Getting back in the habit
After a much longer break than id originally planned im back, and hopefully using my shiny new Gentoo install a lot more than previously, thanks largely to a new motherboard, an RMA’d hard disk and the lovely windows Vista deciding its no longer going to play nicely and instead will start ignoring my other hard drives, not load certain programs at all and generally act like a dying windows install.
And so im back with Gentoo and playing (or more accurately, fighting) with catalyst and trying once again to build my own livecd. This time i actually seem to be getting somewhere, largely thanks to the awesome System Rescue CD and the hard work of its author. So far ive actually started to understand how he builds the sysresccd’s and have started making progress getting catalyst to build my own.
So, you may ask, whats actually going to be different? So far what i have included is the following:
- Moved to using the excellent Zen Sources kernel (so a 2.6.28 kernel).
- Currently building using ~ARCH and the Funtoo portage tree.
- Updated to using the 2008.0 profiles.
- Moved to using XFCE instead of the ugly jwm (least thats what i think it was).
- Support for Wicd to allow easy network configuration (especially wireless networks!).
Im always open to ideas and suggestions so if you would like to see a particular feature or program included, then please do leave a comment, one thing that definately is on my TODO list is adding sound support, most likely using OSS v4.1 as its fairly good at automatically detecting your soundcard when it trys to load the modules, which suits a livecd fairly well.
Gentoo 2008.0
Just incase you’ve been living under a stone for the past few months, Gentoo’s 2008.0 release is finally upon us.
A big congrats to all involved, its been a long journey but well worth it.
Highlights include:
The 2008.0 final release is out! Code-named “It’s got what plants crave,” this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD. LiveDVDs are not available for x86 or amd64, although they may become available in the future. The 2008.0 release also includes updated versions of many packages already available in your ebuild tree.
- Updated installer: The installer now only performs networkless installations using the packages and ebuild tree on the LiveCD. It also contains numerous fixes for extended and logical partitions.
- Improved hardware support: Moving to the 2.6.24 kernel added many new drivers for hardware released since the 2007.0 release.
- Complete rework of profiles: Restructuring profiles allowed significant cleanup of redundancies, reducing developer maintenance and confusion. The difference for you is that profiles now appear in /usr/portage/profiles/ under default/linux/ instead of default-linux/. See the upgrading guide for more details.
- Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD: To save space, the LiveCDs switched to the smaller Xfce environment. This means that a binary installation using the LiveCD will install Xfce, but you’re still free to build GNOME or KDE from source.
- No LiveDVDs on x86 or amd64: In the interest of getting the release out, the release engineering team decided to postpone LiveDVDs because of problems in their generation. They may show up later—if so, we’ll let you know.
- Updated packages: Highlights of the 2008.0 release include Portage 2.1.4.4, a 2.6.24 kernel, Xfce 4.4.2, gcc 4.1.2 and glibc 2.6.1.
A big thanks goes out to our release engineering team members for their hard work over many months to turn 2008.0 into reality.
Get the new release from our “Get Gentoo!” page.
Exherbo – Gentoo 2.0?
After first seeing it mentioned in irc last night, i took a look at former gentoo dev, kloeri’s current project called Exherbo which seems very much to be Gentoo 2.0. So far its got a number of former Gentoo dev’s onboard, including Ciaranm, who, regardless of his sometimes lacking people skills, *is* a very competent programmer. It seems their big aim is creating a gentoo-esque distro thats been built with all the experience available from working on Gentoo for years coupled with a desire to build a forward looking distro that shuns the massive amount of legacy code that other linux distros have picked up over the years.
Surprisigly though, what would appear to have been a low-key announcement in kloeris blog, has somehow been picked up by both slashdot and more surprisingly, TheRegister. While Slashdot takes the usual fairly negative view which it seems to have towards anything even *vaguely* linked to Gentoo. It was nice to read the Reg piece though and not see a totally negative or sarcastic article, they almost sound positive about exherbo!
I have to say im intrigued at the very least and am interested to see where this goes, especially as im a quiet supporter of Paludis (note to anyone reading this, im supporter not a fanboy! 
