Recent blog entries for tod

CREATE_HOME was inadvertantly set to 'yes' in Gentoo's stock login.defs. Changed it to 'no' as it is a RedHat'ism that the stock shadow package doesn't support. useradd from the stock shadow package generates a warning message which was a constant source of confused Gentoo users, if CREATE_HOME is set to 'yes'. Learned something new from that.

Got R and octave working for Gentoo and cleaned up some user contributed ebuilds.

Hmmmm......journeyer? Don't know about that. Flattering, but it is amusing that one certification has that much influence. It may be a coat-tail effect from the increasing interest in Gentoo Linux.

New baby has been taking a lot of time, but have been trying to take care of some bugs and some simpler ebuilds. The tougher ebuilds are slow going, spice is a bitch, especially. Really need to get a working ebuild for lapack commited as many useful crunchy apps depend or benefit from it. Will probably borrow heavily from Debian for that :).

Even GREATER news! I am now the proud father of Jacob Michael as of 00:12 CST 19 Jan. 2002. All 7 lbs. 8 oz, 20 inches of him. Needless to say, I haven't done much the last few days but dote and change diapers. I'm saving all the black tarry stuff so I can pave my driveway :)

Good news! I have been given a "developer" account for Gentoo Linux.

Hooray!

I guess the other developers were getting tired of committing the ebuilds and patches I was submitting :). I am very excited about being a Gentoo developer. It is very satisfying when others find your contributions of value.

Daniel Robbins released a new version of portage last night. 'emerge update --world' will now automagically update all installed packages to their latest versions. This allows me to sort of "make tod's world" to use a BSD analogy, :). Gentoo is really shaping up to be a very nice distribution. I have created a GNOME profile based on the Gnome Installation Guide, but the new portage probably supplants its usefulness. Still might be useful for an initial merge of everything Gnome though.

Submitted a ghex ebuild and found a simple dependency conflict bug related to freetype-1.3.1 between the abiword and gfontview ebuilds

Gentoo has a very nice build "sandbox" working now. The sandbox prevents an ebuild from writing any changes outside of the temporary install directory during configuration and compiling of package tarballs. A previous ebuild submission of mine violated the sandbox when building the pdf manuals because a font it needed wasn't prebuilt during the tetex installation. (I got this bug assigned to me!).

I love it when I wake up in the morning and my problems are magically solved! A gentoo developer, azarah, updated the tetex ebuild so that it created all the fonts during installation. All I had to do to fix the moldy sandbox violation was to change the dependencies to depend on the new tetex ebuild. Sometimes life is easy.

Submitted updated swig and fltk ebuilds. If I can get an ebuild wrapped around Jython, Gentoo will have all the backends that are supported by anygui. :)

Submitted wxPython and anygui ebuilds to a Gentoo developer and they were accepted into the portage tree.

Tried out the Conexant linmodem drivers . The hsfserial.o module locked my computer. The others loaded ok. My modem has pci vendor:device number of 127a:4312. 127a:4311 is listed as supported. Off by one :(

My graphviz-1.7.15.ebuild, Imaging-1.1.2.ebuild, ReportLab-1.11.ebuild, gramps-0.7.0.ebuild, fortune-mod-9708.ebuild, humorixfortunes-1.3.ebuild, and netcdf-3.5.0.diff update patch were committed to CVS and are now in the official Gentoo portage tree.

muted yea

Gentoo has a bugzilla based issue tracking system up at bugs.gentoo.org now. Makes it much easier to keep track of stuff now. You can submit new ebuilds to it, also, and they won't fade from memory like submitting to the mailing-list.

Submitted quite a few ebuilds for Gentoo Linux last night. They were for python imaging library, reportlab, and gramps-0.7.0

During the course of making the gramps ebuild, also, made a trivial patch (added some ifdef's) for gramps that allowed it to be compiled against python-2.2. Submitted the patch to the upstream author.

I've decided I like the DragMod theme for sawfish. I have tabbed everything now. Tabbed browser (galeon), tabbed terminal (multi-gnome-terminal), tabbed chatting (xchat), and now tabbed windows (DragMod). I like tabs! (I sound like a '70's diet cola commercial.) The sawfish extensions that are used with it are what make it really nice. Might have to make some mods to the button images though.

5 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!