My new personal domain is up!

I have successfully migrated all the contents of my developer space to my new personal domain: http://www.deathwing00.org In the upcoming weeks I will make some improvements and upload pretty interesting stuff, like some new nagios plugins. I will be keeping my blog in Gentoo for now.

Apart from that, I plan to go to FOSDEM this year. I will probably go with my own group this time, as I do not want last day surprises. It is not that I do not trust the current people organizing the event, but I had bad experiences in the past and I would prefer to have it my way this time. Anyway, see you all there!

New version of media-gfx/digikam

You can now find on ~arch media-gfx/digikam-0.9.3-beta1, which now requires of media-libs/libkdcraw-0.1.2 (just bumped) and has a new dependency: media-libs/jasper.

This will probably be the last release before KDE4 and it includes the following features:

  • The camera interface is now used to import new images into collections.
  • There are new options to download pictures and delete them from the camera at the same time.
  • Support of Drag & Drop to download files from camera window to album window.
  • A progress bar has been added to indicate the available space in the Album Library Path.

Have fun!

Finally back for good

It’s been a while since I was last around. I finally got back some free time after completing my Master in Security Engineering and back from holidays as well: three awesome weeks in Greece.

You might be guessing correctly, my system is badly outdated. I’m at this precise moment completing the latest updates and after that I’ll have to update my CVS local repository.

In the meanwhile, I took the chance to get back on the rails and I have fixed some broken posts in the Gentoo Forums on the Greek category, which got unreadable after the UTF-8 conversion.

Soon enough I’ll be back to KDE maintenance and Bugday, unless anything unexpected happens again.

See you in the battlefields fellow developers and users!

Back from Mountain View, CA

After a few days in Mountain View, CA, I am back to Spain. The town is very nice… and very extensive. I never imagined that the fact that there were no blocks of appartments would imply that a city of so few inhabitants could occupy such a large extension.

The purpose of the trip will remain secret, at least for now, even though some people might already presume the reasons…

Apart from that, I can state for the few days I was there, that the city itself is safe and that their inhabitants are very kind and are always eager to give some directions to lost visitors… 😉

It has been a great experience and I hope that I will be able to repeat it in a near future. We’ll see about that.

I also got a nice driving experience from that… I am used to manual transmission cars and it was the first time that I had to drive an automatic one. I am not used to such an amount of horsepower either, however it was pretty quick for me to master the car itself. What was harder was to not get lost among so many roads and streets and highways. Maybe the signals on the road, as they are different from Europe, made my life a bit more tricky. Anyhow, it’s just to get used to it; the last day I was already comfortable with it and surprisingly I didn’t get lost even once! 🙂

Back to Spain now, back to work, back to Gentoo. Yes, I know that I missed April’s bugday, but I assure you it was worth it! B)

See ya everyone on IRC and on the forums.

Now with a nice overlay

I had a few custom ebuilds that I don’t want them to hit the main tree. Until today I had two packages inside Flameeyes’s overlay, as I didn’t expect to create any more. However, I’ve seen that it’s just a matter of time until I create new ebuilds that should not hit the tree, either because they are unstable or because they are live ebuilds.

In any case, Markus Ullmann (jokey) was very kind to set up an overlay for private use. You can find my newly created overlay (it’s still missing some configuration, but it’s functional) if you follow the link below:

Deathwing00’s Dev Overlay

Remember as well that I advise you to use app-portage/layman in order to fetch the contents of the overlay.

Gentoo branding on applications!?

My fellow users,

lately, some of us have been discussing about the needs of a common Gentoo branding on some applications (i.e. KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice,…). Currently, every application has either no branding at all or its own branding theme.

In an initial step towards a unified Gentoo branding for applications, we need to solve some technical details, with the help of our fellow users, with your help.

The first issue, my fellow users, is to decide whether you want such branding on your applications and if you would like it to be installed by default or not. Please, be so kind to review the following forums thread, give your opinion and post your feedback: Forums Thread #529836.

Additionally, if you are a KDE user, be so kind to review bug #157519, test it, give your opinion, provide your own content, etc.

Thanks for your time. By the way, the previous bug counts towards Gentoo Bugday.

Everyone thank Stefan Briesenick for his fast reaction on bumping media-gfx/exiv2 to version 0.12: Now you can enjoy the latest media-gfx/digikam version!

