Month: February 2006

Kernel Sources

For all of those awaiting a more permenant fix to bug #85559, this has now been done. Hopefully you vanilla-sources users (specifically) will benefit from a big bandwidth saving.

Also on a similar note, there has been a lot of confusion recently about 2.4/2.6 kernel versions and headers. Let me clear this up.

Many moons ago portage didnt have support for cascading profiles, although the 2.5 kernel had just been made 2.6 and progress was being made on stabalising support for it in Gentoo. The issues we had meant that we had to rename the 2.6 versions into a new package. For example: linux-headers contained 2.4, and linux26-headers contained 2.6.
This meant that managing the dependancies within ebuilds was awkward and amongst other things, far from ideal.
It was also an illogical seperation of what is fundementally the same thing. You dont for example see vim5 vim6 etc, you just have vim.

Now then, what we did recently, with the help of cascading profiles was amalgamate these packages into their relevant counter-parts. Therefore, we now have vanilla-sources-2.{0,2,4,6}* and linux-headers-2.{4,6}* and it is up to the profiles you run to manage which versions should be unmasked for you.
As part of this move we also moved to 2.6 by default for many architectures. As a result, and in true gentoo philosophy, you will find underneath your profile either a 2.6 or most likely a 2.4 subdirectory. If you link your profile to that directory instead then you will no longer be forced to update to 2.6, however I do encourage you to upgrade if you have no valid technical reason to stay.

So with this concludes:
emerge yourfavourite-sources will emerge 2.4, OR 2.6 depending on your profile. Most likely 2.6
emerge linux-headers will merge the appropriate headers.

IF you are upgrading from 2.4 to the newer 2.6 as part of this move, PLEASE PLEASE ensure your new kernel is installed and running along side your new 2.6 headers, since there are several reports of random segfaults occuring with 2.6 headers on a 2.4 kernel.

If you find that its installing a version you dont want, then just relink your /etc/make.profile to ${PORTDIR}/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.0/XX where XX is 2.4 (or 2.6 on different archs in some cases).

Hopefully this has now brought some clarity to the situation 🙂

tasting that fresh mono goodness.

So its been a while since I last blogged, and I’ve decided to give in on that whole “I promise to blog more often” routine which just doesn’t work, but after having a few things happen recently which someone might actually like to read about, I decided to write a new installment of my crazed thoughts to entertain those religeous few 🙂

I’ve been looking for a simplistic, yet powerful Podcast client for quite some time now, without any of the ones i’ve found (iPodder/Juice, Rhythmbox etc) being simple and specific enough. I fairly recently came across monopod which I wrote an ebuild for (0.3) and after finding a bug open for it on bugzilla, submitted it to portage.

At the same time, I decided to clean up v0.4 and got right into mono development. So far I’ve fixed up the deprecated code, fixed and partially re-worked the iPod support, cleaned up a lot of smaller UI niggles and started writing a plugin system fairly similar to Banshee’s to support automatic sync to iPod, daap, etc etc.

I’ve been in touch as well with Edd Dumbill and hope to start putting more time into turning monopod into a very convenient lightweight, but extensible podcast client. Of course, the fact that Banshee (which is awesome by the way, thanks Aaron) is actually getting a lot of attention from people writing podcast plugins for it means that monopod might end up being fairly short-lived. But obviously it has its purpose and I would never encourage playback support in it by standard anyways.

Anyways, on a totally different note Tim (Plasmaroo) lisa (lisa – funnily enough) and I met up in York for a bit of a gentoo get-together with a few other people on Saturday. It’s nice to catch up with people face to face, and Tim’s ability to shout russian in Pizza Hut impressed me! We met a rather interesting poet in the bookstore and ended up chatting about the ups and downs of (iirc) Jasper, XML, XSLT, Why not to use JavaScript, and then participating in some amateur filmography at the top of the stairs! 🙂

It was fun, hope to do it again sometime. The opportunity will come sooner than expected too with an unofficial meet in manchester shortly and a Gentoo UK gathering planned sometime near late May/June in London. Of course, everyone will be welcome and all interested parties should express their interest by badgering George (cokehabit) on #gentoo-uk 😉 – I’m curious about rough numbers as I’m sure George is as well.

So, I could go on for a while with all the things I’ve been working on recently, but instead I’ll give it a break and leave some beef for the next few days 🙂

Also to note, David Nielsen (Lovechild, some of you may remember him from his gentoo days) has been sexually abusing a lot of the UK developers recently. Word of warning for those tempted to visit us in London 😉