So I’m back

And tonight, by doing my first three commits since I came home from the hospital, I officially came back.

Let’s try to summary what this re-installation was like: a hell! Beside a few packages not building, changes in kernels 2.6.22 and later broke lirc for me, as lirc_gpio won’t build anymore, and my TV card is not supported by the bttv IR driver, plus I have no clue how to add support for it for now.

I still miss alsa-plugins (fails to build, speex related), dvd+rw-tools (fails to build, linux-headers related), mpeg4ip (fails to build, gcc 4.2 incompatibility), htdig (fails to build, ICE in GCC 4.2.2), plus all the xine-based software packages because, well, I haven’t rebuilt xine yet (I build it manually).

Thanks to the availability of all the data (/var) and configuration (/etc) from the previous install, I don’t have to waste hours to set-up everything again, although I’ve decided to change a few things, plus I still need to copy the old data (storage, video, audio) from the old disks, I just don’t like having to create a 250GB partition for video – don’t ask – so I think I’ll wait till I can afford myself the DVDs for Boston Legal first and second seasons 🙂

On the other hand, I did my own screwups during the build: the previous configuration had xf86-video-ati unmasked and xf86-input-event using a live git ebuild (the last release at the time didn’t work for me). This created me some trouble with Xorg: the 6.8 pre-release of the radeon driver only supports xrandr 1.2 and drops support for MergedFB, but with my card (a 9250SE), it doesn’t seem to work that well: I end up seeing half the screen that should be on the second monitor on the first one; I reverted to 6.7 release candidates and that worked fine; I hope they’ll fix it before 6.8 is released, but I don’t count on it, considering that my card has quite some troubles in general (EXA not working, Xv not working well with MergedFB, the cursor disappear when coming near the splitting of the monitors, …) that have been reported with as much detail as feasible, and are still wandering in blackness. The event driver instead made my Xorg crash every time I clicked the right mouse button; luckily downgrading to last release fixed the issue, and the release is new enough to work for me it seems.

Anyway, I’m quite happy with the bumps done tonight: PAM integrated some patches from Debian for Hurd, nothing we really needed, but at least they make Linux-PAM more friendly for non-Linux OSes, and that means that one day I’ll be able to keyword it ~x86-fbsd; they also finally applied the fix for LDFLAGS/LDADD/LIBADD that I reported repeatedly, and that made me waste hours and hours to patch every other release: one less download for users, one less patch to maintain for me. I’m not happy with Qsynth new release, migrated to Qt4, as the author doesn’t seem to know autoconf that well, and he tries to lookup Qt4 by link-test when he should be using pkg-config, requiring me to append flags to get gcc and ld to look for the includes and the libraries for Qt4. I’ll probably write a proper patch tomorrow and send it upstream for next release, together with a note that the desktop file he’s shipping is not completely broken standing by the standard from FreeDesktop.

If you’re a jack-rack user and found it failing with the recent GTK+ update, 1.4.6 is also in tree with a patch to fix building, re-enabling deprecated features. Of course I’m quite sure that GTK+ 2.14 or 2.16 will break jack-rack again, so I hope the author will port it to the new API soon.

Okay, tomorrow’s plan: upgrade to baselayout 2 and make sure that everything still works 😛

Ah I forgot, I also asked, as I was there, to finally mark stable the latest qjackctl (already Qt4), a newer Qsynth (not the Qt4 version yet), and of course the long-awaited PAM 0.99 stable request.