Up to Something

Turbogears lacks init scripts, and if you use it long enough you will long for them. The Ashbyte crew hacked up something quick and dirty. They aren’t much, but they’ll save time for Gentoo users.

The main difficulty is the child processes that TG spawns when running with dev configs. Finally, I settled on an awk script which I picked up from Dave Taylor

• conf.d/turbogears
• init.d/turbogears

I setup VMWare Server on Gentoo the other day. It was pretty much easy. After install, cleanup all the .vmware folders in various home directories. Assign users with priv's to the 'vmware' group.

User Setup

gpasswd -a vmadmin vmware

Run the vmware-config.pl - Note the network numbers.

Network Setup

e.g.

• Host-only: 172.16.42.0/24
• NAT: 10.51.1.0/24

Vmware will NAT on the 10.51.1.0 network. Linux will have something like:

• vmnet0 172.16.42.1
• vmnet8 10.51.1.1

Next, fixup /etc/xinetd.d/vmware-authd

--- vmware-authd~       2007-10-13 13:26:18.830128814 -0700
+++ vmware-authd        2007-10-13 13:36:42.833942428 -0700
@@ -10,5 +10,5 @@
     user            = root
     server          = /opt/vmware/server/sbin/vmware-authd
     type            = unlisted
-    only_from      =
+    only_from      = 0.0.0.0/0
 }

Firewall Setup

Once you get a guest running, you discover that DHCP on the NAT network provides a gateway of 10.51.1.2. That is great for VMWare-based NAT setup. See /etc/vmware/vmnetX/nat/nat.conf to tweak the NAT settings. I wanted to use shorewall, complete with NAT and port forwarding. I installed/configured shorewall. After that, I setup the NAT and port-forwarding rules. Finally, I connected to the Guest OSs which I wanted to expose, assigned static IPs and set thier default gateway to .1 instead of .2. This effectively removed them from the control of VMware nat. And that was is awesome.

I never ran the preleases, but I was hot to trot as soon as Gnome 2.14 was released. I was like a kid in a candy store. I have never run forward with such reckless abandon, but if FC5 can do it, Gentoo can do it. Seeing cool articles like the Gnome Summit slide show helped create the desire.The suspense built as we approached the release with What's New for Users. The tipping point was that FC5 and Ubuntu were waiting for it. The profiling, the slab allocator, the memory improvements. Somehow I hit the tipping point.

Hopelessly addicted, I wrote bastard.sh and upgraded to Gnome 2.14

I may not be much of a shell scripter, or a programmer. However, I wrote a utility that saved me more than 30 minutes of time tonight. The Bastard does mass unmasking and keywords overrides for portage packages. Who needs this? People who wish to run Gnome 2.14 before it's unmasked. Lots of the tools will be hardmasked due to a common practice of using shotgun-style keywords:

gnome-base/gnome   ~x86

In this case, a hard-mask is nessecary. Emerge will report this too you when you run it on a masked package. [Keywords or hard mask]. So I wrote a little utility to repeteadly run emerge, catch the output and update /etc/portage/package.keywords and /etc/portage/package.mask. Nice. =).

My Typo is aging a bit, and I have some strange problems. I have seen all my problems as closed tickets in the Typo Trac site. Everytime I try to update though, I get horrible rake errors, etc.

My good friend Nihilist gave me a hot tip that r761 was fairly stable. This seems to have been a good thing.

I also decided to update lighttpd. Gentoo Portage doesn't have 1.4.11, so I had to bump the ebuild, add it to Asylumware Portage and add it myself. No problem. I also put in a couple extras

xXxX@embassy ~/public_html/typo.r761 $ svn export -r761 svn://typosphere.org/typo/trunk
xXxX@embassy ~/public_html/typo.r761 $ rake migrate
....[excess trimmed]......
Extending content table
Converting pages
Updating all articles
Adding podcast metadata fields
Adding Redirect Table
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "redirects_id_seq" for serial column "redirects.id"
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "redirects_pkey" for table "redirects"
Setting published flag on each comment
xXxX@embassy ~/public_html/typo.r761 $ 

My old laptop is broken. It took many abuses. The flickering backlight on the screen. The little black plastic chunks that fell out now and again. The way the harddrive wouldn't stay powered on the battery. *sigh* Those really were the good old days. The 'good old days' ended abruptly when my dear wife decided the laptop needed a short fall off the arm of the couch onto the floor. Even more exciting was it landed on the Lucent Orinoco Gold card. Fark.com: it got pushed an extra inch into the fragile innards of said laptop.

Now, I have a new laptop, thanks to my good buddy Tim. It's a bit wonky, and occasionally the screen freaks out, but I think that something is loose, and perhaps I can fix it. The important bit was the price: $0.00. w00t! All my favourite toys cost no dollars.

It came with a bran-spanking new Orinoco -Gold card. Not the latest, but respectable none-the-less.

Whatever your particular bent is, see: my Trac Wiki for the details.

I have had the lovely experience of running Starcraft on Linux and having it work VERY WELL! I've wished for years that Starcraft was stable on Wine. Sometime in the last 4 years, it became stable and totally usable.

I thought I would try again since Wine is now in the 0.9 stage. I run Gentoo, so I had to unmask and compile 0.9. I also masked all of the older date-based builds.

/etc/portage/package.mask

=app-emulation/wine-200*

/etc/portage/package.keywords

=app-emulation/wine-0.9*  ~x86

Next, of course, 'emerge wine'

37 minutes later, I found wine 0.9 to be very nice. The userspace utilities for managing it are coming along quite nicely, and it works very well. I used winecfg to setup all of my drive/mount points on my machine. It recognized everything and did a bang-up job.

The Starcraft installer was a dismal failure. Every run returned 'Error: program start menu missing'. I have no idea what I was doing wrong. I had a Start Menu. I tried a large number of things, including visiting the Wine Headquarters and looking for suggestions. One link mentioned installing something simple like mIRC, then all would work. No such luck. Next I attempted to install Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1. The install crashed and died with 'Error installing Cross-Platform COM'. Oops. Oh well.

Changing strategy, I searched and found my old Win95 hardrive with Starcraft installed. [circa 1997, when I switched to Linux.] I kept it around because I would occasionally play Starcraft with my wife, so I would boot back to Win95. I haven't played in a long time, however, I tar'd up the contents, and untar'd to my Wine directory on my shiny Gentoo box running Wine.

After the untar everything worked immediately. It was awesome. Starcraft started and ran flawlessly. However, it only took up a very small area of one screen. I have a dual headed setup, so quit X, switched to 'game mode' which is a different X screen setup with only one head. Now Starcraft took off the screen resized. All was well.

I played for about 20 minutes, no problems and no memory leaks from what I could tell. w00t.