importance of having DEVFS in Gentoo

Had a buddy here at work install Gentoo, and he chose dev-sources
which gave him 2.6.7-gentoo-r11. I have r7. Turns out that he *had to
include* dev fs to be compiled into the kernel. The menu states
OBSOLETE, but when Gentoo boots it gives you a warning message if you
don't have it. Without it he could only use terminals (xterm,
gnome-terminal) in X if he was root.

The terminal (gnome-terminal) that he invoked was essentially dead
and was not functional. It loaded a blank, white screen with a
blinking cursor. Took about 5 minutes to figure what he needed in the
Gentoo forums: he needed dev fs. Quick kernel reconfigure, recompile,
copy to /boot, and lilo execution. After a reboot and loading Gnome,
his problem was solved..

Bluetooth, speedstep

I needed to get Bluetooth working so I could toy around with my iPaq
(tossed the Zaurus, too slow and the iPaq is far more aesthetic).
After reading around a bunch of places what to do (mostly at the
Gentoo forums), I reconfigured my kernel and pretty much added all of
the Bluetooth options there are (L2CAP, SCO, RFCOMM, RFCOMMTTY, BNEP,
Multicast filter, Protocol Filter, HCI USB, sco, HCI uart,BCSP). At
the time I also changed my power settings to fix the wierd
clock-synching problem I've been having (since day 1). I enabled CPU
Freq. scaling, ACPI Proccesor P-states driver, Intel Enhanced
SpeedStep.

Bluetooth was easy to get up and running after finally figuring out
that modprobe hci_usb was the only thing needed to get the Dell D800
integrated bluetooth alive. But, since this kernel
recompilation/reconfiguration I've been running noticebly slower.
However, my clock as begun to work. Finally decided to take a look at
the CPU freq today (cat /proc/cpuinfo) and noticed that it's been
capped at 600MHZ! No wonder i've been going crazy with delays. SImple
fix, modprobe speedstep-centrino and the clock is kicked to the max at
1698MHZ (1700MHZ rated).

Multisync

To get multisync to work correctly with Opie Datebook running on the
SharpROM, you have to SIGHUP the actual process. Kind of a pain, but
at least it works. You don't appear to need to do this with the
contact list.

Zaurus pxa255 5600

So I sold my Palm Tungsten C for a Zaurus. And then I bricked the
thing by renaming the wrong file and trying to reflash. Solution was
to get into the Service menu by holding down "d" and "m" while
pressing reset, then powering on (to get out of the Service menu, just
reset). From here you can restore from a NAND flash (4th menu, I
think).

Nice fellow (stormer) from Ireland helped me out by creating two clean
NAND backups from his devices. One an Opie 3.6-pre, the other a QPE.
Both of which I still have and am waiting to post to
zaurususergroup.com for downloads. If you would like this NAND, email
me, securityDOTidentityATgmail.com and I'll make it available.

Secondly, I was able to get the wireless synchronization working with
Evolution using Multisync. I love Gentoo. I didn't need to download
the plugins for this, just typed the following:

USE="evo opie" emerge multisync

Too lazy to add those to my official USE flags. This built the plugins
right into Multisync. Withing minutes everything was up and running.

Love the unit so far. Love being able to SSH and FTP with the thing.
Wireless works wonderfully. Need an SD card for more room.

Tapestry 2

Beautiful, only took me about 10 minutes to figure out the way to do get multiple stylesheets into the Shell component. Here's what what I have working in Border.jwc:

----(begin)----


expression="{assets.ColorPrintStyles, assets.ColorStyles,
assets.Content, assets.FontStyles}"/>





----(end)----

So, now all the pages will have the Border component and inherit the style. Plus, the style is easily managable for the designer at the component level.

Tapestry

Okay, so the Home service with Tapestry is HARD-CODED to resolve a blank URL to a Home.page. Well, the beauty of open-source is that you can modify that to your heart's content. I tried that, spent a couple hours on getting it to work and ended up just overriding the service with a local one (extends org.apache.tapestry.engine.HomeService & )

Next piece I'm working on is modifying a basic Border component to provide only the shell and specific stylesheets. According to the Shell component you can provide many stylesheets to be applied by assigning an array or collection of IAsset. At this point I'm not sure where I should do that. Should it be in the engine that I define my list? I've got the entries as context-assets, can I just provide that as the expression? Gotta figure it out and record it.

JSF or Tapestry?

Heard a bit about Java Server Faces lately and I'm interested in investigating. At work I'm beginning a new project in Tapestry and am looking forward to really delving in.

So in searching out information on JSF, Raible Designs added some insight to the process of creating a JSF app.

script to find a class in jar files

Thanks to N. Jarvis for the guts of this:

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "Enter class name: "

read -e SEARCHEE

echo Beginning recursive search through jars $PWD for $SEARCHEE

for i in `find . -name "*.jar"`; do echo $i; jar tf $i | grep $SEARCHEE; done

xdiskusage

xdiskusage is a great linux app to graphically mesaure your disk usage. Can be a bit lengthy to generate on a large disk, but it's quite useful to be able to drill down into the directory structure and view the numbers.

rox-filer key binding

Bothering me that rox-filer default ctrl+n is set to Create New File. So, how to change it to Create New Directory? After scouring Google, #rox, and the mailing list I pieced together the information. You have to have ROX-Session running in order to edit the menu entries. I guess it's assumed in the Help that you do have ROX-Session running.

