincerely disappointed in it.
I’d love to go back to using Openbox completely, but I need to keep options open for the rest of the family that uses the computer. I feel lucky enough to have a wife that allowed me to move her laptop over to linux and that’s all she uses now. My goal is to find something familiar enough for her that I won’t get my rear in trouble.
Thus, the switch to KDE. I’ve read the reports of Gnome detractors claiming that the environment had been dumbed down and options removed or hidden. I didn’t put much thought into it because for me, everything just worked. Now into KDE, it sure seems like there are a ton more options available to me that weren’t before.
So far, it’s working out well. The wife is apparently happy. I’ll probably switch back to Openbox for my login, I’ve missed it.
Posted in computer, family, gentoo, linux
•October 31, 2011 •
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As evidenced by the fact most of my linux posts are tagged with Gentoo, I run a source-based linux distribution. The only reason for that these days is because it’s what I’m used to. I’ve been running Gentoo since 2002 or 2003. I’ve thrown it on almost every piece of equipment I can, from a P166 to my quad Athlon II.
While I recently switched my wife’s laptop over to Ubuntu to make it easier for her to manage, I haven’t tried running another distro full time on anything save one.
I’m the proud (?) owner of an NSLU2 aka SLUG that I occasionally power up for random nonsense. I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading it from lenny to squeeze. While I could cross-compile everything on another computer, I find it just easier to use Debian’s precompiled ARM binaries.
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•September 30, 2011 •
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While I’m still working on getting the on demand record feature to work in Asterisk, this will work as a manual method.
watch -n1 “asterisk -vvvvvrx ‘core show channels’ “
This will show the channels/calls in progress.
In another window (just because it’s easier), log into asterisk using “asterisk -r” and run
mixmonitor start ${CHANNEL} ${FILENAME}.wav
This will save your recording under /var/spool/asterisk/monitor.
I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong that the *3 command isn’t working (Following http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2741-how-to-record-phone-calls-using-asterisk/)
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Tags: asterisk, linux, record call
•June 29, 2011 •
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Building the latest mesa from source
EXTRA_ECONF=”–enable-shared-glapi –enable-gallium-egl” emerge -qv1 mesa
[ebuild R #] media-libs/mesa-9999 USE=”egl gallium gles llvm motif nptl openvg* -bindist -classic -d3d -debug -pic (-selinux) -shared-dricore -wayland” VIDEO_CARDS=”r600 -i810 -i915 -i965 -intel -mach64 -mga -nouveau -r100 -r128 -r200 -r300 -radeon -savage -sis -tdfx -via -vmware” 0 kB [1]
this is because of this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org/msg08552.html
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=1251e1df0f5d4bc81c80c4c2d61c0a5f9b8b759a
This was updated in the X11 overlay, but the EXTRA_ECONF trick can come in handy later.
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Tags: 9999, ebuild, gentoo
•June 22, 2011 •
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If it’s not obvious, I’ve moved my blog from a self-hosted environment to WordPress.com’s hosting.
So far, my opinion is “meh”. I’m already missing my custom environment and am chafing under the limitations provided here. It does fit in my current budget though.
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•April 7, 2011 •
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Davmail is a java-based gateway for Microsoft Exchange to standards-based protocols.
While I didn’t write the original ebuild, I did write an init script and config and modify the ebuild to run as a service for Gentoo.
Give it a whirl, it’s working for me so far. Bug 351417.
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•April 7, 2011 •
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I’ve updated my ebuild for the CrystalHD card to reflect not only updates upstream but what I’ve learned through reading sources and other bug reports.
Given I’ve just been creating snapshots from particular days, I had originally opted to use a date-based scheme for the ebuilds. I read through a bug report (here) that shows how upstream is referencing the version. That makes sense.
Since the big focus is to get the library and firmware into the tree, I opted to move and rename the library to x11-libs/libcrystalhd. My reasoning is the module is already in the kernel sources and can be compiled from there. What other programs will be looking for is the library to compile against. So, from crystalhd to libcrystalhd it is. The ebuild still optionally installs the kernel module, which is still my preferred method.
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•March 10, 2011 •
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Nothing like waiting 24+ hours for a RAID5 array to finish growing. Thankfully, the array is still accessible while it’s growing. That won’t hold true when the file system itself is expanded, but I don’t think that will be take as long.
My biggest fear is a power outage while it’s growing. My UPS has been acting up lately and shutting down on its own. I think it’s the batteries, but I’m not sure yet. So for now, I’m living life dangerously. Thankfully, the weather is mild without worry of high winds or anything that should take out the power.
Adding the new drives has brought to light my need for a proper case for my server. At present, I’m using a 10? year old Antec tower. It’s fantastic and roomy, but as I’m expanding my storage space, it’s becoming too small. It feels odd to say that since it’s one of the largest cases I’ve ever owned. So, now I’m looking at a new case. The one that has caught my eye is the Norco RPC-4220. At 20 hot swappable ports, it has plenty of room to grow. I’d be able to move my Myth recording array over and actually eliminate an always-on machine at the same time.
Before that though, I probably should get my UPS looked at. I doubt that they’re meant to be user-serviceable, aside from replacing the batteries, but I’m going to give it a try.
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•January 1, 2011 •
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There’s one last bit that’s bothering me about the ebuild, and that’s the version description. If I clone the git repository directly and compile from there, I get a description along the lines of this:
Please attach all output as a file in bug reports.
MythTV Version : v0.24-96-gf5e6f3d
MythTV Branch : 0.24-fixes
Network Protocol : 63
Library API : 0.24.20101129-1
QT Version : 4.7.1
Options compiled in:
<snip>
This is different from what I’ve done.
Please attach all output as a file in bug reports.
MythTV Version : 2f3a2f8-gentoo
MythTV Branch : fixes/0.24
Network Protocol : 63
Library API : 0.24.20101129-1
QT Version : 4.7.1
Options compiled in:
<snip>
The branch string is cake to fix. I just need to see if there is a way to pull the same version string out of the tarball. We could manually enter that information in the ebuild, but that means more work for someone just looking for a quick bump.
Given the tar/zipball doesn’t include the .git directory that you get when you clone the repository, doing a “git describe –dirty” won’t work.
The info IS included as part of the forwarded URL. i.e.
https://github.com/MythTV/mythtv/tarball/f5e6f3df7873b9aeaca42e5cfee0a5c50431ac10
turns to
https://download.github.com/MythTV-mythtv-v0.24-96-gf5e6f3d.tar.gz
which in turn matches the provided version string.
Continue reading ‘More tweaks’
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•December 27, 2010 •
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I’ve made my final tweak to the mythtv-0.24 ebuild and posted it on bugzilla. I swear, I’m done this time. 
I missed a few things on installing and re-installing on existing builds. Uninstalling everything isn’t exactly the same as installing on a clean system. Hell, even in my chroot, I almost missed a warning about yasm because it wasn’t tagged as an error or warning.
I did leave in a USE flag supporting ASS/SSA subtitles. This comes in handy for ripped anime. While it isn’t as good as mplayer’s support, at least it’s better than nothing. Real support is supposed to come in 0.25 with an ffmpeg refresh. Until then, this works for me.
The version info has been changed too. Technically, I think that it should display something along the lines of “commit-dirty”, indicating it has been patched outside of git. I felt it was more appropriate to tag it as “commit-gentoo”. Either way, it’s showing that it isn’t a vanilla build.
I tested my eclass with a 0.25_pre build, and it appears to build correctly in the chroot. I don’t know if I’m ready to move my network up to it just yet though. So far, I haven’t seen a commit has a “must have” quality just yet.
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