zen-sources again on Gentoo

October 15, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 16 Comments

Having been a crazy ‘zen-sources’ user, I really miss those kernel patches nowadays. So I took up the bug 288512 and zen-sources are again available for all Gentoo users[1]
I haven’t committed them yet on portage tree because I want to ensure that they are safe enough for everyday usage. So until then, you can get them via a new overlay hosted on github

git clone git://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources.git

or via layman

layman -a zen-sources

Special thanks to Brandon Berhent for providing the initial Gentoo ebuilds, and for developing the zen-sources :)

Thanks Brandon :)

Have fun with your brand new kernel sources[2]

[1] http://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources

[2] http://www.zen-kernel.org

Tags: <ebuild, Gentoo, zen-sources>

Remember: Documentation is top priority

August 16, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 2 Comments

I always thought that writting documentation is much more difficult than coding. This is because, writting documenation and guides, is kinda boring(?), requires a lot of our free time and it is not as fun as coding. All of these arguments IMHO are true but is documentation really needed?

During my six month Gentoo journey I faced a common problem: “I want to write a python/gnome/qt ebuild. How on earth am I suppose to do it??”

Looking through Gentoo docs I ‘ve found some guides about writting games and python ebuilds. Maybe there are more, I haven’t checked. Those guides are quite handy for anybody who wants to write a quick ebuild without making serious mistakes.

Eclasses usage is another tricky thing. Based on my experiense, I believe that the most difficult part is to understand how they work and when they should be used on an ebuild. E.g., a Qt4 ebuild doesn’t always require to inherit qt4 eclass because it might wants cmake functions to build and install. In this case, despite the fact that it is a pure Qt4 package, you need to inherit the cmake-utils eclass. That was a simple example but I believe you got the point :)

This blog post is a kind request to all fellow developers, to make some time and write proper ebuild guides ( and keep them updated based according to eclasses’ latest changes ) for the sake of developers and users. People tend to believe that ebuild writting is quite hard because of all the e-* functions ( wrappers ) and ebuild phases. Prove them wrong :)

ps: A Qt4 ebuild guide, can be found here

Tags: <documentation, ebuild, guide, qt>

Pysdm Ebuild

April 9, 2008 · Posted in Gentoo · 4 Comments

I was about to start a new project about a gui interface for fstab. I did a google search and i found

Pysdm
Its a quite interesting program written on python with PyGTK .
There wasnt a Gentoo ebuild so I wrote one for my gentoo machine

Ebuild can be found:

pysdm ebuild

pysdm gentoo buzgilla

Tags: <ebuild, Gentoo, pysdm>

DBDesigner Ebuild

April 7, 2008 · Posted in Gentoo · 3 Comments

I ve said in the past that Electrical and Computer Engineering Department @ University of Patras is deeply in love with Microsoft and close-source software. So every program we use on every lab is closed source.
In this semester we have “Databases” labs and we use DBDesigner4 for Database Designer. Unfortunately it is closed source but there is a .tar.gz for Linux purposes. Of course the linux edition is full of bugs but… anyway
There wasn’t a Gentoo Ebuild since they remove it in November 2007 ( i think ) so i wrote mine

But there is an issue

When you try to excecute startdbd you might get the following error

/opt/DBDesigner4/DBDesigner4: symbol lookup error: /opt/DBDesigner4/Linuxlib/libqt.so.2: undefined symbol: XftPatternGetString

The solution is:

cd /opt/DBDesigner4/Linuxlib

rm libqt.so.2

ln -s libborqt-6.9-qt2.3.so libqt.so.2 (already done this on ebuild thanks to Rufinus)

You are done

Files to download:

DBDesigner ebuild

Tags: <DBDesigner, ebuild, Gentoo>

Argouml-0.24 Ebuild

January 8, 2008 · Posted in Gentoo · 2 Comments

I was developing a project on Argouml on Arch Linux. The version of argouml was 0.24. I tried to continue the development on Gentoo but I couldnt because the argouml version was 0.19. I must say that 0.24 version was released on February 2007 !!!! . Anyway I did the ebuild for Argouml-0.24 and I am giving it to you

I also commited it on Gentoo Bugzilla

Argouml-0.24

Tags: <argouml, ebuild, Gentoo>