Preventing the qt-phonon vs phonon block
3 Jun 09 at 23:46 | 
gentoo, phonon, qt | 
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We’ve had an unfortunate situation with x11-libs/qt-phonon and media-sound/phonon blocking each other on Gentoo (bug 270188). KDE and Nokia Qt Software each make their own releases of the Phonon library, and while these are largely the same, there are some minor differences. KDE4 users want media-sound/phonon, while the Gentoo Qt team has always insisted that for non-KDE users x11-libs/qt-phonon should be the default choice as dependency of other Qt modules. Now Qt can also use media-sound/phonon, but the Qt3Support module needs the gstreamer back-end enabled. This has led to some useflag dependencies that trip up portage.
At the last project meeting we decided to introduce a kde useflag to force selecting media-sound/phonon instead of qt-phonon for KDE users. Now that both Qt 4.5.1 and phonon-4.3.1 are stable, or soon to be stabilized (depending on how quick or slow the arch testers are for the architecture that you’re using), enabling the kde useflag (if you want to use KDE4) should give you a smooth upgrade path, without any qt-phonon related blocks. If you don’t have nor want kdelibs on your system, you should disable the kde useflag, and you will get qt-phonon, which is preferred by Qt.
And if you want to prevent media-sound/phonon from pulling in gstreamer, then disable its gstreamer useflag, and make sure to also disable the phonon useflag for x11-libs/qt-qt3support. This will then disable the phonon options in qtconfig, but you can still configure phonon in KDE’s systemsettings.
If you still have any issues, please comment on the bug.
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Recently a user on IRC suggested that using the latest snapshots for sip and PyQt4 could help with pykde:live problems. So those people that are on live kde4 on Gentoo, they may want to unmask and emerge the snapshot ebuilds I just committed to qting-edge overlay. They are masked because they may break other PyQt4 based apps (eric-4.3.3 segfaults here).
gentoo, overlay, qt |
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If you’re not using eix, you probably are not (or shouldn’t be) using Gentoo. It’s simply so powerful and fast, that I can’t imagine working on Linux without it. For those not following Planet Larry, I’d like to point out the tip posted by Matija Šuklje about eix-sync. Use it!
eix, gentoo |
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Oh shiny!
28 Apr 09 at 22:17 | blog, personal, site | 1
So I finally took the time to move back to WordPress, with most of my content migrated—except for the comments made in my Habari install. I also took the opportunity to do a redesign. It’s sort of an evolution of the previous design, as I kept the general layout and a number of elements. I dropped the fancy fixed header, which caused a few (minor) nuisances. I hope you like the new minty color!
In other news, I have now made a definite decision to go to China. As preparation I plan to do a government accredited certification course in August and then start teaching English from September. Of course I’m pretty excited about these prospects, as it means I’m opening a new, exciting chapter in my life. It also means I will have less time to spend on Gentoo development. But hopefully there will be people to pick up where I leave off.
Habari fail
12 Apr 09 at 10:48 | blog, site | Add your comment
I updated my blog software to the latest version, Habari 0.6. Something went wrong during that procedure and I can no longer access the comments in the admin back-end. Sorry for all you commenters, but I cannot “approve” your latest comments.
I don’t really feel like delving deeper into the problem, or downgrading and staying on an old version. Instead I am thinking of migrating back to WordPress, as in certain ways it is easier. That is, from a blogger’s, not a coder’s, point of view. So please a bit of patience when I migrate again (story of my life…).
Dillo progress
10 Apr 09 at 21:54 | browser, gentoo | Add your comment
For users of older hardware and fans of light-weight systems, Dillo is probably not an unknown name. It’s a very light-weight web browser. That comes with its limitations, of course. It used to have a GTK1 GUI, which no one in his right mind would use anymore today. But last year Dillo 2.0 was released, which was reimplemented using FLTK2. This sports modern features like anti-aliasing (smooth fonts) and unicode
Currently the Dillo developers are working on exciting new features, such as basic CSS and JavaScript support. I figured some people may want to try out this new code, so I added an ebuild for the “live” development version to portage today (or yesterday, depending on your timezone). There is definitely some progress to see, so this little browser may grow in popularity again. And they manage to keep it small. The binary is only 629K on my amd64 system.
FOSDEM 2009
13 Feb 09 at 12:24 | fosdem, gentoo, lxde | Add your comment
Last Saturday I was at FOSDEM, the yearly European meeting of Free Software developers in Brussels. It was very nice to meet fellow devs, especially those from the Gentoo KDE team, as I chat with them on a daily basis in the #gentoo-kde IRC channel.
