Aircrack-NG SVN Ebuild, Rawspeed is a No Go

I was going to attempt making a Rawspeed SVN ebuild but the repository only has a VS solution file. Yuck. So I'm not going to touch that one until there is some kind of Linux build system in place. I've been filling up my time lately with the new Aircrack-NG. SSE2 support was added which speeds things up tremendously. Performance improved by more than 300%. The only issue I had was getting it installed. I'm lazy so the first thing I tried to do was just rename the RC1 build from portage to RC2 but it wouldn't compile because the released RC2 isn't 64-bit clean. It was fixed shortly thereafter in SVN. I threw together an ebuild quickly and got everything working in short order. The only complaint I have is that computed PMKs in Airolib-NG haven't sped up at all compared to the massive improvement in Aircrack-NG. I think I'll stick with the SVN version of Aircrack-NG for a while too see if the situation improves. Anyway here's the ebuild I used to get a working SSE2 version.

/usr/local/portage/net-wireless/aircrack-ng-9999.ebuild

LastAgent ebuild

I love Last.FM and I have been using Banshee for quite a while for scrobbling. The only issue I have with the plugin is that you cannot love, share, or tag a local music file. You can only perfrom these operations on your music playing from Last.FM itself. Enter LastAgent. It's a small prorgram written in python that adds this missing functionality and it works with multiple media players, including Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox, and Audacious. I whipped up an ebuild to install LastAgent and check it out. I'm happy to say that it works as advertised. Here's an ebuild for all you Last.FM fans.

/usr/local/portage/media/sound/lastagent-0.3.02.ebuild

I plan on tweaking this ebuild a little bit but it works well now. It's early still and I had a problem fetching the source with the ebuild for some reason so if you have that problem just download it manually and put it in your distfiles directory for now.

Dillo SVN complete, Fast-Track on its way...

The Dillo SVN ebuild is now complete. I successfully compiled and ran Dillo SVN. You will need the ebuild and the updated patch. The png is available in the files directory of Dillo2 in portage but I will provide it here for convenience.

/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/dillo-9999.ebuild
/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/files/dillo2SVN-inbuf.patch
/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/files/dillo.png

I have also successfully compiled and installed Fast-Track and all of its dependencies including Winexe. Winexe required an older autoconf for me to get it installed so that's still an issue. Also it seems that Fast-Track has a whacked out directory structure (probably due to its origins on BackTrack) and its taking a good amount of work to get it to work seamlessly on Gentoo. I'm not sure there is much I can do at this point without some serious work. I'm going to take another look at it to see if I'm missing something simple to make it all work better. Right now it works but there are PATH issues so you have to be in the same directory as fast-track.py for it to run properly.

New Pyrenamer Ebuild

I made a couple of tweaks to the pyrenamer ebuild, one of which was an added dependecy on eyed3. Here it is:

/usr/local/portage/dev-python/pyrenamer/pyrenamer-0.6.0.ebuild

Pyrenamer 0.6.0 Ebuild

Per request I am making available an ebuild for pyrenamer. It's a nice mass renaming utility. I haven't had much time to play around with it but I have been looking for something like it. Thanks goes to a reader who suggested this ebuild. As with all my ebuilds, there are no gaurantees. It works for me but dependency info is minimum because I couldn't find much information on particular dependencies. Try it out and let me know if there are issues with the ebuild.

/usr/local/portage/sys-apps/pyrenamer-0.6.0.ebuild

Miro 2.0... the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

First lets start with the good news. The gui is much more responsive. Interacting with the sidebar is a smoother experience. With previous releases it was possible to lock up the entire application for seconds at a time when selecting a new channel or trying to play a video. All of that has been fixed. Switching channels and videos is now seamless and instantaneous. Not only has the underlying code obviously been reworked but the look and feel has been overhauled too. It fits in with my GNOME desktop better than before now that Miro seems to use more GTK elements. Another change in the look and functionality in Miro is the playback mode. When viewing a video the sidebar is no longer visible. This is a a good improvement because it was useless before when a video was playing because any interaction with the sidebar would stop the current playing video. If you detach the video window you can manipulate the sidebar and its contents. . Since Miro uses xulrunner to display the guide you can also use it to view other web pages like Hulu. Unfortunately I can't get this to work because Miro won't recognize my flash plugin for some reason. It's possible it has something to do with my setup but I haven't looked too hard into it yet. It would be better if they could integrate Hulu channels and video directly into Miro but there might be some technical or licensing issues with that.

