Arora and other additions to portage

As some of you may have noticed, I recently added a few more packages to portage. First of all I want to mention Arora, the Qt4 WebKit browser for which I already have a live git ebuild in berkano overlay. I am making snapshot ebuilds now, about twice a month, to make it easy for Gentoo users to keep up to date with its development. These ebuilds are hardmasked in portage at the moment, as Arora depends on Qt-4.4 which is currently still hardmasked. As soon as Arora makes an official release and Qt-4.4 will be unmasked, I will make an ebuild available for ~arch users. We'll have to wait till Qt-4.5 though to use plugins like flash. (Users prefering GTK+ might want to take a look at Midori.)

I also added a few other Qt4 applications: QtScrobbler, a GUI for easily submitting a scrobbler log from your portable media player to Last.fm; and JuffEd, a nice editor with tabs and syntax hilighting, based on QScintilla. Lastly, I added SubtitleComposer, a KDE3 application for working with text-based subtitles (srt or ssa for example).

If there are any more applications hiding in our bugzilla, or in obscure corners of the 'net, that you believe deserve to be in Gentoo's portage tree, let me or another developer know. Personally my interests lie in the fields of sound, video, fonts and miscellaneous desktop apps (and, as you may have noticed, a growing preference for Qt4 based programs).

8 Jul 08 - 00:14 | , and | 5 Comments

Berkano overlay news

Recent changes in berkano overlay:

  • I cleaned out some cruft, packages that in my opinion weren't useful anymore
  • I removed the older versions of hitchhiker-sources, because the kernel devs recommend using only the latest, for security reasons
  • I added a live git ebuild for Arora, the new Qt4 WebKit browser

Arora icon Arora needs >=qt-4.4.0, which you can get here as a tarball for use in your local overlay (if it breaks anything, you get to keep the pieces), or from one of the other overlays that provide up-to-date or development snapshots of Qt4. I've been told qt-4.4.0 release should be added (as hardmasked) to portage later this week.

I'm actually looking into adding more Qt4 based applications, either to the overlay or portage. My goal would be to get together an as complete as possible desktop using just (or mainly at least) Qt4 programs. The most obvious missing part is a Window Manager. Cutebox was a promising project, but has been abandoned even before its first release. Anyone that would resurrect it and bring it to a useful form, would win a guaranteed spot in my personal Hall of Heroes.

14 May 08 - 10:46 | , , , and | 6 Comments

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