Lots of updates, and good news.

It’s been a while since I last blogged; the reason is found in the recent Italy’s elections; I wanted to avoid ending up talking about italian politics. But now elections are ended and I can restart blogging 🙂

First of all, start with news of the day, Daemon News published an interview done by David Stanford to.. me 🙂 I want to thanks David and the Daemon News staff for this opportunity.

Part two, amaroK 1.4 crazyness… okay I know many people are going to hate me because of the series of bumps of amarok 1.4_beta3. Unfortunately there were a few problems with the released tarballs, regressions since the _rc we all tested, that ended up requiring a final 1.4_beta3c tarball release (1.4_beta3-r2 in Gentoo).

The major change since this release is that xine is no more optional. Upstream decided that one between helix and xine engines had to be built for amaroK to be considered complete, and being helix available only for x86, I did go with xine. If you want gstreamer backend you can select it, but it might not be available in final release as it lacks proper (upstream) maintenance. Xine works in most cases tho, just remember to enable mad useflag if you want to play mp3s.

From the Gentoo/*BSD part, I want to thanks Mike for adding the ldhints patches to Gentoo patchsets for binutils 2.16.1-r2 and 2.16.91.0.7, and Nick Clifton (from upstream binutils) who applied that patch on upstream, too. This means that right now binutils from HEAD supports FreeBSD completely out of the box! Yuppie! Well –as-needed seems not to work, I have to fix that, but that’s lower priority.

I’m still working on baselayout, as there are still troubles, for example rc-daemon doesn’t work as intended, and currently all the filesystems are checked twice (this is fixed in SVN thanks to Javier Villaviciencio who reported it), and dhclient fails to set routes. Most of this will be fixed soon tho 🙂

Also, Xorg7 works, KDE 3.5 works too. kdebase-meta, kdenetwork-meta and kdegraphics-meta are (almost fully) keyworded and works fine. I had to add a last minute fix to mesa to get rid of -ldl from .la files installed, so if you have it installed and have problems linking due to libdl missing, run the following command: sed -i -e ’s:-ldl::g’ /usr/lib/libGL{,U}.la /usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/libGL.la, and that it will fix it.

sdl seems to work, too, so I’m going to keyword it together with flobopuyo (my favourite game and what I’ve tested a lot with 😉 ) later on, although you need the patched libusb 0.1.12 from the overlay if you have libusb already installed, as 0.1.11 has a bad bug that makes libSDL fail to find the usb joystick support on FreeBSD and ends up failing because of undefined symbols on the final library.

Right now I’ve talked with UberLord and I might know what the deal is with dhclient, but I can’t test it right now, I’ll wait for arachnist to test, and in the mean time I’m going to bump alsa to 1.0.11_rc5, sigh.

Anyway, the binutils patch merged upstream is really a milestone for me… next step, patching gcc to recognise the extra format strings added by FreeBSD while using the right FreeBSD target 🙂

I’d like to contact some FreeBSD developer to submit the patches to build freebsd-lib and -sources with binutils 2.16 but I’m not sure who to send them to 🙁