Gentoo

I was thinking a lot about my “server” / “storage” concept at home; my current server is way to big, loud and everything. Finally, I decided to go for some NAS – these boxes do not cost a lot nowadays, and they are silent, do not use much power and are still fast and reliable. I got a Qnap TS-101; it’s a very basic model, but it has everything I need (SMB-shares, mainly). I found one where a 500GB Western Digital hdd is already built in…. it arrived today… but it will be only the second thing to get ready, because first, I will install my new server.

Yes – I think that I still need a server, for e-mail, bittorrent and alike. I decided to give the eee box a try – again, it is small, silent, does not use a lot of power – and it is stylish in these days. I just need to find a keyboard that I can hook to it – my only USB keyboard is at my main box, and the eee does not have PS/2 any more (finally!)…. once I get this, I will immediately get rid of WinXP home that ships with it and install some decent linux on it. I will probably opt for either one of Arch or Ubuntu; Gentoo was a disappointment, lately, and I really don’t want to fiddle around that much at this point in time. Let’s see….

At the moment, I just look at the boxes and admire them

As I wanted to start with my studies revisions on M362 today, I realized that I couldn’t access my mediawiki-environment with all my notes any more!

The error message was something about a missing “includes/parser.php” file (“no such file or directory”).

When I googled for this, I stumbled upon a corresponding Gentoo bug – apparently, the mediawiki-package is broken. I have to admit, I begin to dislike Gentoo more and more for things like this – it seems that the distribution has lost quite a deal of package maintainers… while I am usually ok with the server packages (this is the first time this happens with a package on the server), I am struggling in maintaining a smooth client environment – which is why I decided to switch my Linux client over to Ubuntu. More on this to come soon…

Anyway, back to the mediawiki-problem. Digging into the stuff, I manually extracted the tar-ball (it’s in /usr/portage/distfiles/mediawiki-1.3.0.tar.gz). It seems that the following directories are completely missing when installing the package:

• includes/db/
• includes/parser
• includes/specials

I manually copied them into my mediawiki-installation. After that, I had to run the upgrade.php (see mediawiki upgrade instructions) script by issueing

cd /var/www/localhost/htdocs/mediawiki/maintenance
php upgrade.php

After this, my installation runs fine, again; to be blunt, everything else would have been a disaster, to be honest… as all my study-notes are still in the wiki-environment…

I bought a Brother MFC-7820N; although I do not currently intend to use the fax capabilities, the device is good in all aspects, I assume. What especially impressed me is the Linux support Brother gives.

The device is not attached to my server – instead, it is directly attached to my network via LAN (it comes with an Ethernet interface.

Installing the device within Windows was no problem – the drivers come on a CD (I had to disable my firewall, though, and set up quite a lot of rules after that).

Now, for Linux, there are a few steps to follow. In general, the Linux page from Brother Solutions is the starting point.

All the drivers are available as *.deb packages and as *.rpm packages. Various sources on the net recommended to use the rpm-sources (there are a few source-code packages, but they do not seem to work well). So, first thing to do is thus to emerge rpm.

OK, now for the printer piece. First thing is to install the lpr drivers (sources here), following these instructions. The output is:

Vorbereiten... ########################################### [100%]
1:brmfc7820nlpr ########################################### [100%]

Next thing is to install the cupswrapper drivers (sources here), following these instructions. The output is:

Vorbereiten... ########################################### [100%]
1:cupswrapperMFC7820N ########################################### [100%]


Now, after restarting cups, the printer is showing up, but with two errors: First, cups assumes it’s attached to an USB port, and second, there is an error saying “brlpdwrapperMFC7820N” for printer “MFC7820N” not available: No such file or directory”. So, to tell cups the MFC is reachable on the network, I followed these instructions here ; and to fix the error message, I found this FAQ entry. After restarting cups, the printer works!

Next thing is to make the scanner available in sane. The drivers can be downloaded here; then I followed these installation instructions on installing them. I had to use

rpm -ivh --nodeps brscan2-0.2.4-0.i386.rpm

rather than the command given in the instructions (i. e. I had to insert the –nodeps option). This was the output:

Vorbereiten... ########################################### [100%]
1:brscan2 ########################################### [100%]

Finally, I exported the device as “mfc”. Funny enough, I could not select the device in kooka, but I emerged xsane and it is working flawlessly there.

Another fine piece of work – thanks Brother, for giving us Linux-users all this support!

Since a while, my bootsplash (the nice logo that shows up when booting Linux and thus hiding all the kernel messages) does not work any more.

The reason apparently is that some things have changed…. I started working through the wiki-entry, but soon detected that the vesafb-tng driver is not supported any more. I found a thread on forums.gentoo.org and also the page on Spock’s site (the developer) that explains what is there to do.

I just followed Spock’s explanation to get the framebuffer up and running again; and then back in the wiki, I followed the steps to configure a theme again.

Works all flawlessly – if I find some time, I’ll update the wiki entry as well.

After a long break, I updated my Gentoo installation (I was more working on Windows, recently – mainly for studying reasons…)

After that, when issueing the usual “revdep-rebuild”, I encountered some errors that turned out to be some dependencies on SDL; the corresponding configure routines warned about something like:

checking for sdl-config... /usr/bin/sdl-config
checking for SDL - version >= 1.2.0... no
*** Could not run SDL test program, checking why...
*** The test program compiled, but did not run. This usually means
*** that the run-time linker is not finding SDL or finding the wrong
*** version of SDL. If it is not finding SDL, you'll need to set your
*** LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, or edit /etc/ld.so.conf to point
*** to the installed location Also, make sure you have run ldconfig if that
*** is required on your system
***
*** If you have an old version installed, it is best to remove it, although
*** you may also be able to get things to work by modifying LD_LIBRARY_PATH
configure: error: *** SDL version 1.2.0 not found!

Apparently, there are different sources to this problem; I found two threads on forums.gentoo.org

When I finally looked into config.log, as indicated, I found out that libaa tried to find a libslang-library that was nonexistent:

/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.1.2/../../../../i686-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld: warning: libslang-utf8.so.1, needed by /usr/lib/libaa.so.1, not found (try using -rpath or -rpath-link)

So, re-emerging aalib did the trick.

In the posts I linked above, for others re-emerging libsdl or some other packages helped as well… but the best is to look into config.log, if something like this happens. Will remember this…