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

Rawspeed RAW Image Loader

I read this interesting post about a new RAW loader being worked on by Klaus Post called RawSpeed that is written in C++ and focuses on speed. I'm already a huge fan of RawStudio so I think my next project may be an SVN build of RawSpeed. Development of RawStudio isn't exactly lightning fast but the application itself is by far the fastest RAW image editor I have ever used. It's also extemely easy to use. I'm looking forward to seeing what RawSpeed can do. Linux photography has a writeup about RawSpeed and a few other intersting tidbits about the future of some other photo editing applications.

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.

Fast-Track, Dillo CVS ebuild progress

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to get Fast-Track to work with Gentoo and portage. The first problem I ran into was that the fast-track installer tries to download and install its dependencies outside of the package management system unless you happen to be using Ubuntu. I created a patch that strips that out and configures the metasploit directories to the default Gentoo locations. Then I made an ebuild that depends on the packages that the default installer tries to download. At this point I ran into another problem because one of the dependencies is Pymills which isn't in portage so I made an ebuild for that. That part was a little tricky because Pymills doesn't want to install if its parent directory has the version number attached and that's how the tar.gz is setup. I hacked out a working, but not pretty solution. After that I got Fast-Track installed with my ebuild but it was complaining about not having Winexe installed so I took a go at creating a build for that but I'm stuck again. The build instructions and dependencies don't seem to be correct because I can't even get it to build using their instructions. I think it has to do with Samba but I have to dig a little deeper.

I decided to try something else before going back to the Winexe ebuild. A Dillo cvs version seemed like an easy task but try as I might I couldn't connect to their cvs repository. I guess I'll I have to look into that again today to see if things have changed. So I did a little search on Gnome Files for applications that I might want to create ebuilds for. I found Smuxi which looks promising. It's an irssi-like graphical IRC client written in C#. Fortunately for me (considering my recent track record) there is already an ebuild in portage. Unfortunately for me it doesn't work. All the dependencies installed without a hitch but Smuxi itself gets stuck in an infinite loop during compilation. I filed a bug so we'll see what happens.

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.

New Blog coming soon...

I haven't posted in a while because I have been messing around with Drupal and boning up on my design skills because that is where I am seriously lacking. I've got Drupal figured out for the most part, but I haven't looked into building my own modules yet which it seems I am going to have to do because of some limitation I have already run into. The big issue is that there are still a ton of useful modules that haven't been updated to work with version 6 yet. Currently I am putting to use a little knowledge I gained about design to create a new site which uses Drupal. I have the design almost finalized but I'm still ironing out the details.

In other news, Evolution-rss-1.1 fixed my dark theme problem and it works on Evo 2.24. Webkit got another performance boost but yet again I am left out with a 64-bit machine. And finally Flash 10 was released. It totally borks my computer. A while back I upgraded both Xorg and Flash. After that I was having problems with my system completely crashing when the display blanked and I thought it was due to Xorg but it turns out after reinstalling the official release of Flash 10 it started happening again. I uninstalled and the problem goes away. I could never figure out how I got rid of the problem last time it happed but now I know. It's sad too because Flash 10 actually fixed a lot of issues for me like the infamous disappearing drop down menus that seem to hide behide the content.

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

Rawspeed RAW Image Loader

I read this interesting post about a new RAW loader being worked on by Klaus Post called RawSpeed that is written in C++ and focuses on speed. I'm already a huge fan of RawStudio so I think my next project may be an SVN build of RawSpeed. Development of RawStudio isn't exactly lightning fast but the application itself is by far the fastest RAW image editor I have ever used. It's also extemely easy to use. I'm looking forward to seeing what RawSpeed can do. Linux photography has a writeup about RawSpeed and a few other intersting tidbits about the future of some other photo editing applications.

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.

Fast-Track, Dillo CVS ebuild progress

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to get Fast-Track to work with Gentoo and portage. The first problem I ran into was that the fast-track installer tries to download and install its dependencies outside of the package management system unless you happen to be using Ubuntu. I created a patch that strips that out and configures the metasploit directories to the default Gentoo locations. Then I made an ebuild that depends on the packages that the default installer tries to download. At this point I ran into another problem because one of the dependencies is Pymills which isn't in portage so I made an ebuild for that. That part was a little tricky because Pymills doesn't want to install if its parent directory has the version number attached and that's how the tar.gz is setup. I hacked out a working, but not pretty solution. After that I got Fast-Track installed with my ebuild but it was complaining about not having Winexe installed so I took a go at creating a build for that but I'm stuck again. The build instructions and dependencies don't seem to be correct because I can't even get it to build using their instructions. I think it has to do with Samba but I have to dig a little deeper.

I decided to try something else before going back to the Winexe ebuild. A Dillo cvs version seemed like an easy task but try as I might I couldn't connect to their cvs repository. I guess I'll I have to look into that again today to see if things have changed. So I did a little search on Gnome Files for applications that I might want to create ebuilds for. I found Smuxi which looks promising. It's an irssi-like graphical IRC client written in C#. Fortunately for me (considering my recent track record) there is already an ebuild in portage. Unfortunately for me it doesn't work. All the dependencies installed without a hitch but Smuxi itself gets stuck in an infinite loop during compilation. I filed a bug so we'll see what happens.

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.

New Blog coming soon...

I haven't posted in a while because I have been messing around with Drupal and boning up on my design skills because that is where I am seriously lacking. I've got Drupal figured out for the most part, but I haven't looked into building my own modules yet which it seems I am going to have to do because of some limitation I have already run into. The big issue is that there are still a ton of useful modules that haven't been updated to work with version 6 yet. Currently I am putting to use a little knowledge I gained about design to create a new site which uses Drupal. I have the design almost finalized but I'm still ironing out the details.

In other news, Evolution-rss-1.1 fixed my dark theme problem and it works on Evo 2.24. Webkit got another performance boost but yet again I am left out with a 64-bit machine. And finally Flash 10 was released. It totally borks my computer. A while back I upgraded both Xorg and Flash. After that I was having problems with my system completely crashing when the display blanked and I thought it was due to Xorg but it turns out after reinstalling the official release of Flash 10 it started happening again. I uninstalled and the problem goes away. I could never figure out how I got rid of the problem last time it happed but now I know. It's sad too because Flash 10 actually fixed a lot of issues for me like the infamous disappearing drop down menus that seem to hide behide the content.