), and have liked how it has forced portage to actually document how everything works via the EAPI’s, which makes it easier to figure out if a certain behaviour is a bug or actually a feature!
While ive no intention to actually try and install Exherbo at this point (as im just a mere user!), i do intend to watch and see what it grows into, and whether it can fulfil its rather lofty aims.
Possibly the best use for the eee-pc yet
I couldnt resist posting this, everytime i think xkcd couldnt get any better they go post something like this!
Of course, now xkcd posted this, how long till someone goes off and actually makes this 
(incase the image doesnt show, heres the original xkcd post)
Living in CSV Hell
As part of my new job im left dealing with a whole series of databases, and one of the regular jobs is to update them from various sources. Normally that involves extracting data as a CSV file from the main database, which then needs to be edited and checking in excel because all the table names need changing so that when you import it into the database system used within the office it matches the fields used there. Also the conversion to csv seems to introduce random characters in fields, so as part of the process you also have to check all the data and make sure it doesnt contain any of these random characters before finally importing it and hoping everything works.
Now incase this didnt sound too painful, while most of the time there are only a few new records, im about to get to the one time of year where we receive in excess of 2500 new records. And while in previous years it may have been accepted that you need to manually check them, i *really* dont want to have to waste a day (and my sanity!) checking all this data.
So we get to my problem(s), not only am i stuck using windows (bad!), but ive also got a crappy CRT monitor (my eyes!), and finally i have to spend half my time working with a custom frontend to an oracle database which is written in java and helpfully launches from inside IE and is so obtuse and badly designed i feel sick everytime i use it!
However, getting away from my severe java allergies :p im hitting a roadblock in terms of automating at least some of this, originally i was going to try out my python skills, till i realised i really dont know anything, so i resorted to using PHP. In both cases though, despite some googling there seem to be very few, if any, decent tutorials/guides to working with CSV files. So my question plea is for any guides/tutorials or any decent documentation for working with CSV files in PHP. Im open to pretty much anything as the best ive found is for pretty much just opening the file and reading it.
Now all i have to do is dust off my PHP skills and hope i can throw something together that works!
Welcome to Planet larry, and damn you real life!
Well, i figured i should at least post something here 
Thanks to beandog for adding me planet larry, although lately my work with linux has taken a downturn. For those who somehow found my blog beforehand (ie. no one) would have known ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Thats had to take a backseat for now, its still something i want to do, even if using catalyst can be a pain at times. My thinking now is that im going to save myself some trouble and use sysrescuecd as a base as they too use catalyst and seem to have working X autoconfig (which was my main stumbling block), they also have a few other cool bits that i like, so it makes sense to start with them.
Ive also started a new job lately which has left me with more free time, but due to an early start im more tired so what free time i have is being used up with me being tired and lazy, lately thats meant playing eve-online and not doing stuff i should be.
Im determined to get something done, who knows, maybe il finish off this livecd soon!
Slightly delayed
Ok, so i made a slight oopsie when building the x86 livecd, seems i forgot that building a x86 chroot on amd64 system might cause problems, id seen the solution, read it then promptly ignore it.
So after emerging setarch as told and lauching the 32bit chroot with linux32 im now recompiling everything to make sure there are no hidden problems, so only 694 packages to go 
Building a Gentoo based livecd
So, ive finally managed to find a bit of free time now that work allows me the whole weekend to myself so ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Ive previously tried using catalyst, the official tool used by gentoo to build their livecd’s but its not exactly intuitive so ive been using a somewhat more manual way as detailed over on the gentoo wiki.
As with many wiki articles through its less of a guide and more of a jumble of ideas thrown onto a wiki page, which is a shame as if you dig through the crap there are quite a few handy tips and the basis for some scripts to simplify the process a bit. Ive taken many of these and hacked them around a bit to create something a bit easier to reuse. At the minute theres not much there, really just scripts to automate mounting, unmounting and generating the squashfs and cd image however ive a few more ideas id like to add based on stuff ive found useful while working on my cds.