Of course, it would be nice to just have .roxrc or something equivelant...ROX Faq Keyboard Shortcuts

VIM color pain, change search highlight color

Finally found where to change the search highlight color in VIM. This was a great resource:

http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=14

Simply added the following lines in my .vimrc:

hi Search ctermbg=LightBlue ctermfg=White

map :let &hlsearch=!&hlsearch

More info available in :help hlsearch

Lexmark T632 working Gentoo

What a fiasco here at work to get the T632 working in Gentoo, compared with Fedora. It was entirely user error.

So today I decided to give it another shot by downloading the drivers from Lexmark's site. I chose the Suse/Redhat driver because it appears to be the only legit linux driver. Steps for operation:

1) emerge rpm

2) rpm -Uvh --nodeps whateverdrivername.rpm

3) /usr/local/lexmark/setup.lexprint

4) /usr/lexprint/bin/lexprint

The Java app will take it from there. It was a breeze to browse to the T632, create a queue, and print a test page. "gnome-cups-manager" will then have the queue listed, right-click to make default and the setup was complete.

Another completely satisfactory Gentoo experience.

X Font Server, who needs it?

I dunno who needs it, but removing it from startup now returns my initial speed of booting up.

Updating FC Cache

Do I really need X-Font Server? It takes an extra 10+ seconds on boot and I'm wondering what purpose it serves. I emerged it due to the font problem I had some time ago, but I don't think that it solved anything. For now I'm removing it from startup for efficiency's sake.

Eterm versus aterm,materm,multiaterm

I've had enough of using aterm and it's variants. I continually find descrepencies in behavior when running jboss and other apps. The terminal will simply vanish and take whatever was running with it.

Eterm appears more solid, just as configurable, and more polished.

emerge gnome-blog

This is great, now I can post straight to the blog using gnome-blog. What a slick tool. So much for writing a java app to accomplish the same thing that this does, if I ever get the time...

Time sync

For some odd reason I've been having time issues when I halt the
machine. Simple fix by emerging ntp and updating configuration:

# emerge ntp

You need a time server, which can be obtained here:

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock2a.html

Uncomment the second statement and update the NTP server with your selection.

Add the service to default run-level to startup on boot:
# rc-update add ntp-client default

Start the service now for immediate sync
#/etc/init.d/ntp-client start

Printing now working

Easiest way for me to get printing in my Gentoo up and working was by
using gnome-cups-manager. Though I use fluxbox, this executed
flawlessly and worked in seconds. However, that was using the built-in
driver for our HP LaserJet. For the Epson at home I'll be going
through the
Gentoo printing how-to.

Gentoo: Mysql 4.1.3 beta, Openldap

The latest version of MySQL (at the time of this writing) in Gentoo
Portage is only 4.0.20. However, my project at work requires 4.1.1+
for proper behavior. I found this out the hard way after emerging it
from Portage and then building/testing our project only to find a
connection pooling issue. Fortunately, due to the grace of emerge,
unmerging MySQL was painless. Installation of binaries from MySQL's
site was extremely simple and took a matter of minutes to get
everything up and running.

It's not my intention to zealously preach the benefits of Gentoo (or
maybe it is?) , but I do remember when I had a similar problem like
this while running Fedora and I had to go through several steps with
RPMs to set matters straight.

Similarly, what a riotous mess I encountered with getting openldap up
and running in Fedora. This round of installing Openldap, with emerge,
it was a delight. The only change I had to make was adding permissions
for others to write .to /var/lib/ldap so I wouldn't need to be root in
order to CRUD the entries. On second though, I suppose I could've
alleviated that need if I added myself to the ldap group.

ACPI handling for power-button and lid-closing events

Finally have a script for handling the power-button event and
turning off the screen when the lid button is triggered. Hopefully
will soon be able to resolve the issue of suspending and hibernating
(since both are supported in my kernel, 2.6.7-gentoo-r7). For some
reason it croaks reporting some piece of hardware doesn't support the
action...still need to investigate.

Here's the perl script to place into /etc/acpi/handle.pl:

---begin----
#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $eventarg = shift (@ARGV);

if ($eventarg =~ /^button\/lid$/) {
system ('/usr/X11R6/bin/xset -display :0 dpms force off');
}
if($eventarg =~ /^button\/power$/) {
system('/sbin/halt');
}
---end----

Make sure that it's executable after you create it. Next step is to
update /etc/acpi/events/default:

---begin----
event=.*
action=/etc/acpi/handle.pl %e
---end----

That's it. Now you can shutdown the machine by simply pressing the
power button.

the prerequisite I didn't mention is that ACPI must be compiled into
your kernel and you must have acpid running or nothing here will work.
In the case that you need to patch your kernel to enable it check out
Mike
Hardy's Dell D800 page