Tidbits @ Kassemi

A collection of opinions, thoughts, tricks and misc. information.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

 

Gentoo Update

So I've finally gotten a few things done with Gentoo! My system is in the process of installing PHP5 on top of my mysql and apache2 installations... Hopefully everything will go well..

I think that the gentoo system is a pretty amazing distro. Portage, although quite difficult to get working properly at the moment, seems to be something I'll end up loving in the future. I use the KDE desktop, and I like to have things looking pretty good, so I decided I needed the taskbar v2, which allows the taskbar to be fully transparent. I try an emerge --search, and then an emerge --searchdesc to try to find the ebuild for this software, and failed. I couldn't find an e-build anywhere, and that put me in a very strange place. (I've been up now for over 50 hours, probably around 42 when I ran into this problem). How can I get this software installed? I figured a ./configure && make && make install wasn't the appropriate thing to do on a gentoo installation, and after about 30 minutes of research figured out my only solution would be an ebuild. Now remember, I have not yet attempted to actually figure out the portage system. I vimmed up the skeleton ebuild and started editing. In the end I got something like this:


# Copyright 1999-2005 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $

inherit kde eutils
DESCRIPTION="Taskbar v2 - allows transparency in the taskbar. "
HOMEPAGE="http://www.uni-weimar.de/~wolff3/index_taskbar.html"

# http://www.uni-weimar.de/~wolff3/kdelook/mtaskbar-0.7.tar.bz2
SRC_URI="http://www.uni-weimar.de/~wolff3/kdelook/${P}.tar.bz2"

#I'm not distributing the .ebuild, and I didn't actually look up
#licence of mtaskbar, sorry.
LICENSE="gpl"

SLOT="0"

KEYWORDS="~x86 ~i686"
IUSE=""

DEPEND=""

S=${WORKDIR}/${P}/${PN}
#I had to figure out how this works, since the source didn't extract in a
# normal way:
#echo ${WORKDIR}/${P}/${PN}

src_compile() {
econf || die "econf failed"
emake || die "emake failed"
}

src_install() {
make DESTDIR=${D} install || die
#einstall || die
}



And I know it's probably the ugliest thing an experienced gentoo user has ever seen, but guess what? It works! I finally have a nice desktop with the transparent titlebar!



So I've still got to set up my openssl stuff with apache, and really need to recompile my kernel for iptables (don't believe I forgot to do that). But I've got wireless up and running, and my desktop pretty much the way I want it. Welcome Gentoo!

Monday, October 17, 2005

 

Slackware to Gentoo... in process

Hello everyone... I'm back, at least for now. I've got an issue with my laptop hard drive, which continues to fail. There are loads of bad blocks, and new ones popping up all the time, causing hell. I recently had a corruption problem that knocked out my local apache installation, and not actually knowing anything about ReiserFS, I decided I'd just re-install it. So, there I go...


rm -rf /...


When BAM! I hit my enter key accidentally. Ctrl-C ends the destructive process just a little to late. I manage to keep a few utilities (enough to get stuff backed up onto CD, interesting without ls and cdrecord), and decide it's probably time for a change anyway. So I hit up the Gentoo web site on Knoppix, download the gentoo minimal install CD, and get to work.

I must say... Gentoo is a pretty cool system so far, but it has taken forever to get where I'm at right now! I have fluxbox running with firefox, a KDE emerge and mplayer emerge occuring right now (should have gotten alsautils emerged first, but what the heck), a kernel compiled properly except for one setting (for my wireless), and a pretty fast freaking system. I decided to use a stage1 snapshot, and its day 4 so far. I just hope it's all worth it.

This is going to be quite a change from my normal ./configure && make && checkinstall process, but I think that it will probably be a little easier to keep track of dependencies this way... Besides, the portage experience should help me out if I ever want to switch to a *BSD system...

I'll be back at a later time (much later probably), once I get this distro up and running perfectly...

James

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