Hopefully il have a basic x86 cd ready to go sometime in the next few days, sadly i suspect i broke the amd64 one when i got a little bit carried away tried to use openrc/baselayout2 on the livecd, while mostly it worked a few of the changes seem to have broken the hardware detection scripts used and i cant find any fixes, so looks like im starting from scratch again
What i am trying to decide on though is what to include on the livecds in terms of software, so far ive got networkmanager and possibly OSSv4 (initially disabled, but could be a nice way for people to test if it works for them), after that though i get a bit stuck, il probably throw in some more wifi drivers and thats it, im open to suggestions through
Creative X-fi on linux using OSSv4
Well, ive been twiddling my thumbs for months waiting for someone, somewhere to answer my prayers and create a working linux x-fi driver. Creative did release an ‘official’ beta driver last year but ive never had any luck with it like a large number of other people.
However it would appear that our prayers have been answered, at least in part. As with the latest release of OSS there is a basic x-fi driver, and whats more, it works! Its not amazing, currently only stereo sound is available but it works, and works ok therefore im happy.
If your interested in getting it running on gentoo then take a look at the official OSS forums as there is an overlay available that has working ebuilds in it.
Ive also just finished putting together a patched ebuild that adds support for OSS v4 to gstreamer so that sound works inside gnome, take a look on the downloads page for details (many thanks to seawright on the OSS forums for the patch).
One Step closer, now i need ideas
So im making progress in getting this site working, although most of my tinkering has been behind the scenes lately, but i now have subversion and trac working (for anyone who cares trac is running on http://dev.monkeydust.net/trac) although i did hit some snags getting trac running in the root directory of dev.monkeydust.net so for now its running in /trac, perhaps il get round to taking another look at some point. Of course it doesnt matter much at the minute as i currently dont have anything to host there!
With any luck il have some more time to actually devote to learning python and i might even make a start on one of the many program ideas ive got bouncing in my head, so far im trying to get my head around the layman source code as id like to try and make it work with paludis (while playman works, its not as pretty as layman and wont remove repos for you), my other idea is a basic pygtk front end to tpb (thinkpad buttons) to make it a bit easier to control what button does what.
If anyone has any ideas though im open to other suggestions for useful (basic) tools, anything that will force me to learn more python is good
-
Planet Gentoo- Diego E. Pettenò: The debugged debugger — part 2 July 4, 2009So after my last night’s post I finally found the problem. Actually, my mixing in the new system libbfd sidetracked me for about an hour, because the same symptoms were caused by an API change that I didn’t maintain correctly; after that I was able to use both system and internal libbfd with the same exact results. I started adding printing checkpoints with […]Diego E. Pettenò (flameeyes)
- Diego E. Pettenò: The neverending fun of debugging a debugger July 4, 2009In the previous post of mine I’ve noted that I found some issues with the Mono-implemented software monosim. Luckily upstream understood the problem and he’s working on it. In the mean time I’ve had my share of fun because mono-debugger (mdb) does not seem to work properly for me. Since I also need Mono for a job task I’m working on, I’ve decided to work on […]Diego E. Pettenò (flameeyes)
- Alex Legler: LinuxTag: Booth Review July 3, 2009Today: CentOS I like it though, except the poster at the back on the ground :-/ Gravity always prevails… (from http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-promo/2009-July/000529.html) Greetings to our booth neighbours […]Alex Legler (a3li)
- Diego E. Pettenò: In the land of smartcards July 3, 2009Even though I did post that I wanted to get onto hardware signatures I ended up getting an USB smartcard reader for a job that requires me to deal with some kind of smartcards; I cannot go much further on the matter right now though, so I’ll skip over most of the notes here. Now, since I got the reader, but not yet most of the specifics I need to actually g […]Diego E. Pettenò (flameeyes)
- Diego E. Pettenò: How _not_ to fix GCC 4.4 bugs July 2, 2009So with GCC 4.4 and glibc 2.10, C++ support went, once again, stricter. Now, leaving aside all my possible comments on a language for which there is still an absolute vacuum of actual implementations years after publishing, let just look at what the problem is this time around. The main issue, in which glibc 2.10 is also related, is that the C-style string […]Diego E. Pettenò (flameeyes)
- Diego E. Pettenò: The debugged debugger — part 2 July 4, 2009