Now let's take a look at some of the bad, or more accurately, the ugly. The previous version didn't use many native GTK widgets. The only native GTK looking part of the previous version was the media controls. Now it is one of the few parts that does not respect the native GTK theme. The controls now have an iTunes-ish look. The GTK theming definitely isn't perfect either. I use a dark theme and while most applications I use now work with a dark theme without a hitch the new Miro is problematic. The text details for videos is the same color as the background and isn't readable with my theme unless the selection is highlighted and even then the text has a very low contrast with the background.

Overall I like the new Miro. I was getting tired of dealing with latency issues and the fact that it wouldn't work for me without an ancient version of openssl. That's all taken care of now and for the most part I like the new look, or at least the direction it is going in but it needs some polish. I am completely happy with the way it works though which even more important. For those of you who want to play around with new Miro here is an ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro-2.0.ebuild

New Webkit-GTK SVN Ebuild...

My webkit-gtk svn ebuild finally broke a week or so ago. I fixed it up per requests. It builds fine for me here but midori isn't working anymore so I'm still investigating the breakage. I'll link to it anyway so people can try it out.

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/webkit-gtk-9999.ebuild

In other news, I have been slow to get my new site up because of a lack of funds, and I have been concentrating on trying to get another job which I did not believe would be this hard or would take up so much time. I'll probably stick with blogger for a while longer just so I'm not in limbo. I have the drupal site all designed and ready to go I just need to find some money so I can get it hosted.

UPDATE: The issue I was experiencing with Midori was solved by deleting my Midori preferences and restarting. The newest Webkit is working great...better than ever.

Tracemonkey javascript performance

I thought that my comparison of the latest Webkit vs stable Gecko wasn't fair so I decided today to create an ebuild to fetch the latest xulrunner so I could test Tracemonkey. I had to tweak the ebuild a little (other than fetching with mercurial) because xulrunner would not compile with lcms enabled. I created another USE flag that toggles lcms. With this and some modification to the patch tarball I was able to build the latest xulrunner.

Here is my ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/xulrunner/xulrunner-9999.ebuild

This ebuild requires the xulrunner.conf from the original ebuild files.

Next I launched Epiphany and typed "about:config". I searched for "jit" and then toggled "javascript.options.jit.content" to true and restarted my browser. Then I proceeded to run Celtic Kane's javascript speed test and the Sunspider Benchmark. Celtic Kane's test didn't show much of an improvement over the old javascript engine and didn't come close to Squirrelfish's performance. The result was a paltry 23ms decrease in time.



Maybe the Sunspider Benchmark would be different. Here is the comparison of the old Gecko JS engine and Tracemonkey. The old engine is under the FROM title and Tracemonkey is under TO.



We see some significant improvements over the old engine but we see some regression too. The overall picture shows us a slight improvement. Next let's compare Webkit's results to Tracemonkey. Here we have Webkit in the TO column and Tracemonky in the FROM column. Get ready for an all out browser war!



Yikes! That's disappointing. For all the noise we've heard about Tracemonkey these were not the results I was expecting. Squirrelfish is still eating it for lunch. I guess it's a good sign that Mozilla's numbers are improving but I have yet to see the performance they claim. There could be many reasons for this and I'm sure things will only improve but as it stands now I cannot achieve the kind of numbers I've seen put up on the web about Tracemonkey.

UPDATE: Apparently JIT cannot yet be enabled in 64-bit browsers so that is why perfromance is so close between the new Tracemonkey JS engine and the old one. When that changes I'll post a real performance comparison.

