SPARCing around

While I’m listening to Interview to pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam (yes, I do like the bsdtalk podcast), I decided to write some little update on what I’m during on this “less work on Gentoo” week.

A part continuing my job with PHP, MySQL and JavaScript (brr), I’ve also continued using Klothos to keyword some of my preferred tools, like for instance metalog, and avahi, that I use to monitor my network to see which boxes are up.. unfortunately the latter does not complete the registering, and gdb seems to be useless to find where it gets stuck, so I’ll try to debug that better later on. I then decided to shift to something more useful like trying to get catalyst working, but even that ended up as a cul-de-sac because I got a kernel panic as soon as it tried to bind the directories for the chroot, the problem is probably either a bug in the kernel, or a misalignment between the userland (6.2-RC1) and the kernel (6.2-BETA3), I’ll solve that once I’ve got the CF memory working (I also received the memory today, it’s a geek’s dream to get a machine to boot within such a little device..

Tonight I also tested the new Audacious plugins package(s) on FreeBSD to get WavPack and MIDI decoding working, it’s kinda cool to have Audacious playing on a box connected to just a KVM and an ethernet cable, and listening it through the main box’s amplifier, viva PulseAudio! 🙂

I’m now thinking of branching xine-lib to work on a possible 1.2 version with FFmpeg imported without changes, maybe that would help to sync it more often, but I’m not really sure if I have the time to continue it on right now. I just can’t stand here doing nothing leaving xine dying, I simply can’t.

On good news, XCB problems with FreeBSD are now being solved, thanks to Jamey and Josh the solution will be a standalone library that would stub the needed functions for pthread, being a no-op for GLIBC and other systems where the functions are all stubbed in the C library (I think I should send a PR to FreeBSD about the missing pthread_equal stub, but I’m not yet sure).

On bad news, cdrkit is a desperate case on FreeBSD, gcvt, ecvt and fcvt are missing, and the ebuild currently hard-deps on libcap. I’ll try to see to fix it, but I’m not optimistic.

And now last but not least, a big thank to Mike (Arthur) for Fahrenheit 451, I read that one when I was 11, an old Italian copy of my teacher (class’s library) and I’m really looking forward for reading original Bradbury’s word for it, it’s still a current reading, unfortunately (not that’s a bad reading at all, but it would be surely better if there wasn’t the risk of ending up that way).