Animus Wisdom

After a few weeks checking the KDE4 trunk, it seems to be one of the most exciting releases of KDE in some time, there is a long way to go and with the feature freeze coming up in a few days, I will have to put some extra work in this week.

To work on this week:

• Kopete
• Kate
• KDEPIM

Cheers

Half a year ago I found my self in dire need for a laptop, the main reason being an upcoming business trip that required me to have a laptop or risk madness.

I decided to go get one that same day to replace my old deceased vaio laptop, checked out a few bargain places in my local area ( all rubbish ) and by the end of the day I decided to go to Fry’s Electronics, picked the first laptop I found that was all black, dual core and AMD. This Compaq v3010us came to as an open box special and had everything I wanted!

Well after getting it home and killing off the existing HD data y noticed a few things… no Infrared or Bluetooth as promoted at the store and on the laptop it self, no biggie since I don’t really use them, but there it was… it has a BROADCOM wifi card :(

First thing I did was take the bloody thing out of the bottom of the laptop and release the IRQ, I went to eBay and bought a mighty Ralink USB adapter ( I try to keep everything as Free as possible on my systems ). In a little over a week I had my wifi usb adapter and that was when the trouble began…
The driver did not support SMP, that means if I wanted to use the ralink adapter I needed to turn off one of my CPU cores… That was not going to happen so I risked it and used it anyways on my SMP kernel with many many lockups along the way…

I decided to bin the buggy thing and get a new one ( it might be just that adapter right? Nop ) I had the same problems with my new adapter.. so I decided to break my clean Gentoo system and build the drivers straight from the driver site since the newer drivers do not warn about SMP ( that must mean it kinda works right? Nop again ) I had the same problems if not more with the new drivers, lockups on plugin or removal on random usage or it might just stop working all together.

After the 3rd time I lost important data because of a lockup caused by that bloody adapter I installed extra cabling all over my house and left the wifi unused… A week ago I decided to dig out that darn BROADCOM card and give it a try. After a few minutes it was working quite well… I just binned the new ralink usb adapter and I plan on using the BROADCOM wifi until I find a PCI-MINI wifi card that can replace it on this laptop.

Thanks to everybody that sent me emails on the last release,
I made some fixes to help out with the problems pointed out.

Try it out

Download Source

Decided to publish my pre-alpha bashcfg library so here it is with a test program.
I use this to update multiple machines automatically.

What does the library do?

The libbashcfg.a library creates or parses a bash script loaded via a file or general stream
and creates an interface to manipulate the variables.

What does the application do?

This app allows you to manipulate bash variables by using actions.
Create, Append, Remove, Clear, Erase; these actions work differently depending
on the type of bash variable.

Example:

bashcfg  /etc/make.conf +USE=' kde' -USE=gnome

This example adds ‘kde‘ and removes ‘gnome‘ from the USE variable in the make.conf on Gentoo systems

bashcfg  /etc/conf.d/net aconfig_eth0='()' +config_eth0='"dhcp"'

This example creates an array net config variable and adds ‘dhcp’ also usefull on Gentoo systems.

Download:

Download Source

Requirements:

* Gentoo 2007.0 LiveCD ISO
* +1GB USB Flash Drive
* syslinux mtools lilo must be available

USB Gentoo Reference:

NOTICE: If you use Gentoo and want to do this, you already know your way around linux, there is no point in making a baby step tutorial.

Read the rest of this entry »