Tag Archives: Gentoo

I Guess it’s Back to Gentoo Then

Posted by in Reviews > Software

To preface this post, it was started as a draft a few months back titled “Back to Gentoo”. At the time it was obvious all was not well in Funtoo land, and for my specific use cases, it was no longer serving its purpose. In the mean time, the BDFL of Funtoo officially discontinued the Funtoo project back on July 26th, 2024 and later revised its status to “hobby mode”.

Funtoo was fun, until recently, when the wheels just fell off. Between stupid errors like new .0 releases of packages not knowing that the distributed files remove the .0 (so the source isn’t found and the build fails), and progressively worse Wayland and KDE support Funtoo is no longer fun. Oh, and Docker broke.

In my opinion, the one thing Funtoo did better was a much better profile system. Funtoo used a layered profile system which had “mixins” which you used to specify what you wanted the system to be. Using intel graphics? Use a mixin. Using KDE plasma? Use a mixin. It essentially was an abstraction of the USE flag system, which was more focused on use cases instead of low level features. The beauty being, if a package’s USE flags changed, you didn’t end up in circular dependency resolution hell quite as often.

Gentoo doesn’t have this. In Gentoo you pick a single profile (so Gentoo has a lot of profiles to handle the various configuration permutations that exist). This isn’t great, it doesn’t scale, and, honestly, it’s a mess. That said, after setting up two servers with Gentoo, I think I can get over the clunky profiles. I took the time to actually setup a distribution kernel with custom config.d overrides. Now, kernel updates are almost painless. While Funtoo had a way of doing the same thing (managed custom kernel config, build, and install), my insistence on using efistub precluded using it, so I had been using genkernel.

Next up on the migration docket are a couple of HTPCs that are not able to run Steam OS, and finally my daily driver laptop (well, if I’m being honest, it’s about time to replace the laptop anyways as the battery is starting to reach the end of its useful life).

-John Havlik

Making Firefox and Thunderbird Less Ugly in KDE4

Posted by in Guides

Mozilla uses the GTK for its applications’ GUIs. As every KDE user knows, KDE uses QT (KDE4 uses QT4.x), and GTK applications look ugly in KDE. There are ways of getting GTK applications to look not as bad in KDE (qtCurve). However, these typically are a custom qt theme, which is not what I want (I’d rather skin the few misbehaving applications).

Luckily, for Firefox there is a very good theme called Oxygen KDE. You want version 2.0.1 or newer. It works very well, and applies to any Linux distribution. Thunderbird has something similar, named Oxybird. The original works with Thunderbird 2.x, you’ll want Oxybird 2 for Thunderbird 3.1.x. I have not tried Oxybird with Thunderbird 2.x, so I can not speak for it in that environment, but in Thunderbird 3.1.x it is not as polished and will not give you the same KDE look and feel that Oxygen KDE does for Firefox.

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Set Phonetic Nickname in Teamspeak 3 on Linux

Posted by in Guides

Most gaming clans use VoIP software to communicate in game, one of the most popular applications for this is Teamspeak. Starting in Teamspeak 3.0, a text-to-speech engine is included to provide notifications of players entering and leaving channels (among other things). By default, Teamspeak will try to pronounce your nickname, not always a good thing when the nickname contains your rank (e.g. “|sgt| mtekk”, we want everyone to hear just “mtekk”) as the engine pronounces “|” as “vertical line”. In Windows and OS X you can use “Set Phonetic Nickname” under the “Self” menu. In Linux, the prompt will open, but the text box is disabled. This is due to a text-to-speech engine not shipping with the Linux version of Teamspeak3.

So how do we set the phonetic nickname in Linux? Well, it’s really simple. Go to “Connections > Connect”. In that prompt click the “more” button. You should now see a field that is labeled “Phonetic Nickname”.

Alternately, you can dive into the Teamspeak configuration files (like I did). Under your home directory there should be a directory named “.ts3client”, in a terminal you can see it using ls -a ~/. Within .ts3client there should be a file named “ts3clientui_qt.conf” open this up with your favorite text editor (e.g. nano: nano ~/.ts3client/ts3clientui_qt.conf). Scroll down to the bottom of this file, there should be a section named “[Connecting]” the last field should be “LastUsedPhoneticNickname=” just append to this setting your phonetic nickname (e.g. “LastUsedPhoneticNickname=mtekk”).

-John Havlik

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Meet Atomtux

Posted by in General

After mtekktux met an untimely demise, one did not have working parts to replace it. Once the new Atom 330 board arrived on Saturday, work commenced on fitting it into the Gateway FLEXATXSTC case of mtekktux. Yes, a little modding took place.

The back of the case does not have a standard IO shield hole, so one had to be cut with the trusty Dremel tool. Since this the board is the intel D945GCLF2, it requires the “Pentium 4″ 4 pin 12V connector. Well, the power supply in the case is a 70W ATX power supply, so a molex to P4 connector adapter had to be made. Luckily, the P4 connector from a dead Antec power supply was still around, as was a molex to 2x SATA power adapter. One of the SATA connectors on the adapter was removed, and the P4 connector soldered in the appropriate locations.

When trying to close/flip in the disk bracket (flips forward and contains the hard drive bay, 3.5″ bay, and 5.25″ bay), the hard drive hit the ATX power connector, and its bracket hit the memory. So off to another round of modifications. The 3.5” bay needed new holes to accommodate the screw holes for the hard drive (who ever decided that floppy drives and hard drives should have different hole patterns should be punished). The lip of the bracket, which hit the memory, was trimmed back with the Dremel. Now everything fits in the case. There is some external aesthetics related work that needs to be done, but that can wait until the semester is done.

Since last night, Gentoo Linux has been installed, well actually it’s Funtoo (the Core 2 stage 3 was used). This is install number six using the handbook method, which seems shorter now than it used to be. At the moment, the internal network functions (samba, hplip, etc) are being installed and configured. Apache is already up and running (with the same USE flags as we use at Weblogs.us).

And for the curious, an Atom 330 runs just fine under the GCC “Core 2” profile (in menuconfig for the kernel a similar option was set as well).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

New Database Server

Posted by in Weblogs.us

So this past weekend the new database server was installed (physically) at the data center. On Monday JD installed Gentoo, and then I setup mySQL on it (plus some security things). Last night JD transfered over this blog and another over to the new database server for initial performance testing. Later this week and month, additional blogs hosted by Weblogs.us will be transfered over and performance tweaks will be applied. Hopefully, by June everyone will be on the new database server. At that point, signups for more blogs may be possible. It also looks like we may be reintroducing the Weblogs.us front page that I designed a while back.

Right now, the speed increase is apparent on this blog, especially when working in the WordPress dashboard. All those AJAX elements instantaneously load now. Additionally, Spam Karma 2’s administrative section loads much faster than before. There should not be any more of those failed comment submissions due to timeouts now, which is an all around plus.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]