Intrepid Blog » gentoo

find: invalid predicate `-delete'

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:30:31 +0000

Check for a stray version of find in /bin.

“waiting for x server to begin accepting connections”

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:19:58 +0000

Try DisallowTCP = false under [Security] in /etc/X11/Sessions/Gnome/custom.conf or similar for other window managers. Obviously this isn’t a very desirable solution, emerge --emptytree gnome might do the trick too.

(and obviously this might be just one of the many underlying causes for the very generic symptom of X not accepting connections)

wlan0_rename

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:07:49 +0000

If udev has problems assigning wlan0 to wlan0 (as given by the kernel) and instead lets you end up with an ugly wlan0_rename or alike, you might want to check whether you’ve got stray udev config files in /etc/udev/rules.d/ like 70-persistent-net.rules.

X61s (1)

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:35:47 +0000

I’ve been the lucky owner of a Thinkpad X61s for a bit more than a week now. It’s a light and small 12.1 inch notebook. It’s structurally very solid and has got almost the same full size keyboard as my 14.1inch T60. (The enter, tab, shift and alike keys are shortened in width).

The installation of Gentoo went quite smooth. For those interested the xorg.conf, make.conf and kernel .config I use.

Internal mic/speaker and external jacks; video; DRI and AIGLX; USB; PCMCIA; wireless; fingerprint reader and ethernet all seem to work just fine. I haven’t tested the firewire, ssd slot, bluetooth and n-capabilities of the wireless yet.

In comparison with my T60 the volume and the backlight buttons aren’t hardware controlled. Gnome recognizes the volume buttons, but not the backlight ones. I’m still working on those.

ssmtp segfault in sendmail on Gentoo

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:39:52 +0000

Disabling the md5sum useflag might fix it.

Thanks to Bram for the tip.

rebuild-scm-ebuilds

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:51:37 +0000

Two very simple ruby scripts (I love ruby!) and a little bash script that searches all ebuilds with 9999 in the name, orders them by dependencies and then emerge -a them. Very useful when you got a lot of 9999 ebuilds.

ati-drivers-8.33.6 for Gentoo

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:29:29 +0000

This is a slightly adjusted 25.3 ebuild that will give you the 8.33.6 ati-drivers for Gentoo. Yes, it’s dirty. They aren’t in the main tree yet because they are considered broken, although it works just fine for me.

Download: ati-drivers-overlay-8.33.6.tar.bz2

Extract them to an overlay.

Update, the 8.33.6 drivers are in the mainline tree now, so you should use those instead of mine.

XGL take 2

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 23:01:22 +0000

I tried to get AIGLX to work on my Thinkpad yesterday. AIGLX is an API similar to XGL, but is a better implementation. Unfortunately AIGLX requires implementation by the video-card driver (which is good because it allows more performance), but the proprietary drivers of ati still doesn’t support it. (nvidia’s do, note to myself: get nvidia next time).

So I had to revert to XGL. A lot has changed since the last time I installed XGL. Other gentoo overlays, other windows managers, other hacks.

I used the gentoo-xeffects overlay to get Xgl.

Installing Xgl was a lot more straight forward and less of a problem than it used to be. An emerge and writing a simple startxgl script was enough.

The compiz-quinstorm patchset seems to have evolved to a proper branch of the compositing window manager, now called Beryl. It also includes a nice settings manager now.

Even hibernation and suspend finally seem to work.

A nice screenshot:

One thing left to do: integrate Xgl into xdm.

(auto)mounting removable media as user

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:46:26 +0000

I’ve always been bothered by the fact that you need to be root to mount anything (like an usb stick). It can be solved a bit by setting up udev rules and putting a specific device in /etc/fstab, but that only works for that single usb stick. Pretty annoying.

Googling only gives you stupid and silly solution (like allowing users to mount /dev/sd[a-z] — security risk).

Luckily I’ve recently been pointed to ivman, which is an automounter. It automatically mounts removable media for you in /media.

I looked at the internals of ivman, and noticed that it uses pmount, which is a wrapper around mount which allows users to mount removable media on a /media folder. Great!

Btw, you need to be in the plugdev group to use pmount.

Update It seems that gnome-mount also works fine when you’re in the plugdev group. Gnome-mount does about the same as pmount with the advantage that gnome-mount has got the nice gui integration everywhere in gnome.

T60 (2)

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 22:57:57 +0000

After 2 days installing gentoo on my great T60 I’ve accomplished quite a lot so far:

WiFi works. 4 seperate components (userland, firmware, kernel module and yet another kernel module) increase complexity a bit. Although the fifth component caused trouble — I forgot to tweak conf.d/net
Radeon X1400 and video card worked almost directly after using aticonf — nice! When I upgraded to xorg-server-1.1, though, I got a few crashes when closing X in a not-so-nice manner.
Using the synaptics drivers my touchpad now support drag’n'drop, right and middle mouse click and scrolling emulation. Still got to find a way to bind the thinkpad shortcut to disable/enable the point or pad.
Finally got the DVD rewriter to work. It seems I overlooked one little stupid generic E-IDE option in the kernel config.
Bluetooth and infrared should work — haven’t got the gadgets to try them out
Never even saw a PCCard, so didn’t even bother to look into ti
Software suspend (hibernation) doens’t work yet, but I definitely be working on that.