I also met up with Mario Behling and Christoph Wickert, from the LXDE project, which seems to be gaining a lot of momentum (several distros such as the famous Knoppix liveCD now offer LXDE as default desktop or lightweight option). They had a so called “Lightning Talk” with a 15 minute slideshow presentation. I spoke to them after the talk about the recent developments in LXDE, the growth of the community, and the need for some talented volunteers to work on offering more themes. LXDE themes would be a combined package of a matching Openbox theme and GTK2 theme, possibly with an iconset added. A wiki page is in the making, and there may be a contest later.
All in all, FOSDEM was a success, especially the social aspect. I hope to go for the whole weekend next year. What about you? Did you enjoy FOSDEM this year? And are you planning to go next year?
Advancing Qt on Gentoo: qting-edge
1 Feb 09 at 16:34 | gentoo, overlay, qt | Add your comment
Lately I’ve been very busy mainly with Qt related issues on Gentoo. We managed to resolve a good number of open bug reports, and finally came around to marking the split ebuilds for Qt 4.4.2 stable. This was quite a complicated issue, but has been made a lot easier with the recent improvements in dependency resolving in portage.
I also made an appeal for new staff members wanting to help out maintaining Qt and related packages in Gentoo. That got a lot more response than I expected, and as a result I started mentoring a few guys to become new Gentoo developers. Coincidentally there are several Greeks among them — it seems they can’t leave me alone! (FYI: I have lived in Greece for 6 years, did my university degree there, and had a long serious relationship with a Greek girl.) It is nice tho, to reminiscence about the good times I had in Greece, their whacky language and delicious food!
I want to make a special mentioning of Markos Chandras, who has become a very valuable member of the Qt team, and is now on the verge of becoming a full developer. He is a great help in squashing bugs and thinking about how to improve things. We have started a new overlay, called qting-edge
(a name that collaborator Christian Franke came up with), in which we develop new Qt ebuilds and eclasses. We also have ebuilds for the “live” git development version of Qt, and KDE’s patched qt-copy. And we add new applications using Qt4 to the overlay for testing.
It is still my ideal to assemble a light-weight Qt4 desktop, and this overlay is another step into that direction. The overlay contains x11-wm/antico, and while that is a promising project, it certainly isn’t ready for daily use yet. I’m hoping qlwm works better (it certainly is more mature), so that will be my next target. If you know a Qt4 project that you think is interesting for the overlay, or even portage, give me a shout!
Supporting Songbird
18 Dec 08 at 01:46 | gentoo, overlay, xulrunner | Add your comment
One of the Songbird developers wrote a good blogpost about the problems that distros meet when trying to support Songbird, an open source iTunes competitor. The post concentrates on Ubuntu, as one of the most popular distros, but the concerns raised there in essence are the same for all distros. We have our own bug open for this new package, and it’s not really going anywhere. For us a similar compromise as for other distros exists: we do have a songbird-bin ebuild in Sunrise overlay.
But nobody wants to maintain an extra copy of xulrunner, or backport Songbird’s patches to the system xulrunner (which is used by Firefox among other packages). The whole idea seems very Windows-like to me: take existing packages, patch them to bits, mash it together with your own application into one big binary package. This is certainly not the way things are normally done on the Linux side of things.
I would urge the Songbird developers to work with upstream (Mozilla in the case of Xulrunner) to get their patches accepted, or some other kind of solution to make Songbird and vanilla Xulrunner to work together nicely. That would make it a lot easier for us, and any other Linux distro, as well as the BSDs, to import this package into our official repositories and give it proper support.
In the comments to that post you can read that OpenSuse and Fedora have the exact same problems. With such a unanimous voice from the distributions, I would say the ball is now in Songbird’s court, if they care about Linux support.
To twitter or not to twitter?
20 Oct 08 at 20:08 | personal, social media | Add your comment
That’s the question.
I am an avid blog reader and IRC user (hello #gentoo-* !), and I dabble in my share of social media (Last.fm, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, YouTube), but not as serious. Now Twitter is all the rage, and so far I have not jumped on the bandwagon. But now I’m wondering if I’m missing anything. So to my readers that are using Twitter, and those that have tried it, I want to pose the question: is it worth it, or merely a huge waste of time? Is there anything to gain for someone like me, interested in free software, the blogosphere, and “alternative” music (mainly post-rock and prog-rock/metal currently)? Let me know your thoughts and experiences!
