wonkablog

I took a few minutes today and cleaned up a few small bugs on Planet Larry and friends.

One thing I get asked for every now and then is if I have archives of past posts. Well, I do now. I just copy the HTML file of the last post to $date one each run. A simple and unelegant solution. I’ll be doing the same thing for Planet Gentoo soon.

Also, fixed the FeedBurner link on the main page — I didn’t even realize it was broken. While I was at it, I created one for Universe as well.

On the packages website, I finally fixed it so you can search against just packages again. That’s been annoying me for a while. By default the search is way too wide, I think. It will search the full atom, the package description and the package name. I have to do the package name twice because of regular expressions (starting with, ending with, exact matches, etc.). And there’s still no simple way to search for packages containing multiple words, which is also an annoying little bug. Advanced searches for GPNL and Packages has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but have been putting off since I started the projects. Sheesh. Every time I sit down and start to poke at it, though, I realize just how big a beast it is, based on what I’d like to accomplish. I really need something for the interim, though.

Anyway, I better quit before this post gets any more boring. One last thing — we can use more users who are Gentoo users and have a blog on Planet Larry. Just drop me an e-mail and I’ll get you setup.

I’ve made an awkward and difficult decision that I hope doesn’t make anyone feel bad: effective immediately I’ve removed any feeds from Planet Larry / Larry the Universe that were from developers who have retired from the Gentoo project.

I setup the planet feeds mainly so that regular users of Gentoo Linux could talk about and share their experiences, and I want to get back to keeping it with them primarily in mind. I tend to think that ex-developers have more weight with their posts, which tends to cause some unbalance that I was never comfortable with.

Speaking of users, I am always looking for new bloggers to get added, so if you are a Gentoo user who blogs about computer experiences, be sure to sign up.

That’s all for now.

Edit: I originally took this post down, and am now restoring it. I still haven’t decided if this is a permanent change or not. I might create a planet just for ex-developers, or reintegrate them somehow. I dunno. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

There has been some recent activity again on the libdvdnav front, and so I’ve been playing around with it again.  I finally created an SVN ebuild for MPlayer which I can use myself instead of just manually updating and reconfiguring the repo myself.

Generally speaking, I don’t like the idea of ebuilds that hit upstream’s SVN servers directly, so please be kind and don’t do anything asinine like upgrade every single day or something.

So now I have live subversion ebuilds for both libdvdnav and mplayer.  This is the important thing to know about the libdvdnav ebuild: it has some changes to libdvdread so you will have to unmerge the one that is already uninstalled.  On top of that, since it is a new API version, everything you previously compiled against libdvdread (k3b, etc.) will have to be re-emerged … and even then, there are zero guarantees that it will work at all.

In short, these ebuilds are only designed for a select few: those people who are using mplayer exclusively and want to have dvdnav support at the risk of breaking anything else that needs DVD access.  Obviously, that scenario fits for someone with a media frontend, but doesn’t make sense for general desktop usage.

Also worth noting is that these are the only two ebuilds that will work together.  Previously, the mplayer in the tree would have detected and worked with the libdvdnav ebuild, but that’s not the case anymore.  It’s these two in the overlay, or the mplayer in the tree.  Pick one set and choose.

If you have problems with the ebuilds, let me know.  I’m still not an expert at layman so I can’t go about giving you instructions on how to install this stuff directly.  Have fun, though.

Oh, and last but not least — I tested them, and it works for me. :)  Just emerge libdvdread first, then mplayer.

Even though I can’t code in C++, or anything more hardcore than bash (and even that’s pretty sketchy), with a push in the right direction from a noble soul in #mythtv, I managed to mangle a patch together for MythVideo that fixes some annoyances that I’ve had for a very long time. They are:

• Filenames won’t display underscores, but folders would
• Getting rid of the “cover image” screen in the gallery
• No page up, page down support with your remote

The patch is here, which should apply cleanly to media-plugins/mythvideo-0.20.2_p15087. Or you could just try and use my overlay directly. If you look at what I’ve changed, it should be really simple to make the same changes to the most recent version for SVN, since I don’t think the file has changed much between releases. Creating patches is also not my favorite thing to do, and in fact actually took me longer to create the actual diff and apply it correctly then it did to hack the code.

Here’s a complete list of what I changed, if you don’t want to go digging around the code and determining what’s happened for yourself:

First, the issue of page up / page down. Sure it’s nice that you can do that with a keyboard, but if you are using a remote, it’s painful scrolling when you have a lot of folders to look through. I remapped 1 and 7 to emulate Home and End, and 3 and 9 to emulate Page Up and Page Down.

Second, for the display of folder names, if it has an underscore in the title, that is replaced with a space. This is consistent with the naming scheme for the actual files.

Third, and always most annoying to me, is that I got rid of the information screen that displays all the metadata about a movie after you select it in gallery mode. I always thought that was pretty useless, because I already know what I want to watch, and didn’t like having to hit enter twice to start playback. There was a shortcut already, you could just hit the Play button and it would skip the screen, but I think this is more effective and natural.

Finally, I disabled the Menu, Filter and Info options by commenting them out, for the only reason that I never used them and sometimes they would pop up when I was debugging stuff with mplayer and my remote.

Needless to say, I’m much happier now with my user experience, since MythVideo is all I’m using right now. I have a really low tolerance for small tweaks that bug me, and I’m glad I finally got these taken care of. Besides, it’s forced me to start learning some C++ (again) so I don’t have to keep relying on people to help me get started.

Now I can go back to watching Roger Ramjet and Knight Rider in navigation harmony. It’s great.