Updated sK1 gnome patch

It seems that the latest revision of sK1 has a new configurator.py that breaks my old gnome patch. I've updated the patch to work with the latest revision. Hopefully this won't end up being an arms race type of affair where configurator.py is constantly changing. Just rename to gnome-sK1.patch and copy in place of the old patch and remember to edit the fonts and font sizes in the patch if you want to match your gnome theme better.

Updated Midori ebuild

Midori is now using a new build system so if you attempt to emerge it like before it will not work. There is an updated ebuild available on bugzilla. Unfortunately I have yet to get it to work. It builds fine with the new ebuild but the program will not start. I am using it in conjunction with my webkit-gtk svn ebuild. If I find the solution to the problem I will post an update.

UPDATE: It's working now. I built it with a vanilla compiler instead of my default hardened compiler and it is running now. I test Acid3 on Midori everytime I rebuild it. It gets to 77 before it crashes. This is better than the 69 I was getting before. At one time I was able to acheive 100 percent compliance but that hasn't happened in months. My biggest gripe/bug continues to be the font settings. It seems that Midori will not respect my font settings until I adjust them. I have to change the font size and then change it back again every time I start Midori.

Updated sK1 ebuild with gnome USE flag

I've updated my sK1 svn ebuild to include a gnome USE flag. The normal build defaults to Crystal icons. The USE flag patches the configurator.py file to use Tango icons and also changes the fonts. You can edit the patch to use different fonts if you like.

/usr/local/portage/media-gfx/sK1-9999.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-gfx/files/gnome-sK1.patch

Webkit-GTK svn ebuild

I have been very interested in Webkit ever since the GTK port was announced. It seems like a good fit for integration with Gnome applications like Epiphany and Evolution. Right now I'm using it in Evolution-RSS and Midori, a Webkit-GTK browser. There are a couple of svn snapshot ebuilds in portage but I find myself constantly creating new snapshot ebuilds to test out the latest Webkit-GTK along with the svn ebuild of Midori. So in a similar fashion to my sK1 svn ebuild I decided to create a Webkit-GTK svn ebuild. Be forewarned that the checkout process takes a very long time. Based on my genlop output the checkout process alone took 40 minutes and compilation took another 20 minutes.

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/webkit-gtk-9999.ebuild

Extremely hacked Flash 10 on Gentoo

Flash has always been a problem for me on 64-bit linux. It works ok with Nspluginwrapper but is continually crashing or hanging the browser. It has even started to crash X lately which is just screwed up. So I decided to take Flash 10 beta for a test drive to see if anything is improved but I ran into some stumbling blocks along the way. Nspluginwrapper failed to install the latest flash because it was missing some necessary 32-bit libraries. Fortunately I found that the 32-bit binaries of OpenOffice and Adobe Reader provided the necessary libraries but they were not located in /usr/lib32. I didn't want to mess with the library path so I just symlinked the necessary libraries into /usr/lib32. I logged out and back in again and Flash 10 is working! I'll report back later so see how well this hack stands up and how well Flash 10 performs. If you want to try it out here are a couple of files you might want. Remember that this only works on 64 bit, you need nspluginwrapper, and you must have both the Adobe Reader binary and the OpenOffice binary installed.

This script will symlink the necessary libs into place. It needs to be given execute permission and run as root. Also the script is extremely dumb so check the output for failures:

symlink.sh

This ebuild is just a copy from portage but with a modified version number to get the latest beta released on August 11, 2008:

/usr/local/portage/net-www/netscape-flash/netscape-flash-10_beta20080811.ebuild

Evolution-RSS

For years I have been using Liferea for RSS feeds and Evolution for email. After years of searching for information in mailing lists using Evolution then switching to Liferea for RSS I got tired of it and started looking for a RSS plugin for Evolution when I found Evolution-RSS. That was a few months ago when the stable version was 0.0.8. Since then a newer version has been released but not updated in the sunrise overlay. I took the 0.0.8 ebuild and Auke Booij's advice on Gentoo Bugzilla and created this ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/gnome-extra/evolution-rss/evolution-rss-0.1.0.ebuild

