Technobabble

I've been using Gentoo since early 2003 and have generally been very regular (almost daily, at least weekly) with system updates using emerge . There was a period of time though when the system was on KDE 3.x and I didn't do any updates for several months. Eventually it took me a lot of effort to resolve dependencies and fix the blocked packages to go up to KDE 4.1. Being an old machine, I didn't do much on that system for the past 5 months. Now it seems like it's going to be very very difficult to any updates. Running emerge -av kde-meta:4.3 give me a huge number of conflicts and blocked package: Total: 290 packages (26 upgrades, 59 new, 205 in new slots, 228 uninstalls), Size of downloads: 556,992 kB Conflict: 272 blocks (12 unsatisfied) ('installed', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.0', 'nomerge') pulled in by ~x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.0 required by ('installed', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-4.5.0', 'nomerge') (...

I've been trying to get the latest version of Amarok to build on Gentoo . This in turn requires PyQt4-4.4 but that ebuild fails with this error on pluginloader.cpp: pluginloader.cpp: In static member function 'static PyObject* PyCustomWidgets::getModuleAttr(const char*, const char*)': pluginloader.cpp:284: error: invalid conversion from 'const char*' to 'char*' pluginloader.cpp:284: error: initializing argument 1 of 'PyObject* PyImport_ImportModule(char*)' pluginloader.cpp:296: error: invalid conversion from 'const char*' to 'char*' pluginloader.cpp:296: error: initializing argument 2 of 'PyObject* PyObject_GetAttrString(PyObject*, char*)' make[1]: *** [pluginloader.o] Error 1 make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs.... make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/dev-python/PyQt4-4.4/work/PyQt-x11-gpl-4.4/designer' make: *** [all] Error 2 There's some discussion of this issue on the forums which le...

Here are a couple of ways to tweak the performance of a Gentoo Linux install: Prelinking : This improves load times of shared libraries. It is especially useful for application suites that use a large number of shared libraries like KDE. Using NPTL : The Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL) improves the performance of multi-threaded applications. The performance of Java based applications like Tomcat , Orion and Azureus have visibly improved with NPTL.

Someone posted this note about Gentoo on /: Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means... Gentoo makes me so much more productive. Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings. Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source! Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom. I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs. Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-sup...