IT Knowledge

Archive for the ‘Gentoo things’ Category

Well the Gentoo DEV team messed up the current world build, i’ve just upgraded the first of 8 servers to the new “CURRENT” version and i’ve already walked into a world of hurt that should never have been necessary.

- syslog-ng updated to 3.0

the config is not backwards compatible so you need to rewrite the whole thing. Now that’s ok, it happens, but the default config supplied by the gentoo team also does not work. They made an error in the init.d file causing the config to always fail the checkconfig statement (just add the -f flag). And for some reason the syslog filter doesn’t exist/work anymore, causing my beautifull scriptings that use that log to fail on me

- open-vm-tools updated to 0.0.20091015.201664

the .la files in /etc/vmware-tools/plugins/common get installed causing vmtoolsd to never start, remove them and it works fine. Furthermore you now need open-vm-tools-kmod and don’t forget to add the modules to the /etc/ modules.autoload.d/kernel.2.x file or you’ll have very poor VMWare performance.

- /bin/setfont moved in the config file, but the file self didn’t move
- /bin/loadkeys moved in the config file, but the file self didn’t move

all in all a very bad world upgrade. Hope they start taking a better look at these things. The gentoo install base isn’t extremely wide like a debian, ubuntu or redhat. But this will give their user unnecessary headaches and make the consider to switch to another distro…

I’ll wait with the other servers until they fixed this stuff…

Ebuild are builds that are not in portage, but very usefull to install software that is not supported by the main portage team.

Here is a short manual on how to install an ebuild.

– First create an overlay

“mkdir -p /usr/local/overlay”

– Add the following line to /etc/make.conf

“PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/overlay”

– Now create a catagory directory in the overlay directory

“mkdir -p /usr/local/overlay/mail-client”

(remember, this can be any catagory listed in /usr/portage/profiles/catagories)

– Now create a application directory

“mkdir -p /usr/local/overlay/mail-client/evolution-brutus”

– place the ebuild file(s) in the application directory and run the following

“ebuild <name>.ebuild digest”

that’s it. Now you can run emerge -va <application> and build it.

I’ve found that most applications are still blocked, so the file /etc/portage/package.keywords and add the following line :
“mail-client/evolution-brutus     ~amd64″

(replace ~amd64 with ~x86 if required)