The newest Evolution-RSS has the ability to display feeds using either Gecko or Webkit (if installed). You can also use Evolution's excellent search function on your RSS feeds. It makes finding information so much easier. The downsides are that it is still incomplete and I have come across a few crasher bugs (adding a feed within evolution crashes evo for me). Also there is no dbus integration so downloading feeds directly through Epiphany is a no go. You need to manually add feeds using evolution-import-rss.

sK1 svn ebuild

For ten years now UNIX has had a fantastic vector editor called Skencil (formerly Sketch). The bad news is that it hasn't been updated in over 2 years. That's where sK1 comes in. It has a new updated interface along with a cairo backend and CMYK support for use in pre-press. I've been checking out svn versions and the project looks very promising although quite incomplete at the moment. Anyway, I got tired of fetching things manually and adapted an sK1 ebuild I found on the net to fetch the latest svn version. Here it is:

/usr/local/portage/media-gfx/sK1/sK1-9999.ebuild

Watch TV on the internet with Miro

If you haven't heard of it yet Miro is an opensource internet TV application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses RSS feeds to grab torrents and then downloads them for viewing. There are is also a guide to watch free television but what if you want to watch a show that isn't in the guide? There is an easy workaround that should be familiar to you if you use bittorrent already, it's called Mininova.

First you need to navigate to Mininova and search for the show you want to watch. I will use the Daily Show as an example. You will get a list like this:


Click on any actual Daily Show episode. Notice that some results that are displayed are for other shows. When you do click on a torrent it will load another page with links like this at the top of the page:



Click on the show title, in this case "The Daily Show". This will load another page that prominently displays an orange RSS feed link:



Now open Miro and and from the toolbar menu choose Channels->Add a new channel. Use the rss feed for the show you searched for as the URL. That's it. Now you have a channel in Miro that will automatically download the latest feeds.

There are a couple of things to note. While this works quite well for me it isn't without issues. You will tend to get multiple of the same episodes because of the nature of a bittorrent search site. Also Miro isn't exaclty light on resources and it is a bit buggy to boot. The good news, at least for linux users, is that Banshee is going to be incorpoarting the same technology into their 1.4 release due out in September. If you haven't used it Banshee is one of the best media players for Linux and after the aforementioned 1.4 release I believe it will be the best media player hands down on any platform.

For Gentoo users out there here is an ebuild for the latest version of Miro (1.2.6) that I adapted from an ebuild for version 1.2.4 found on the net:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/miro-1.2.6.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/setup.py.patch

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/MozillaBrowser.sed

Fix frequency scaling on Gentoo >=2.6.25

I created this blog for a few reasons. One of those reasons is to document tips, tricks, and workarounds for computer related problems that I have come across. I have been creating notes on my computer to reference these problems but this blog will allow me to not only store my findings on the web but also allow other people to access them should they provide useful. So without futher ado here is my first fix.

First a little background, my OS of choice is Gentoo Linux. Currently I am running a 64-bit kernel with a hardened profile, and a hardened gcc 4.2 from Xake's toolchain overlay. I am using PaX/Grsec for hardening.

The Problem:

After upgrading to kernel with version 2.6.25 or higher frequency scaling stopped working with cpufreqd. After hours of investigating the problem, and a few Gentoo forum posts it was determined that the problem lay with cpufrequtils. In order to work properly cpufrequtils had to be upgraded. Unfotunately there is only one cpufrequtils package in portage and it is quite old.

