Hartwork Blog (Posts about Planet Gentoo)

Upstream release notification for package maintainers

Sebastian Pipping — Sun, 03 Jun 2018 13:22:35 GMT

Repology is monitoring package repositories across Linux distributions. By now, Atom feeds of per-maintainer outdated packages that I was waiting for have been implemented.

So I subscribed to my own Gentoo feed using net-mail/rss2email and now Repology notifies me via e-mail of new upstream releases that other Linux distros have packaged that I still need to bump in Gentoo. In my case, it brought an update of dev-vcs/svn2git to my attention that I would have missed (or heard about later), otherwise.

Based on this comment, Repology may soon do release detection upstream similar to what euscan does, as well.

Holy cow! Larry the cow Gentoo tattoo

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 14:53:08 GMT

Probably not new but was new to me: Just ran into this Larry the Cow tattoo online: https://www.geekytattoos.com/larry-the-gender-challenged-cow/

I love free software... and Gentoo does! #ilovefs

Sebastian Pipping — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:25:05 GMT

Some people care if software is free of cost or if it has the best features, above everything else. I don't. I care that I can legally inspect its inner workings, modify and share modified versions. That's why I happily avoid macOS, Windows, Skype, Photoshop. I ran into these two pieces involving Gentoo in the Gallery of Free Software lovers and would like to share them with you:

Images are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (with attribution going to Free Software Foundation Europe) as confirmed by Max Mehl.

GIMP 2.9.6 now in Gentoo

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 26 Aug 2017 18:53:07 GMT

Here's what upstream has to say about the new release 2.9.6. Enjoy :)

Re-introducing app-portage/fetchcommandwrapper

Sebastian Pipping — Tue, 16 May 2017 18:46:30 GMT

Hi! When I started fetchcommandwrapper about 6 years ago it was a proof of concept: It plugged into portage replacing wget for downloads, facilitating ${GENTOO_MIRRORS} and aria2 to both download faster and distribute loads across mirrors. A hack for sure, but with some potential. Back then public interest was non-existent, fetchcommandwrapper had some issues — e.g. metadata.xsd downloads failed and some sites rejected downloading before it made aria2 dress like wget — and I stopped using it myself, eventually. With the latest bug reports, bugfixes and release of version 0.8 in Gentoo, fetchcommandwrapper is ready for general use now. To give it a shot, you emerge app-portage/fetchcommandwrapper and append source /usr/share/fetchcommandwrapper/make.conf to /etc/portage/make.conf. Done. If you have extra options that you would like to pass to aria2c, put them in ${FETCHCOMMANDWRAPPER_EXTRA}, or ${FETCHCOMMANDWRAPPER_OPTIONS} for fetchcommendwrapper itself; for example

FETCHCOMMANDWRAPPER_OPTIONS="--link-speed=600000"

tells fetchcommandwrapper that my download link has 600KB/s only and makes aria2 in turn drop connections to mirrors that cannot keep up with at least a third of that, so that faster mirrors get a chance to take their place. For non-ebuild bugs, feel free to use https://github.com/gentoo/fetchcommandwrapper/issues to report. Best, Sebastian

Fwd: x11-misc/safeeyes: Protect your eyes from eye strain / asthenopia

Sebastian Pipping — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 14:18:09 GMT

Hey there! If you are not subscribed to the new Gentoo packages feed, let me quickly introduce you to SafeEyes that I started using on a daily basis. It has found it's way into Gentoo as x11-misc/safeeyes now. This article does a good job: SafeEyes Protects You From Eye Strain When Working On The Computer (webupd8.org)

Best, Sebastian

Creating Fedora chroots on Debian, Gentoo, ... easily

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 22:20:00 GMT

Hi! Just a quick tip on how to easily create a Fedora chroot environment from (even a non- Fedora) Linux distribution. I am going to show the process on Debian stretch but it's not be much different elsewhere. Since I am going to leverage pip/PyPI, I need it available — that and a few non-Python widespread dependencies:

# apt install python-pip db-util lsb-release rpm yum
# pip install image-bootstrap pychroot

Now for the actual chroot creation, process and usage is very close to debootstrap of Debian:

# directory-bootstrap fedora --release 25 /var/lib/fedora_25_chroot

Done. Now let's prove we have actual Fedora 25 in there. For lsb_release we need package redhat-lsb here, but the chroot was is functional before that already.

# pychroot /var/lib/fedora_25_chroot dnf -y install redhat-lsb
# pychroot /var/lib/fedora_25_chroot lsb_release -a
LSB Version:    :core-4.1-amd64:core-4.1-noarch:[..]:printing-4.1-noarch
Distributor ID: Fedora
Description:    Fedora release 25 (Twenty Five)
Release:        25
Codename:       TwentyFive

Note the use of pychroot which does bind mounts of /dev and friends out of the box, mainly. directory-bootstrap is part of image-bootstrap and, besides Fedora, also supports creation of chroots for Arch Linux and Gentoo. See you :)

Gimp 2.9.4 now in Gentoo

Sebastian Pipping — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:24:15 GMT

Hi there! Just a quick heads up that Gimp 2.9.4 is now available in Gentoo. Upstream has an article on what's new with Gimp 2.9.4: GIMP 2.9.4 Released

Uses Gentoo: PS4 Linux demo by fail0verflow at 32c3

Sebastian Pipping — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 01:09:51 GMT

Demo start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A7V3GLWF6U&feature=youtu.be&t=37s

Where "OpenRC 0.19.1 is starting up Gentoo Linux (x86_64)" scrolls into display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A7V3GLWF6U&feature=youtu.be&t=1m21s

XScreenSaver unlock dialog tuning

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 19:42:59 GMT

I'm having a bit of trouble accepting that one of the dialogs that is presented to me as frequently as the XScreenSaver unlock window below is by far the least shiny part of my daily Linux desktop experience.

Tuning just the knobs that XScreenSaver already comes with, I eventually got to this point:

The logo still is too much noise and the font still lacks anti-aliasing. However most of the text noise, the pre-90s aesthetics and the so-called thermometer are gone. To bring it to your desktop, use this content for ~/.Xdefaults

xscreensaver.dateFormat:
xscreensaver.passwd.body.label:
xscreensaver.passwd.heading.label:
xscreensaver.passwd.login.label:
xscreensaver.passwd.thermometer.width:  2
xscreensaver.passwd.uname:              False 
xscreensaver.passwd.unlock.label:

xscreensaver.Dialog.background:         #000000
xscreensaver.Dialog.foreground:         #ffffff
xscreensaver.Dialog.Button.background:  #000000
xscreensaver.Dialog.Button.foreground:  #ffffff
xscreensaver.Dialog.text.background:    #000000
xscreensaver.Dialog.text.foreground:    #ffffff

xscreensaver.Dialog.shadowThickness:    1
xscreensaver.Dialog.topShadowColor:     #000000
xscreensaver.Dialog.bottomShadowColor:  #000000

and run

xrdb < ~/.Xdefaults  && xscreensaver-command -restart

as advised by the XScreenSaver Manual. For other approaches, I'm only aware of this one: xscreensaver lock window themes. Please comment below if you know about other approaches. Thank you! PS: The screensaver in the background is Fireflies. For a Debian package, you can run make deb from a Git clone.