I’ve finally gotten around to bumping alsa-driver in the tree.  This is the first time I’ve done it all by myself, and really, about the only thing I’ve ever done for ALSA on Gentoo since joining the herd probably a year ago.

While the bump isn’t so much an interesting story, what probably could use some clarification is the status of the package itself.  First of all, it’s unsupported.  Mostly.  That is, I’m the only one who is maintaining this package, and it’s mostly out of a sense of obligation and the fact that I use it now and then.  But if you have problems with it, there’s not gonna be much I can do.  It’s completely unsupported by the alsa herd, as the official recommendation is to use the in kernel drivers.

Anyway, I’ll fix whatever I can, but if you have a bug, assign it to me (beandog@gentoo.org) and not alsa-bugs.

As far as changes go, you can see what’s new in this release from the alsa project homepage.

Well, it’s finally done, or at least a state where I can release it to the world.  I’ve written a clone of the original packages.gentoo.org website, with the same postgres + portage backend that GPNL uses, and it’s now available online here: packages.larrythecow.org

I’ve been working on this thing non-stop for the past two weeks at least, and I’m really excited to have it done and up and running.  I loved the original design and site, and used it quite a lot.  It’s a great resource to just randomly find packages that are in the tree if you ever browse it, and find new stuff to try out.  Plus, it’s a great way to search the portage tree as well!

The search is one thing I’m pretty excited about.  Just like eix, it will accept regular expressions as input.  So if you want to search for an exact package name, try ^portage$  If you want to search on more than one word, seperate them with pipes: foo|bar  There’s lost of stuff you can do, so have fun. :)  I’ll have an advanced search sooner or later.

Speaking of feature requests, I have also setup a Trac project page for the backend, where you can see which bugs I’m going to be working on.  You’ll notice that getting some Atom and RSS feeds is on that list.  I’m sure people are going to want that.

Also, one small drawback, is that it only updates once a day right now.  The only reason for that is because my server is just a small little Athlon, and while it could handle the load of updating more regularly, I don’t want to put too much of a strain on an already overworked little system.  I’m going to look into ways of optimizing things so that I can get updates out the door more frequently, but for now, it’s going to have to wait.

As always, feedback, comments and suggestions are more than welcome.  Please let me know if you find any bugs, too.   Enjoy.

I’ve just updated my apache config, and larrythecow.org and planetlarry.org now have a permanent redirect to http://planet.larrythecow.org/

There’s no need to update your RSS readers if it handles redirects okay, but eventually the content for the main domain name will change — not anytime soon, though, that’s for sure, I have zero plans right now. Even when I do change www.larrythecow.org to something else, I’ll still have the RSS feeds redirect so as not to break anyone’s feed.

Anyway, you’ll see why I’m moving to a subdomain here in a day or so.

Edit: More spring cleaning, now Universe has its own subdomain as well: http://universe.larrythecow.org/

Just another Gentoo PSA, portage now has the latest driver for the openChrome X11 drivers for VIA chipsets (x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome). These drivers are really nice because they support more chipsets than the standard VIA ones do.

I shouldn’t get any credit for this one. I’ve actually had an ebuild for this for like 4 months, and procastinated putting it into the tree. In fact, Donnie (dberkholz) beat me to to it — thanks, man. All I really did was clean up the ebuild and do some testing. Also, of course, thanks to upstream for actually working on the project and getting something successful out the door. Much love.

So there ya go. With that little driver you should be able to do some cool stuff with those Mini-ITX’s that you’ve been waiting to convert into a PVR. Rock on.

Nothing new on the frontend, but the backend for GPNL has been almost completely replaced now with my updated changes.  The difference in speed alone is pretty nice.  Where it took about 30 to 45 minutes to import the entire tree, now it only takes around 5.  Plus, I’m importing more stuff this time.  That means a lot more flexibility on my end to play around with the code and do some debugging if I have to.

There’s still some minor sorting issues to worry about, but I’ll have that worked out by today.  I’m also working on a really cool proof-of-concept using the postgres database as a backend, that will hopefully be ready soon within a few days.

The next stop is to get GPNL to do some more reporting on QA checks.  I need some ideas of what to look for, but already there’s a few things I can do just by running system-wide queries against the entire tree.  One issue that has come up recently is the splitting of DEPEND and RDEPEND correctly for building binary packages.  Given a list of packages to look out for, I can easily report that.  Another one that phreak came up with was to look at redundant data in the metadata.xml files.  I can also duplicate that with a simple query, so that’ll be easy to track it’s progress in getting cleaned up.

Anyway, I could use some more ideas.  It’s one thing to have all this data gathered, archived and indexed, but it’s another to come up with creative ideas on how to use it.  Looking through the QA bugs usually helps to give me an idea.

I just thought I’d send out a random update status on the stuff I’m working on in Gentoo right now.

 alsa-driver: Putting it on life support, going to have a bump here for 1.0.16 pretty soon.

webmin / usermin: I thought someone was taking care of it, they weren’t, so I took it over after finding some annoying bugs.

GPNL: The new code is 99% done.  All that’s left is I need to rewrite checking for masked packages and then find where the code is lagging, and push it live.  Then I can start working on some advanced searches, and starting to run some checks for QA issues.  One I want to put in there soon is checking for RDEPEND/DEPEND bugs.

Sword modules: Kinda dropped the ball on this one, I still have a lot more to add to the tree.

Openchrome: I still need to add that to the tree.

Planet: I’m thinking it’s about time to upgrade our b2evolution.

And that’s about it.