Archive for category Gentoo
The 2.6.28 kernel
So I finally got around to updating my kernel on my thinkpad to 2.6.28, the latest release from kernel.org. I’ve seen nothing but good things so far. - My media keys work again! Sound and Brightness keys are now actually working properly with Gnome. I don’t know if it is an exact result from the new kernel, but either way I am happy. - I can still suspend. I usually screw up my kernels each release so I can’t suspend to ram or wake properly. WiFi seems the same, was hoping for some improvements but I can’t see any for now. I still don’t see the added benefits of GEM yet. Perhaps some of my stuff is not upgraded to a new enough version to use GEM. I assume this because glxgears still says
Failed to initialize TTM buffer manager. Falling back to classic. Meh, I guess I can wait awhile longer for my Intel graphics to stop sucking massively. I just wanna play starcraft but it craps out on “Blah Unsupported visual” even though an earlier X/mesa/driver combo worked. I’m also pondering the venture into using EXT4 on my / partition. I don’t know how to proceed though. Does one run tune2fs from a livecd or can one do it on the running system? I assume livecd is required as one will need to fsck before mounting EXT4. I plan to try EXT4 following this advice. Any comments or suggestions before I take to the leap to EXT4 would be appreciated.
Troubles with WICD
Ah, the fun of college life. My university has wpa2 enterprise wifi spots that I have been unable to connect to using wicd. None of the default provided templates seem to work at all. As far as I know, they are WPA2 with AES/TKIP encryption and I’m required to input a login/password instead of a shared key or certificate.
So far my efforts have been pretty futile (such as complaining on irc 
. NetworkManager has connected successively before I ditched it (which dubbed the wifi wpa enterprise, so I know that I can connect to the encrypted network. I don’t know how to roll a template for wicd or even wpa_supplicant for this situation however, so I’m currently at a loss.
Any help would greatly be appreciated!
OpenDNS with NetworkManager
If you are like me, you roam around with Wi-Fi or your ISP’s DNS servers just really suck. NetworkManager has the habit of ignoring /etc/conf.d/net here and uses the crappy DNS servers. No more! To use OpenDNS simply add this to your /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf
supersede domain-name “opendns.com”; prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220; Now OpenDNS should be working for any access point you connect to. Enjoy the freedom.
KeePassX woes
The following error occurred while opening the database: Unknown error while loading database. This is what I was just greeted to after trying to open my KeePassX database. The problem? I just recently emerged KeePassX 0.3.2 from portage. I’m glad whoever maintains this checked if you can even open an existing database…sigh. My Solution? Well I rescued the old ebuild from cvs and emerged it. Behold! The database opened right up after entering my password. So I’ll export this database as a KeePassX XML file. This should work hopefully… Nope. After saving the new database it still ain’t working. Hrmm.. Let’s run a revdep-rebuild just in case something got broken along the way. It comes up clean, so this isn’t the option. OK, maybe TwoFish is simply broken with the new version. Let’s try with AES encryption… Success. It seems for now TwoFish is broken on my Gentoo system with the new KeePassX. I wonder if this is an issue that is affecting others? It seems there is a bug open at sourceforge about it.
Calendar software: Mozilla Sunbird
So I’ve been looking for a calendar/organizer thing for my recent Gnome install as I am not using evolution as my mail client but am using claws-mail. Being that evolution’s calendar and friends is now out of the equation, I found Sunbird from Mozilla. At first I was skeptical, as it was made my Mozilla. After using it for a few days I am fairly impressed with it and will continue using it. I was able to get a webdav disk to sync calendars across computers through the use of CPanel. CPanel being useful? I know …scary. Sunbird supports the basics of events and tasks. Although there isn’t a real big difference between the two when confronted to explain the difference. I guess one has a checklist todo type interface and the other doesn’t. Both however appear in the calendar view. hint: To view tasks on the calendar right click in monthly view or multi weekly and check show tasks. One thing that was handy was I could import a google calendar into Sunbird. Yay, no more missed Gentoo events again. Well, if I remember to look at Sunbird…
Bluetooth Working now
I finally got bluetooth working last night and playing friendly with gnome. It was surprisingly simple once you have your kernel setup correctly for your bluetooth device. All what was needed was a simple merge:
% emerge -av bluez-gnome bluez-utils gnome-bluetooth Although gnome-bluetooth isn’t required, as bluez-gnome is the important package to emerge. bluez-gnome provides a handy applet that appears in the notification area allowing you to browse and send files to other bluetooth enabled devices. It’s fairly straight-forward. note: I did have to logout of gnome and back in after emerging bluez-gnome for the applet to appear in the notification area.
Todays lesson of what not to do
So today I learned that emerge xorg-server with USE=hal is a very bad idea. When I relogged in for something else, it hit me. My entire keyboard layout was completely hosed. Hit the up arrow, can you guess what it did? That’s right, up arrow takes a screenshot. what?. It was the only beginning of my woes. Luckily my desktop box was still connected to irc, so I asked around and was told that a workaround from total borkage is to install xorg-server without hal. So with a magical:
USE=-hal emerge -av xorg-server I was on my way typing normally. This was all brought on my wanting to use the windows key as a modifier key in gnome, but it was being reported as Super L. Eventually in the end I found where to set it as Hyper in Gnome and all is well. I hope hal fixes this soon, that was annoying… However, I did find it neat gnome had a keyboard layout for IBM->T61. Yay!
current laptop screenie
So here’s my current laptop screenie:
It’s my gnome desktop with a floating urxvt. The font I’m using is Terminus and it seems to be working pretty good so far!
Next up is getting bluetooth working and sound.
New ThinkPad T61
So recently I got a shiny new laptop in the mail and have been going through the struggles of getting Gentoo to run on it and have everything just work. Well, things didn’t just work without some work, but it’s nearly 100% now. My first issue was getting the WiFi working. Gentoo-sources 2.6.26 worked intermittently, so I needed to try something else. I installed network manager and let it start handling the wifi and magically it started working. For some reason if I let udev at init launch my iwl3945 wifi interface, the card would instantly RFKILL itself. Very frustrating, but at least I have a working wifi card now with 2.6.26 and iwl3945 + network manager. The second issue of course was suspend. What a pain this adventure was. If it wasn’t for fellow Gentoo Developer Joker with an R61 kernel config I would have never gotten suspend working. My initial kernel on resume would simply blink the crescent moon sleep light on my thinkpad and never resume. I assume it was kernel panicking. I used his config and changed it for my wifi card, and now suspend works flawlessly. Note: I’m using pm-utils for suspending. Here’s my .config for anyone who wants it: .config Right now I’m running Gnome, even though I’m not really a fan of it. HAL automounting seem to be working fine which is a plus, just had to emerge gnome-volume-manager with the automount use-flag.
Boredom with gimp
Yay for boredom with gimp:
Yes I’m aware I screwed the text up