The Solution:

A new ebuild had to be created for the latest cpufrequtils. I based the new ebuild on the current ebuild only modifying the "epatch" line. Here are the results for anyone who may be experiencing issues with cpu frequency scaling on Gentoo.
/usr/local/portage/sys-power/cpufrequtils/cpufrequtils-004.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/sys-power/cpufrequtils/files/cpufrequtils-conf.d

/usr/local/portage/sys-power/cpufrequtils/files/cpufrequtils-init.d

Aircrack-NG SVN Ebuild, Rawspeed is a No Go

I was going to attempt making a Rawspeed SVN ebuild but the repository only has a VS solution file. Yuck. So I'm not going to touch that one until there is some kind of Linux build system in place. I've been filling up my time lately with the new Aircrack-NG. SSE2 support was added which speeds things up tremendously. Performance improved by more than 300%. The only issue I had was getting it installed. I'm lazy so the first thing I tried to do was just rename the RC1 build from portage to RC2 but it wouldn't compile because the released RC2 isn't 64-bit clean. It was fixed shortly thereafter in SVN. I threw together an ebuild quickly and got everything working in short order. The only complaint I have is that computed PMKs in Airolib-NG haven't sped up at all compared to the massive improvement in Aircrack-NG. I think I'll stick with the SVN version of Aircrack-NG for a while too see if the situation improves. Anyway here's the ebuild I used to get a working SSE2 version.

/usr/local/portage/net-wireless/aircrack-ng-9999.ebuild

LastAgent ebuild

I love Last.FM and I have been using Banshee for quite a while for scrobbling. The only issue I have with the plugin is that you cannot love, share, or tag a local music file. You can only perfrom these operations on your music playing from Last.FM itself. Enter LastAgent. It's a small prorgram written in python that adds this missing functionality and it works with multiple media players, including Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox, and Audacious. I whipped up an ebuild to install LastAgent and check it out. I'm happy to say that it works as advertised. Here's an ebuild for all you Last.FM fans.

/usr/local/portage/media/sound/lastagent-0.3.02.ebuild

I plan on tweaking this ebuild a little bit but it works well now. It's early still and I had a problem fetching the source with the ebuild for some reason so if you have that problem just download it manually and put it in your distfiles directory for now.

Dillo SVN complete, Fast-Track on its way...

The Dillo SVN ebuild is now complete. I successfully compiled and ran Dillo SVN. You will need the ebuild and the updated patch. The png is available in the files directory of Dillo2 in portage but I will provide it here for convenience.

/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/dillo-9999.ebuild
/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/files/dillo2SVN-inbuf.patch
/usr/local/portage/www-client/dillo/files/dillo.png

I have also successfully compiled and installed Fast-Track and all of its dependencies including Winexe. Winexe required an older autoconf for me to get it installed so that's still an issue. Also it seems that Fast-Track has a whacked out directory structure (probably due to its origins on BackTrack) and its taking a good amount of work to get it to work seamlessly on Gentoo. I'm not sure there is much I can do at this point without some serious work. I'm going to take another look at it to see if I'm missing something simple to make it all work better. Right now it works but there are PATH issues so you have to be in the same directory as fast-track.py for it to run properly.

New Pyrenamer Ebuild

I made a couple of tweaks to the pyrenamer ebuild, one of which was an added dependecy on eyed3. Here it is:

/usr/local/portage/dev-python/pyrenamer/pyrenamer-0.6.0.ebuild

Pyrenamer 0.6.0 Ebuild

Per request I am making available an ebuild for pyrenamer. It's a nice mass renaming utility. I haven't had much time to play around with it but I have been looking for something like it. Thanks goes to a reader who suggested this ebuild. As with all my ebuilds, there are no gaurantees. It works for me but dependency info is minimum because I couldn't find much information on particular dependencies. Try it out and let me know if there are issues with the ebuild.

/usr/local/portage/sys-apps/pyrenamer-0.6.0.ebuild

Miro 2.0... the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

First lets start with the good news. The gui is much more responsive. Interacting with the sidebar is a smoother experience. With previous releases it was possible to lock up the entire application for seconds at a time when selecting a new channel or trying to play a video. All of that has been fixed. Switching channels and videos is now seamless and instantaneous. Not only has the underlying code obviously been reworked but the look and feel has been overhauled too. It fits in with my GNOME desktop better than before now that Miro seems to use more GTK elements. Another change in the look and functionality in Miro is the playback mode. When viewing a video the sidebar is no longer visible. This is a a good improvement because it was useless before when a video was playing because any interaction with the sidebar would stop the current playing video. If you detach the video window you can manipulate the sidebar and its contents. . Since Miro uses xulrunner to display the guide you can also use it to view other web pages like Hulu. Unfortunately I can't get this to work because Miro won't recognize my flash plugin for some reason. It's possible it has something to do with my setup but I haven't looked too hard into it yet. It would be better if they could integrate Hulu channels and video directly into Miro but there might be some technical or licensing issues with that.

