Syncing Bash History Between Shells October 22, 2009

Ever closed and opened a shell because you needed to refresh the history to pull up a command you used before? Nevermore! Read this excellent post on briancarper.net to make your terminal life much easier.

Using Gorg to Preview Gentoo Documentation August 14, 2009

This is very handy if you’re working on Gentoo documentation, which is composed of XML that gets translated into HTML.

Alright, enough with the introductions. I’m just going to write how I got gorg to work.

1. Install gorg. If you’re using Gentoo Prefix, and bug #281335 is not solved yet, use my Gentoo Prefix overlay to get it installed. (I only tested on OSX, though.)
2. Copy /etc/gorg/gorg.conf.sample to gorg.conf, and begin editing it.
3. Change the root variable to point to the directory where your copy of the Gentoo site will reside. I changed mine to:
   root = "/Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo"
4. I’m not sure if this is required, or what this even does, but I changed the two mount variables to match root:
   mount = /cgi-bin on /Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo/xml/cgi-bin
mount = /images on /Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo/xml/images
5. I left everything else to defaults. Save, exit. The other sample files should/can be left as samples. It doesn’t affect gorg in any way negative, at least as far as I can tell.
6. Now you’ll need to make a monster of a checkout:
   cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gentoo.org:/var/cvsroot co gentoo/xml/htdocs
7. When that’s done, either move the htdocs folder to the place indicated by root, or make a symlink. I opted for a symlink. This allows my gorg environment and my programming environment to remain at least organizationally (that’s a word!) separate.
8. Run the following, replacing the “/User/jacob/Sites/gentoo” part with wherever you told root to point:
   xmlcatalog --create /Users/jacob/Sites/gentoo/index.xml >> /etc/xml/catalog
9. You should be viewing Gentoo’s home page, albeit with images and other things missing. Congrats!

Now, to finish off the work on Gentoo Embedded’s documentation…

When you Can’t Compile ‘Em, Virtualize ‘Em (in VirtualBox) August 10, 2009

That’s the approach I’m taking when it comes to Gentoo right now. September, my deadline for all computer projects, is my hard deadline, because that’s when college starts, and that’s when I expect my free time will be dramatically shortened, if not entirely consumed, as far as my computer projects are concerned. Because of that, I can’t waste a lot of time patching and hacking. If it doesn’t work in Gentoo Prefix like I want it to, I’ll throw it into VirtualBox’s copy of Gentoo and use the Shared Folders feature to keep data synced in and out of the virtual machine.

First off, don’t even think about doing this if you don’t have x86 virtualization extensions. You may survive the experience, but you won’t be able to stand it for much longer after. On my ol’ 1.8GHz Pentium 4, the speeds were always at least twice as slow. With my new Core 2 Duo processor with VT-x, the virtual machine can let the real processor take on most of the processing needs. If I had a “Core i7″ Intel processor, or something else with Nehalem, I would also have Nested Paging which can give as much as a 1/3 increase in speeds.

But never-mind, because VT-x gives me near-native performance, which is absolutely necessary for Gentoo. Another good thing to have is a bigger-than-8G hard-drive. (In other words, the default Linux size is not good enough.) I gave the machine 512M out of my 4G total, which is more than enough for a Linux desktop. I turned on 3D acceleration and gave it 64M of VRAM, because I want to try KDE4.3. Everything else are defaults, pretty much.

[Correcting] The Current State of Gentoo August 4, 2009

My last blog post was the first one I’ve really just started writing on a feeling, and expressed it in full. Unfortunately, what came off in the post was all negative, without much hope for resolution, or even without anything positive about the projects mentioned.

So, here is a continuation of the last blog post I’ve written, in which I go over again what was bad, but also what was good, and how the bad can be corrected. Probably what the first post should’ve been.

The Current State of Gentoo August 3, 2009

(Edit: Please read my next blog post after or in stead of reading this one.)

Here we are, with working images, and we’ve begun to look into how to better make our images and the contents within more like (and simultaneously more compatible with) official Gentoo. A lot of that has involved us using tools provided by official Gentoo, such as catalyst and eselect. A lot of things, however, cannot be accomplished with plain Gentoo, such as catching portage before it tries to emerge something to make sure the file-system is set up correctly. It took us over half a year to finally “catch up” with Gentoo Embedded and actually reach the limits of what Gentoo provides officially.

Let’s step back a month or so, and go down another path: Gentoo Prefix. This excellent project gives people like me hope for Gentoo where there is none. I installed this to OSX, and I have had all kinds of fun hacking my programs into existence, as I’m sure my readers know from previous posts about Pidgin. In fact, it is because of Prefix that I have begun to scratch the surface of the ebuild world with many a Prefix bug report which often (I think) ended up in an ebuild/patch submission.

My experience with each project has been somewhat different, and somewhat disturbing too. What I have found with both projects, I believe I can trace straight up into Gentoo, and may be what is driving more than a few users and developers away from the once-very-popular distribution. I will attempt to describe what I have found, but please keep in mind that, as authoritative as I may sound, all of what follows is largely my own opinion based on what I’ve seen.

The Secret to Pidgin on OSX with Gentoo Prefix July 12, 2009

OK, there’s no secrets really. It’s just a matter of avoiding potholes and fixing bugs enough so you can work around them.

