gentoo

I just upgraded my mythtv backend's gcc from 3.4.6 to 4.1.2. It's still compiling all of world now and will be have been about 24 hours when it's all done. Then I did an emerge --sync and now there is a gcc 4.3! Arghh.

So I am on a Kubuntu edgy laptop at work and I am trying to get WPA wireless networking working before the upcoming demo that we are putting on. Since I have no idea what kind of networking is set up at both demo locations I am making sure all options work. WPA is the last one to take care of.

I just bought two new 320G hard drives last weekend and they are finally up and running with my same old Gentoo Linux OS. I wanted to put them in a RAID1 configuration and this was my first experience with software RAID.

I switched to Paludis yesterday. For those who don't know what Paludis is, it's an alternative Gentoo package manager, or a Portage/emerge replacement. It has not all been smooth. I had to fight with it for a while, re-installing a bunch of packages that thought they depended on an installed package that no longer existed. I think this was because Portage left some cruft around that made it think that.

I am excited to be a part of Planet Larry. I don't write about Gentoo too often, but once in a while I might have something interesting to say about it. For those that are interested, my past articles on Gentoo, and my past articles on Linux.

Beryl is now in Gentoo's official ebuild repository, portage. There are instructions on installing it for Gentoo as well as how to set up your nvidia graphics card if you have one. The beautiful thing about having a nVidia graphics card is that with the latest nVidia drivers (build 9625) you no longer need to install XGL. You just add the AddARGBGLXVisuals to your xorg.conf file and install the Beryl window manager and you get snazzy effects right out of the box. The other great thing is that you don't need to edit any other files on your computer. Just launch KDE for example, as usual, then run "beryl-manager" from a konsole window. You can change your window manager to beryl from the taskbar icon that shows up, restart beryl if it crashes, or switch back to kwin. You can also use emerald (the window-decorator) and change your emerald theme from the taskbar icon.

Why ssmtp should be removed from gentoo:

• ssmtp is no longer maintained upstream
• Even its successor, bssmtp has been abandoned. The writer of bssmtp and maintainer of ssmtp said himself "I have now switched back to using Postfix on my laptop."

According to this page by the maintainer, the two advantages of ssmtp are:

• it is light (doesn't matter if it's crap)
• it is easy to configure (it appears that way at first, but it isn't necessarily so, if you check out the gentoo forums)

MythTV 0.20 was released today. I can't wait to install it and check out the new features. I completely rebuilt my MythTV box last week and it is totally kick-ass now. It has a new 250GB hard drive which allows me to record 100 hours of TV. Some other improvments I made were, setting up XvMC which allows my video card's GPU to help out with some of the MPEG-2 decoding (bringing my CPU usage from 20% to 10% during video playback). Thanks to the Hauppauge PVR-350 card my CPU usage during recording is nil. I also got a new video card with composite out rather than s-video. That fixed a problem with the flaky s-video connector I had (whereby it would slip out and cause the screen to go all fuzzy) and also fixed a problem I had with 3 vertical lines on the TV during playback. We also bought and expensive composite cable to make sure that there are no problems. Finally stuck everything in an Antec Sonata II case for maximum silencing and cooling (not to mention how cool the black case looks).

Crazy news tonight, that Daniel Robbins (gentoo founder) is returning to Gentoo. Gentoo rocks with or without him, but that would be awesome if he came back. No mention of it over on his blog yet, but I'll be sure to checking there over the next few days. Oops, I was wrong, there is an article on his blog. that apparently started it all. So looks like maybe he'll just be becoming a developer again, rather than resuming his former role of Chief Architect.