Now let's take a look at some of the bad, or more accurately, the ugly. The previous version didn't use many native GTK widgets. The only native GTK looking part of the previous version was the media controls. Now it is one of the few parts that does not respect the native GTK theme. The controls now have an iTunes-ish look. The GTK theming definitely isn't perfect either. I use a dark theme and while most applications I use now work with a dark theme without a hitch the new Miro is problematic. The text details for videos is the same color as the background and isn't readable with my theme unless the selection is highlighted and even then the text has a very low contrast with the background.

Overall I like the new Miro. I was getting tired of dealing with latency issues and the fact that it wouldn't work for me without an ancient version of openssl. That's all taken care of now and for the most part I like the new look, or at least the direction it is going in but it needs some polish. I am completely happy with the way it works though which even more important. For those of you who want to play around with new Miro here is an ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro-2.0.ebuild

New Webkit-GTK SVN Ebuild...

My webkit-gtk svn ebuild finally broke a week or so ago. I fixed it up per requests. It builds fine for me here but midori isn't working anymore so I'm still investigating the breakage. I'll link to it anyway so people can try it out.

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/webkit-gtk-9999.ebuild

In other news, I have been slow to get my new site up because of a lack of funds, and I have been concentrating on trying to get another job which I did not believe would be this hard or would take up so much time. I'll probably stick with blogger for a while longer just so I'm not in limbo. I have the drupal site all designed and ready to go I just need to find some money so I can get it hosted.

UPDATE: The issue I was experiencing with Midori was solved by deleting my Midori preferences and restarting. The newest Webkit is working great...better than ever.

Tracemonkey javascript performance

I thought that my comparison of the latest Webkit vs stable Gecko wasn't fair so I decided today to create an ebuild to fetch the latest xulrunner so I could test Tracemonkey. I had to tweak the ebuild a little (other than fetching with mercurial) because xulrunner would not compile with lcms enabled. I created another USE flag that toggles lcms. With this and some modification to the patch tarball I was able to build the latest xulrunner.

Here is my ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/xulrunner/xulrunner-9999.ebuild

This ebuild requires the xulrunner.conf from the original ebuild files.

Next I launched Epiphany and typed "about:config". I searched for "jit" and then toggled "javascript.options.jit.content" to true and restarted my browser. Then I proceeded to run Celtic Kane's javascript speed test and the Sunspider Benchmark. Celtic Kane's test didn't show much of an improvement over the old javascript engine and didn't come close to Squirrelfish's performance. The result was a paltry 23ms decrease in time.



Maybe the Sunspider Benchmark would be different. Here is the comparison of the old Gecko JS engine and Tracemonkey. The old engine is under the FROM title and Tracemonkey is under TO.



We see some significant improvements over the old engine but we see some regression too. The overall picture shows us a slight improvement. Next let's compare Webkit's results to Tracemonkey. Here we have Webkit in the TO column and Tracemonky in the FROM column. Get ready for an all out browser war!



Yikes! That's disappointing. For all the noise we've heard about Tracemonkey these were not the results I was expecting. Squirrelfish is still eating it for lunch. I guess it's a good sign that Mozilla's numbers are improving but I have yet to see the performance they claim. There could be many reasons for this and I'm sure things will only improve but as it stands now I cannot achieve the kind of numbers I've seen put up on the web about Tracemonkey.

UPDATE: Apparently JIT cannot yet be enabled in 64-bit browsers so that is why perfromance is so close between the new Tracemonkey JS engine and the old one. When that changes I'll post a real performance comparison.