So, first off, 2.5.7 is the version I use, even though 2.5.8 is out. 2.5.8 has its own set of problems, and if I recall correctly they’re not as easy to work around. Second, I use the following USE flags:

net-im/pidgin prediction perl gtk -ncurses gnutls debug aqua spell
x11-libs/cairo svg
app-text/enchant -hunspell aspell

Pidgin requires cairo with svg, so that’s a no-brainer. Currently ncurses wide-character support is broken, either in Pidgin or ncurses itself, so I avoid that altogether with the “-ncurses” USE flag. Also, if you want a spell-checker, aspell is much more stable than hunspell on Gentoo Prefix right now, and does the same thing. (Besides, other things use aspell more than hunspell, so it’s one less library to install.) That explains the “-hunspell aspell” USE flags.

There’s one USE flag there you may not recognize for Pidgin. It’s “aqua”. This USE flag was put there by me. This is the show-stopper that had be running in circles for quite a while. In order to get proper GTK+ aqua support, you’ll have to patch Pidgin and Pidgin’s ebuild. You can find all the resources you need at the Gentoo bug I made, or in a handily compressed file here, update: or, better yet, in my Gentoo Prefix overlay. With these in your Gentoo overlay, and the proper USE flags above, pidgin will install correctly. Huzzah!

The Secret to Unmasking in Gentoo (and Prefix too) July 4, 2009

If you ever dip your toes into Gentoo Prefix, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that a lot of your software is either missing or masked. If you’re sharp, or have lots of experience already with Gentoo, you’ll also notice that your profile comes with the ~ unstable keyword by default. You see, Gentoo Prefix is a pretty small project in comparison to Gentoo itself, as far as I can tell, so not as much testing goes into every package, and not every package can be and/or is currently handled by Gentoo Prefix.

Let’s assume, however, that you really don’t care, like me. Let’s assume you want to try things and out and, like every other good citizen of Linux, you plan on tracking down and reporting every bug you find to the Gentoo/Alt bug tracker. You will most certainly try to emerge something that hasn’t been reasonably stabilized yet, like Pidgin. (I will go into more length on Pidgin later. For now, a summary would be “not for the faint of heart”.) If you’re running an x64 Prefix, just about anything you try to emerge will be keyworded or masked. Not discouraged, you’ll start adding the appropriate entries to your package.keywords and package.unmask directories. After your fifteenth entry, or third round of emerge’s, it gets pretty tedious.

My MacBook Pro (v5,3) and Gentoo Prefix June 28, 2009

As noted in a previous blog post, I am now an owner of the latest (as of this writing) 15″ MacBook Pro, the 2.66GHz model, and, let me tell you, it’s a superb laptop. (I don’t think I’ve gotten this excited since I took home my Wii.) I wanted to go in-depth on each thing I’ve done with it, so instead of covering the same topics twice, I decided to summarize my experience here, and write in-depth in other posts instead.

How has my experience been overall? OSX is not flawless, but it’s brilliant. For example, I’m constantly switching from Ctrl+Tab to Cmd+Tab to Cmd+` to Ctrl+A Ctrl+A depending on the application I’m using. (Ctrl+Tab for tab switching, Cmd+Tab for app switching, Cmd+` for window-in-an-app switching, and Ctrl+A Ctrl+A for terminal screen switching.) Another example is Finder. The fact that the Open dialog looks exactly like, and yet is different from, other Finder dialogs makes me do summersaults in my head when I try to do something in Open that I did in Finder or vice-versa. The library of software for OSX is lacking, but I supplement it with Prefix (more on that later). The hardware is sheer awesome, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to leave it now.

Gentoo for Pandora Down, but not Out June 9, 2009

A recent comment in a previous post (I have readers!?) reminded me to update my blog with the latest on Gentoo for Pandora.

First of all, some good news: our first truly working, truly stable release is out, v0.0.3.

Besides that, though, we’ve decided to work Gentoo Embedded into our strategy. viridior and I had a chat over Skype, and viridior pointed out that our project really isn’t replaced, because Gentoo Embedded never plans (or doesn’t appear to be planning) to provide support for further additions beyond a simple stage3 build. Indeed, Gentoo Embedded has a broad focus: bring Gentoo to embedded platforms. Our focus will be on the Pandora, so we’ll be able to provide more “specialized” documentation and support through our project.

Also, another thing viridior pointed out is Gentoo Embedded is more or less doing us a favor by taking the responsibility of the base variants (the images we use to build all the other images) off our shoulders. All we’ll have to do is grab the latest stage3 and we’re already halfway home.

So, all thanks to viridior, I’m back on my feet, and the project continues to move along!

Gentoo for Pandora Replaced by Gentoo Embedded June 5, 2009

There’s an official Gentoo project caleld Gentoo Embedded which is supposed to handle porting Gentoo to various embedded systems. When viridior and I started Gentoo for Pandora, they were not handling armv7a processors (yet), so our project filled in a gap .

However, I’ve been recently informed that Gentoo Embedded will receive a BeagleBoard before too long, and they’ll use their tool called “autobuild” to generate up-to-date stage3’s on a regular basis. This is essentially what viridior and I have been working towards.

When another group of people come along and completely invalidate the reasons you’ve been working on a project for 4+ months and you think is going to benefit a lot of people long-term, you’re pretty much done. I’m going to run through the motions of releasing our latest 0.0.3-rc5 image, but after that we’ll have to move on and figure out what we can add that Gentoo Embedded hasn’t already done.