Today I got desperate at the moment I noticed that I could not submit media-gfx/digikam-0.9.0_rc2. The reason was that the dependency on media-gfx/exiv2-0.12 is now enforced on this version. Luckily, Stefan Briesenick (sbriesen) quickly responded to my petition in bug #157515 and bumped media-gfx/exiv2 to the required version in a most swift and efficient way. Now everyone can enjoy the latest media-gfx/digikam and media-plugins/digikamimageplugins.

Thank you Stefan!

Version bumping day

Dear users,

today I have bumped media-gfx/digikam, media-plugins/digikamimageplugins, net-p2p/ktorrent and app-cdr/k3b. I expect that you will delight these version bumps. Remarkable changes go below:

media-gfx/digikam-0.9.0_rc1
For this release of digikam, upstream makes it clear that it is strongly advised to use media-gfx/exiv2-0.12 which is not released yet. In the portage tree, the latest version is 0.11. To make it clearer, they use an unreleased SVN version of exiv2. Fortunately, digikam seems to work fine with version 0.11 and you will not need to make use of any live ebuilds. Other dependencies have been updated, list follows:

  • >=media-libs/libpng-1.2
  • >=media-libs/libgphoto2-2.2
  • >=media-libs/tiff-3.8.2
  • >=media-libs/lcms-1.14

As advised, the minimum KDE required version is now 3.5.x. The main reason of this release is the large quantity of fixed bugs.

media-plugins/digikamimageplugins-0.9.0_rc1
With every digikam release, we get a digikamimageplugins release. The most remarkable of this release is again a large quantity of fixed bugs. This version of digikamimageplugins requires digikam of at least the same version.

net-p2p/ktorrent-2.1_beta1
As a downstream maintainer, I have removed the znow patch for this version (which remains for version 2.0.3), because of the fact that upstream decided to stay put and leave alone CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Some interesting new features of this release:

  • Switched the GUI to an IDEAl style GUI (like KDevelop)
  • WebGUI plugin
  • RSS plugin
  • Improvements in down and upload performance
  • Grouping feature to put torrents into groups
  • Improved search plugin, which now allows multiple searches

app-cdr/k3b-1.0_beta1
I have added a new optional runtime dependency to this release of k3b. The dependency is known as media-video/emovix and will allow to burn eMoviX images with k3b.

As for the upstream release itself, it includes many improvements, fixes, and even GUI changes over preview 1. Looks like the day for the final release is closer!

That’s all for today, have a nice bump-day 🙂

Another grub patch for kde-base/kdm, version 3.5.5 this time

Again, I was forced to regenerate a patch for a newly released version. This time it was kde-base/kdm-3.5.5. Many KDE users that use kde-base/kdm together with sys-boot/grub need to use the functionality of the `grub-set-default‘ command. The problems of the integration of the bootloader (grub) with the display manager (kdm) have been notable. Although the solution is provided in bug #63800 of KDE, it was not applied in SVN yet, and that brought me to a report in bug #153566. I regenerated the patch and committed a new revision bump to the tree. I expect upstream to handle this issue soon. If you are really interested in this patch to be applied upstream, I advise you to get into that KDE bug and ask for it. Maybe next time I won’t be here to regenerate that patch 😉

KMess-1.5 pre1 hits the tree with LINGUAS support

I have commited a recent pre-release version of net-im/kmess and I added LINGUAS support to it. The peculiarity of this ebuild is that it provides three different character sets for Chinese input (two additional: zh_CN.GB18030 and zh_CN.GB2312). For users that need Chinese support, simply adding zh_CN to their LINGUAS will make all three character sets get installed. Another peculiarity is that the Estonian locale is called ‘ee’ instead of ‘et’, however users that need Estonian support do not have to worry about it, as I added a check so that when ‘et’ is present in LINGUAS, the ‘ee.po’ file is used.

This new version of KMess not only contains many fixes for various bugs (some of them annoying to the user), but it also provides the new protocols MSNP12 and MSNC5 together with new interface improvements. Let’s mention that among the many new additions, users can now receive winks, send and receive nudges and use direct connection support, which results in faster file transfers.

If you want to try this pre-release version of KMess, you will find it keyworded for ~x86 ~amd64 ~ppc and ~sparc.