Updated sK1 gnome patch

It seems that the latest revision of sK1 has a new configurator.py that breaks my old gnome patch. I've updated the patch to work with the latest revision. Hopefully this won't end up being an arms race type of affair where configurator.py is constantly changing. Just rename to gnome-sK1.patch and copy in place of the old patch and remember to edit the fonts and font sizes in the patch if you want to match your gnome theme better.

Updated Midori ebuild

Midori is now using a new build system so if you attempt to emerge it like before it will not work. There is an updated ebuild available on bugzilla. Unfortunately I have yet to get it to work. It builds fine with the new ebuild but the program will not start. I am using it in conjunction with my webkit-gtk svn ebuild. If I find the solution to the problem I will post an update.

UPDATE: It's working now. I built it with a vanilla compiler instead of my default hardened compiler and it is running now. I test Acid3 on Midori everytime I rebuild it. It gets to 77 before it crashes. This is better than the 69 I was getting before. At one time I was able to acheive 100 percent compliance but that hasn't happened in months. My biggest gripe/bug continues to be the font settings. It seems that Midori will not respect my font settings until I adjust them. I have to change the font size and then change it back again every time I start Midori.

Updated sK1 ebuild with gnome USE flag

I've updated my sK1 svn ebuild to include a gnome USE flag. The normal build defaults to Crystal icons. The USE flag patches the configurator.py file to use Tango icons and also changes the fonts. You can edit the patch to use different fonts if you like.

/usr/local/portage/media-gfx/sK1-9999.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-gfx/files/gnome-sK1.patch

Webkit-GTK svn ebuild

I have been very interested in Webkit ever since the GTK port was announced. It seems like a good fit for integration with Gnome applications like Epiphany and Evolution. Right now I'm using it in Evolution-RSS and Midori, a Webkit-GTK browser. There are a couple of svn snapshot ebuilds in portage but I find myself constantly creating new snapshot ebuilds to test out the latest Webkit-GTK along with the svn ebuild of Midori. So in a similar fashion to my sK1 svn ebuild I decided to create a Webkit-GTK svn ebuild. Be forewarned that the checkout process takes a very long time. Based on my genlop output the checkout process alone took 40 minutes and compilation took another 20 minutes.

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/webkit-gtk-9999.ebuild

Extremely hacked Flash 10 on Gentoo

Flash has always been a problem for me on 64-bit linux. It works ok with Nspluginwrapper but is continually crashing or hanging the browser. It has even started to crash X lately which is just screwed up. So I decided to take Flash 10 beta for a test drive to see if anything is improved but I ran into some stumbling blocks along the way. Nspluginwrapper failed to install the latest flash because it was missing some necessary 32-bit libraries. Fortunately I found that the 32-bit binaries of OpenOffice and Adobe Reader provided the necessary libraries but they were not located in /usr/lib32. I didn't want to mess with the library path so I just symlinked the necessary libraries into /usr/lib32. I logged out and back in again and Flash 10 is working! I'll report back later so see how well this hack stands up and how well Flash 10 performs. If you want to try it out here are a couple of files you might want. Remember that this only works on 64 bit, you need nspluginwrapper, and you must have both the Adobe Reader binary and the OpenOffice binary installed.

This script will symlink the necessary libs into place. It needs to be given execute permission and run as root. Also the script is extremely dumb so check the output for failures:

symlink.sh

This ebuild is just a copy from portage but with a modified version number to get the latest beta released on August 11, 2008:

/usr/local/portage/net-www/netscape-flash/netscape-flash-10_beta20080811.ebuild

Evolution-RSS

For years I have been using Liferea for RSS feeds and Evolution for email. After years of searching for information in mailing lists using Evolution then switching to Liferea for RSS I got tired of it and started looking for a RSS plugin for Evolution when I found Evolution-RSS. That was a few months ago when the stable version was 0.0.8. Since then a newer version has been released but not updated in the sunrise overlay. I took the 0.0.8 ebuild and Auke Booij's advice on Gentoo Bugzilla and created this ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/gnome-extra/evolution-rss/evolution-rss-0.1.0.ebuild

