rullzer

It has been long since my last post. Too long. I won’t fill you up on all the things I have done. Or maybe I will in other posts. But today I want to talk about openstreetmap.

As you might (or might not) know openstreetmap aims to provide a free (as in speech) map of the world. You can help by adding or editing the map. This is what I have been doing the last couple of months. Mostly fixing roads or adding new cycleways. Now of course cycling is good exercise. And it feels good to contribute to a free world map. However the real kick is seeing your changes of your work!

This can be seen on the main website. However that is only updated once a week. There are several other tile servers that serve a part of the map. These servers are generally updated more often. However when you use a tile server you are can’t change the rendering. So how great would it be to create your own rendering?

Check out my wiki entry. Of course it is a wiki so add all improvement you can think of.

So my base system is running smooth. Distcc and crossdev are up and running and the server is doing a great job compiling everythin for it. NFS is running which safes a lot of space and keeps me from cleaning the distfiles every day. Since well 4 gb is not a lot :P.

Other than that I’m supprised how fast the system boots. I guess it is because there is not much hardware to detect. Other than that the kernel is also very small and when I get over at my folks tomorrow I can get it even smaller I believe.

Right now KDE is compiling since I promised my gf’s father to check what the old thing could do. currently I’m at packag e 146 of 192 since this morning. So that will be done tomorrow. And it will be time to run KDE…. that would be the ultimate test. Howver I feel fluxbox or something will run a lot smoother. But maybe I’ll test that later.

I’m wondering what I could do with the laptop. Cause it would be nice to put it to good use. Now useing it for presentations or something would be great. Or other than that using it for some basic school stuf for one of my sisters or something could also be the case. Ah well I’ll check it tomorrow

After going trough my /usr/portage/distfiles/ I found a lot of tarballs that belong to versions of packages that are no longer in portage. Now these tarballs take up a lot of space. Doing a nice rm -rf * will ofcource take care of the problem but then all the tarballs that are still in portage will have to be downloaded again if once of the gentoo boxes in the network needs it (currently 4). Now it is not that I have a datalimit but it is a matter of principle.

So there must be an easier solution. I’ll try to look into it but python is writen in portage so maybe I can just include it and check for all packages and versions and remove the tarballs that have no corresponding ebuild. This script doesn’t have to run every day since it would take some time I guess but once a week or so just to keep the system clean.

Please let me know if anybody is interested in such an app or knows if it already exists…

So this weekend my girlfriend father pointed out that they had an old laptop lying around. I decided it would be fun to run gentoo on it and use it for anything I could think of. First to give you an impression

Compaq Armada 100s
550 Mhz Cpu
56 meg ram
8 meg video-ram

This laptop is old so that means the CD-ROM does not react that well to CD-R’s. This is bad when you want to boot from a CD-ROM. But I got it working. Now after booting the kernel (nofb ofcourse, and more options). An error messgae kept spamming my screen wich was caused by udev loading the usbmodule (while I gave nousb as one of the options to the kernel). This is not what should happen so I filled a bug (#206954).

The solution was easy just rmmod uhci_usb and it stopped. So that ment no USB support into the kernel. The USB port (yeah only 1) is know to be broken on this laptop I read on other sites.

Now since I wanted to use the laptops full potential I ofcourse changed the CHOST etc. But a downside ofcourse was that gcc and glibc needed to be recompiled….. It is compiling gcc for 10 hours straigt now. And I have no idea how long it will keep on going. But if it isn’t finished in another 10 hours It will be killed and I have to think of something else.

I’ll keep you posted on the process with this laptop.

So since it is vacation, Christmas is over and I have some time to fill. I have been thinking about some projects to do but could not really think of something doable in a few days. Since well I do not mind long term project I just want something where I have something working in a few days.

I had a nice idea that I borrowed from Tobias Koenig about bus-services. So I checked the transport company in Amsterdam. Wrote them a nice email if they have a way to communicate with the database. XML-RPC or something like that. Since I do understand they would not allow me directly on the database. An email came back that they do not have such a service and indeed could not allow me on directly on the database.

That is all understandable but the departure times are all available on the internet so I decided to give it one last try. A dump of the departure times from the database. But again they could not help me. Now I wonder why is that. I wrote a nice email that I just wanted to make a nice program. Why can’t they share that stuff with me? Or anyone else?

Now I could ofcourse parse the whole stuf by myself. But that would mean I had to write some ugly parser in their web of html. Which I do not like.

So that project won’t work for me. Then a friend of mine suggested a simple bittorrent client. That can run on a server and a nice client program to connect to it. So It can run while you are asleep or whatever. However after looking at a bittorrent file and the protocol I figured that would not be something I could have working in a few days.

So no project now. If you have any suggestions drop a comment please.

Qt has not even released a final version of Qt4.4.0 but 4.4.0_rc1 is already in portage. What does that mean? Well first of all that some people that complain that gentoo is now always up to date with its versions are proven wrong. Just run an ~arch system and you won’t really get more bleeding edge than that.

But the other thing Qt4.4.0_rc1 is that qt is that we now have qt-core. This means that you can compile and run qt programs on machines without X. I find this a huge advantage since I really like coding in Qt. First of all OS independancy this isn’t the most usefull feature for me since I only run linux but it is always good to know more people can use the things you create.

However the most usefull thing I find is the easy use of sockets and string modulation. It currently is masked ~M on x86. And not even keyworded on the other arches. However I added the amd64 keyword and compiled it on my home server. Compilation went smooth and a simple hello world program worked like a charm. So soon I can write some nice usefull (at least for me) servers in Qt wich should safe me a lot of time. Which is always a good thing

Yet another reason why I just love Qt.

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