rullzer

So after putting rockbox on my ipod it was time to fill that baby up again. However I discoverd that my music collections is quite big now. Over 200 GB.

So I pulled out amarok again. Before I mainly used it to store files on my Ipod. But now it is time to actually get it to manage the music files. I have always like the amarok interface. However storing over 20.000 tracks in an sqlite database did not seem the best idea. So compiled amarok with mysql support. Configured the database and scanned my collection.

It works faster than I tought it would work. Searching is no problem but also track info is displayed in no time.

Now it is time to tag the untagged files….

Today I found myself listing to my ipod when a project I read about some time ago poped into my head. ipodlinux yup that is right linux on your ipod. So this morning I decided to give it a try.

The first thing I encounterd was that the GUI install program reguires libcrypto.so.0.9.7 and well 0.9.7 is not even in portage anymore that was out of the question. However I think else I also would have done the manual install since well then I can control all the aspects of the installation myself :). But the guid was very clear and in no time I had ipodlinux running. And well I got to tell you it is quite a kick when you see those kernel messaages scrolling over your ipod screen.

However not everything was as good as it seemd. The ipodlinux guys do yet support the 5G ipods so I had no music player. I could still boot the original ipod but well what was the point then. So I decided to install rockbox which was recomended me by Sander.

Installing rockbox was even easier then ipodlinux. Just configuring the bootloader of ipodlinux was enough. Man all things should be that simple! A huge advantage of rockbox is that when a new version is released just extracting a new verion on the ipod will be enought to get it running.

But now comes what I like most about rockbox. No more weird apple database! I can just store the files on my ipod. Now amarok did a nice job in managing my ipod database but now I can do it all easy from the console. So I can only describe that as a big plus! Other than that a lot of more audio formats are supported plus ofcourse it is open source.

Now you are wondering why I even installed ipodlinux right and not just rockbox? Well Ipodlinux has some nice features that I also really really like. For example iBoy. It allows me to play gameboy games on my ipod. Now I realise that some games will be a lot harder than others to play on it but I can for example play Final Fantasy! Just playing RPG games on my IPOD! Hell yeah.

I was already using my ipod a lot but it seems I’ll be using it even more now

I had some contact with the SABnzbdplus maintianers today and it tuns out that the program is still called SABnzbd. So I switched the name of the ebuild and all reverences to SABnzbdplus are removed. This does mean users will have to chown their custom download dirs again. Sorry for that Chris.

Changes to the ebuild:

• All templates in the original package are now installed
• More info at the end of the ebuild
• Passes repoman, well not totally since it uses local use flags.
• Changelog enty

If you have the time please grab the ebuild here and give it a spin.

It is 40 minutes past midnight. However I did not want to keep this from you!

About a week back I saw that in my feed reader all the messages from the SABnzbd project were empty. Which means that there was no activity for a very long time. So after browsing trought the forums I found that SABnzbd was abbandond. It made me sad. But the good thing is that I saw that a new group of people has started a succesor for SABnzbd, SABnzbdplus.

SABnzbdplus: Binary Newsgrabber written in Python, server-oriented using a web-interface. The active successor of the abandoned SABnzbd project

Now what does this mean for the SABnzbd users? Well it comes down to that their usenet download tool is supported again and actively developed. So you can expet new features. Bug fixes etc. So all good news. (for current changes see the changelog).

Now the response I got to my SABnzbd-0.2.5 ebuild (see original blog post) was quite a lot. People thanking me and sending in suggestions. Unfortunatly the ebuild never made it into gentoo portage. But times have changed. Currently Cherrypy-2.2.1-r1 is in portage. So that means this ebuild does not need any other ebuilds.

Having said that I must admit that is not entirely true. It still need yenc if you want that. However we come to that. Since well that package is quite small and only a few python script being installed. It should be no problem getting that into portage. However I do not yet feel quite ready to sumbit my new ebuild to portage since it needs some testing and some features (like the included Nova themes) are not yet available after installing the ebuild. So it will need a lot of fine tuning. However that is proces that will take some time and I could really use your help. So please if you got some spare time emerge the ebuild, try it and let me know how it works out.

I now have only tested it on amd64 but since it are all python scripts it should work on any arch that has the required deps. As stated you will need the yenc ebuild. Other than it should all work fine.

Now if you were using my pervious ebuild be sure to unmerge that first. Else you will get file collison!

And finally here the ebuild can be found.

So my server does his job quite well. Serving files for the network. Acting as a rsync mirror for the network. Downloading my usenet stuf. But I decided to expand its function a bit more. So I compiled transmission (which is in portage) compiled it with daemon support but no graphical interface. Since well what do I need that for? After that I downloaded torrentflux. A nice webbased interface.

You can just follow the instruction in the package to get it running. Quite simple actually.

Now the main use of this is so I can download some torrents every once in a while wihtout having a full blow torrent client running on my laptop. Plus now I can help out the gentoo community a little more by seeding some gentoo stuf. Always nice to do that to.

So yesterday and today I spend some time on setting up a multilib chroot on my 64 bit laptop. Why I do not run multilib you ask me. Well I don’t know. It is something I don’t like. Extra compiling. Plus the way I see it things 64 bit should be able to work on its own. And well After 2 years with the laptop it has served me well!

So the multilib chroot. I’m setting it up so I can test some multilib packages. Since this laptop is now my primary test machine. it should be fine. Now I was playing around with inittab and by modifing it a bit I now have my terminals as follows:

tty1 - tty3: native amd64
tty4 - tty6: amd64 multilib

So that makes switching to it a lot more easy
It works perfectly. Maybe i’ll even set up a completely 32 bit chroot. That way I can easilty check if things compile in 32 bit, 64 bit and multilib all together.

You got to love linux for allowing you to do this

When I’m in Amsterdam I’m hooked up to the internet trough Surfnet. A network that connects all the universities but also takes care of students. However the network is owned by surfnet they do not maintain it here. That is done by some oter company. So now you know a little bit how it is organized around here.

So 2 days ago something was wrong with the network. Don’t ask me what but it just was. All of the sudden no 10 mbit line. No it seemed like I was back at my old 56k6 modem. Damn. Pages not loading instantly. Man that is a pain in the ass. I had totally forgotten what it is like. That grabbing the source code for a random package can actually take more tan 1 minute or so :S

Well it is fixed now and I hope it won’t happen again.

So this weekend I had some spare time. So I decided to reconfigure the samba domain so that when we get a new pc for my sister (wich will run gentoo… No paying for a windows licence) everyone can login everywhere etc. In order to do that I had to move some files around. But it works.

Now I wanted to share some extra stuf on the server. For example the music, some files, photo’s etc. In windows they are all mounted. So I wanted to do the same on my linux boxes. Should be a piece of cake since a have a share dir on the server that holds all the stuff to be shared.

So I shared that dir via NFS. Mounting went easy. However. all the dirs were empty… Now why is that? Could it be some kind of dark magic? No it is just that NSF (for security probably) can only acces 1 partition per share. So now I have them all shared seperatly. Not a big deal ofcourse. BUt always good to know.