The newest Evolution-RSS has the ability to display feeds using either Gecko or Webkit (if installed). You can also use Evolution's excellent search function on your RSS feeds. It makes finding information so much easier. The downsides are that it is still incomplete and I have come across a few crasher bugs (adding a feed within evolution crashes evo for me). Also there is no dbus integration so downloading feeds directly through Epiphany is a no go. You need to manually add feeds using evolution-import-rss.

sK1 svn ebuild

For ten years now UNIX has had a fantastic vector editor called Skencil (formerly Sketch). The bad news is that it hasn't been updated in over 2 years. That's where sK1 comes in. It has a new updated interface along with a cairo backend and CMYK support for use in pre-press. I've been checking out svn versions and the project looks very promising although quite incomplete at the moment. Anyway, I got tired of fetching things manually and adapted an sK1 ebuild I found on the net to fetch the latest svn version. Here it is:

/usr/local/portage/media-gfx/sK1/sK1-9999.ebuild

Watch TV on the internet with Miro

If you haven't heard of it yet Miro is an opensource internet TV application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses RSS feeds to grab torrents and then downloads them for viewing. There are is also a guide to watch free television but what if you want to watch a show that isn't in the guide? There is an easy workaround that should be familiar to you if you use bittorrent already, it's called Mininova.

First you need to navigate to Mininova and search for the show you want to watch. I will use the Daily Show as an example. You will get a list like this:


Click on any actual Daily Show episode. Notice that some results that are displayed are for other shows. When you do click on a torrent it will load another page with links like this at the top of the page:



Click on the show title, in this case "The Daily Show". This will load another page that prominently displays an orange RSS feed link:



Now open Miro and and from the toolbar menu choose Channels->Add a new channel. Use the rss feed for the show you searched for as the URL. That's it. Now you have a channel in Miro that will automatically download the latest feeds.

There are a couple of things to note. While this works quite well for me it isn't without issues. You will tend to get multiple of the same episodes because of the nature of a bittorrent search site. Also Miro isn't exaclty light on resources and it is a bit buggy to boot. The good news, at least for linux users, is that Banshee is going to be incorpoarting the same technology into their 1.4 release due out in September. If you haven't used it Banshee is one of the best media players for Linux and after the aforementioned 1.4 release I believe it will be the best media player hands down on any platform.

For Gentoo users out there here is an ebuild for the latest version of Miro (1.2.6) that I adapted from an ebuild for version 1.2.4 found on the net:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/miro-1.2.6.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/setup.py.patch

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/MozillaBrowser.sed

Fix frequency scaling on Gentoo >=2.6.25

I created this blog for a few reasons. One of those reasons is to document tips, tricks, and workarounds for computer related problems that I have come across. I have been creating notes on my computer to reference these problems but this blog will allow me to not only store my findings on the web but also allow other people to access them should they provide useful. So without futher ado here is my first fix.

First a little background, my OS of choice is Gentoo Linux. Currently I am running a 64-bit kernel with a hardened profile, and a hardened gcc 4.2 from Xake's toolchain overlay. I am using PaX/Grsec for hardening.

The Problem:

After upgrading to kernel with version 2.6.25 or higher frequency scaling stopped working with cpufreqd. After hours of investigating the problem, and a few Gentoo forum posts it was determined that the problem lay with cpufrequtils. In order to work properly cpufrequtils had to be upgraded. Unfotunately there is only one cpufrequtils package in portage and it is quite old.

The Solution:

A new ebuild had to be created for the latest cpufrequtils. I based the new ebuild on the current ebuild only modifying the "epatch" line. Here are the results for anyone who may be experiencing issues with cpu frequency scaling on Gentoo.
/usr/local/portage/sys-power/cpufrequtils/cpufrequtils-004.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/sys-power/cpufrequtils/files/cpufrequtils-conf.d

/usr/local/portage/sys-power/cpufrequtils/files/cpufrequtils-init.d