After emerging MythMusic on my brother’s (soon to be finished) MythTV rig, I got the following error at the end of the run:

* Regenerating GNU info directory index... * Processed 127 info files; 1 errors install-info: No such file or directory for /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

After a little hunting, I was able to find the solution on the Gentoo forums (thread). Basically, it’s just an old symbolic link that is not needed. The solution is to simply unlink it:

# unlink /usr/share/info/bashref.info.gz

Seems to have worked.

As I’m sure you know, Congress decided to change when daylight saving time is observed this year claiming that it will reduce energy usage. Well, a side effect of that is that the clocks on my two Gentoo servers were off by an hour today.

In both cases I had to emerge sys-libs/timezone-data-2007c. On my MythTV box, that seemed to fix the time almost immediately. On my other server, it still seemed to be an hour off until I restarted the clock service:

europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart * Caching service dependencies * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service * Stopping bitlbeed * Stopping exim * Stopping syslog-ng * Your TIMEZONE in /etc/conf.d/clock is still set to Factory! * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [Local Time] * Starting syslog-ng * Starting bitlbeed * Starting exim

After all the services came back up, my time seemed to be correct.

Honestly, I haven’t looked into why I had to do that… but I figured I’d pass it along in case it was helpful to anyone else. Enjoy.

After a very long time, I finally decided it would be a good idea to upgrade MythTV. In the course of the upgrade, I ended up switching from XFree86 to Xorg. Thankfully I was able to just copy over my old XF86Config file to /etc/x11/xorg.conf and it pretty much just worked. I did get the following keyboard errors (just like Matt said I would):

(EE) Failed to load module "Keyboard" (module does not exist) (EE) No Input driver matching `Keyboard' No core keyboard

The fix is to just change the keyboard driver in the config from Keyboard to kbd:

Identifier "Keyboard1" Driver "kbd"

Next, Mythfrontend was failing to update the database schema, claiming there were duplicate columns. To make a long story short, I used the advice given on the mythtv-dev list from 2004 and manually dropped some columns using phpMyAdmin:

ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN lastmodified; ALTER TABLE recorded DROP COLUMN filesize;

For what it’s worth, I didn’t have to drop the ‘oldprogram’ column mentioned in the post.

After that, everything seemed to work fine…

I didn’t even lose my old recordings or programming schedules in the upgrade. I’m shocked!

Got Gentoo loaded on the new Dell PowerEdge SC430 tonight. Apparently the handbook only supports Stage 3 installs these days. Just one of the many things that have apparently changed since the last time I did a full install.

Everything went smoothly except for the inability to grab the time from the system’s hardware clock (via hwclock). It would fail to read /dev/rtc and then give the following error:

select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out

Apparently I’m not the only one who has run up against this issue, as there are quite a few references to it on the net. It could be related to ACPI, but a post about Debian Bug #277298 gave me a decent workaround. Fire up your favorite editor and add/modify the following lines in /etc/conf.d/clock:

CLOCK="local" CLOCK_OPTS="--directisa"

Restart the clock service:

europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service. * Stopping syslog-ng ... * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [local] ... * Starting syslog-ng ...

After that, everything works fine. Good enough for me.

Tonight’s CPLUG meeting was really interesting. Rather than the normal format of two talks (one pre-pizza, one post), Ian Berry and Lindsay Snider presented a talk called “Innovating with Open Source at BitLeap.”

BitLeap is a startup company (est. 2004) founded by the two. In a nutshell, they do offsite backups using custom Gentoo boxen. You sign up with them, they give you a box, you plug it in, and it they handle just about everything else. But although it sounds rather simple… the technology behind it is really really slick.

Between splitting the data up into tiny chunks, encrypted tunnels, MD5/SHA hashes, patching PHP, remotely managing and updating Gentoo boxen across the country, OpenVPN, and a ton of other hacking… it was a fascinating talk.

Some pictures are available after the jump…

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I recently started down the dark and lonley path of trying to get Gentoo loaded on my old Ultra that’s been sitting in the basement. More on that later, but for now let me share one link that I came across while doing some research. It’s called My Sun Ultra 5 And Me.

Quoth Tony:

A few weeks ago, I stubbed my toe on my old Sun Ultra 5 as it sat there lifeless and unused in my apartment. Once my primary desktop, the envy of my geek friends, and a way to woo the ladies, its glory days have long since passed. As much as I would like to let it live out its days looking sexy and taking up space, I live on the island of Manhattan, where space is a premium. Since I can’t charge it rent, I decided I’d better use it or lose it. But what to use it for?

That’s pretty much my problem as well. Even if I get it up and running, the IDE interface in it is so pitifully slow I’m not sure what it would be good for. Sure I could run my IRC sessions from it for bragging rights… but not much else. Please share any good ideas below.

PS. Yes, I already know… “boat anchor.” Har har har :)

Last night my goal was to mount a share on my desktop containing ripped DVDs (.vob files) using Samba. Then play the movies over the network with VLC so I can watch then on the TV in the family room. I’ve been using VLC on Windows for a long time and love it, so I figured this should be an easy task. Not so! After emerging VLC and all the library dependencies, I found that I had no GUI.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get VLC to play DVDs mounted on a Samba share…

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