Zomg teh Blargs! - linux

my e17 woes are over -- for now

nospam@example.com (Evan) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:24:47 -0500

The pulling-my-hair-out below may have just come to an end.

All day Saturday I was Googling like a mad man trying to find a solution to evas not compiling. Part of the problem is that I was googling the whole "evas_engine.c:942: error: invalid type argument of '->' (have 'struct ')" line straight out of the shell, which for some reason had fancy quotes in it (replaced with normal apostrophes above). It wasn't until this morning explaining the problem to someone else in #sporks that I tried googling the first part of the line up to the first '.

I found this: The Rasterman speaks

so, one simple 'echo "x11-lib/evas -cairo" >> /etc/portage/package.use' later, and it's off and compiling like a champ.

I think I need to send an email to the maintainer of the e17 overlay for portage (yes, I use Gentoo) to take cairo out of the USEable options for e17.

Livin on the edge.....

nospam@example.com (Evan) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:49:13 -0500

99% of the time, open source software is awesome

I'm currently sitting in the 1%.

http://pastebin.com/f238d77c6

At least fluxbox is quick to compile.

ETA: for those curious, the above is what happens when I try to update e17 aka enlightenment dr17. I've been using it for over a year and it's been really good to me but now that it compiles some chunk of the programs but not the rest, I can't use it (sigsegv on x startup).

G1 software I use so far:

nospam@example.com (Evan) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:45:43 -0500

Here's a list of the Android apps I've played with in the first two weeks of having my G1 (and what I think of them):

OI Shopping List: It's decent, but I preferred the J2ME 'SmartShopper' on my Motorola phones. Once you check something off this list and hit 'clean up list' it disappears forever. In SmartShopper you could switch between a setup view (selecting which things would be on the shopping list, adding new things, etc) and the actual shopping list. When you checked things off the shopping list they disappeared off that screen but stayed in the main list.

OI Convert CSV: Makes the above shopping list tolerable because I can import a previously saved list instead of having to type everything in each time.

OI File Manager: Prereq of OI Convert CSV, but it makes poking around the FS kinda fun. Nothing too fancy.

Twilight: a combination Sun/World clock that tells you sunrise/set times locally (as determined by GPS; no memory of last location, which kinda sucks) and for other cities/airport codes around the world. Sunrise locally is kinda important so I know when to put up the flag, and times in other places is handy cause I'm calling European and Aisian places for work every so often.

Terminal Emulator: Does what it says on the tin. Note that the restrictions inside Android itself make it nearly useless, but having ping is handy every once and a while.

ToggleWiFi: yes, this is an app that lets you turn wifi on and off. Having it on (one of) the home screen(s) is better than digging through 3 menu options to do the same.

Toggle GPS: same as above but for GPS.

Power Manager: one of the necessities according to lots of people out there, it works pretty well

Rings Extended: also one of the necessities (according to others) but I'm not sure I get it. I have yet to see what it does that I couldn't do with the native ringtone manager.

Bubble: a level based on the accelerometer data. I haven't needed it yet but it's fun to play with.

ConnectBot: very very handy SSH client (see other post below about controling my home computer with my cell phone) that I can't say enough good about. It works. It works very well. My only annoyance with it right now is that while it supports multiple concurrent connections to different hosts, you can't have two to one host (where 'host' is one of the saved profiles). I may be able to had two profiles that do the same thing and get around that but I haven't tried yet.

Orienteer: A fairly simple compass, but it's already come in handy tweaking the direction of my UHF antenna. It also has a second screen to show the raw GPS data (if GPS is on).

Sky Map: This is an awesome program. While I haven't posted my astronomygeekyness on here yet, let's just say I have a lot of time at night to look at the stars. This app combines data from the clock, GPS, accelerometer and compass such that when you hold the phone up to the sky it shows you a sky map of what you're looking at. It's unbelievable how well it works considering how new the G1 is. I can stand outside at work, look up, go "what's that star" and hold up my phone and find out. I'm not sure if there's something similar for the 'other' phones/PDAs/things out there, but if you're a star geek this is a major selling point for the G1.

Flashlight: Probably the most simple and useful app, it turns up the brightness, turns off the auto-dim/auto-sleep, and displays a white screen. I've oft used my RAZR screen as an impromptu flashlight before but my wallpaper isn't that bright. This is another case of "why didn't I think of that" that I use probably 2 or 3 times a week (with blacked out windows in the bedroom I need it more than I thought I did).

Hmm, I thought there was a list of the other apps I'd downloaded (but uninstalled) but I can't find it. The ones I remember are a few games, a brain-age type thing, and a j2me emulator that I couldn't get the jar/jad from my SmartShopper into (browser balked at downloading it cause it's unsupported and there's no option to install from the SD card). Oh well.

and now, an entry from my g1

nospam@example.com (Evan) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:34:58 -0500

I'm blogging from my phone.

Is this a great country or what?

-- ETA: I need to work on the css to make the colors a tad higher contrast for this screen.

I edited the crontab on my home pc from my G1 last night

nospam@example.com (Evan) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:51:43 -0500

Connectbot + EDGE + G1 + 3 computers running sshd.

Getting the hosts.allow on my home router to recognize the phone was a PITA, so I just set it to allow another computer I have access to. So I ssh into that computer (type that password), ConnectBot automatically runs the command to ssh to my home routerbox (type that password), then I ssh into my home desktop (type that password), and su (type that password).

But the keyboard's useable enough. Connectbot remaps the right 'alt' key to / (otherwise it'd be alt+.) and the right shift to [tab] (otherwise it'd be alt+q). Both ConnectBot and the Terminal for the phone use trackballpress as ctrl, which works well. So, 4 passwords, crontab -e, the editing, and trackball+x,y,enter and I've edited my crontab from work without touching a company computer.

Yay.

So I ordered a pcHDTV card....

nospam@example.com (Evan) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:42:31 -0400

While I've seen issues with it posted around I figured I'd give it a try.

I don't even have it yet and my mythbox is currently unusable.

I upgraded the kernel from 2.6.18 to 2.6.25 in preparation, wanting to get the latest DVB stuff so it'll work when it gets here. (it'd been sitting at the old one cause something broke for my hpt366 back in 2.6.8 and i found a patch someone had made, upgraded to the latest at the time then left it alone)

Now my existing bttv card is giving choppy audio and nothing but green video.

From what I've been able to gather the kernel changed something in the v4l system and myth doesn't like it. TVTime runs just fine, but mythtv fails it.

I'm currently recompiling mythtv to see if it just needed to be compiled against the new kernel, but if that doesn't work I'll have to downgrade to 2.6.24 which is reported to not have this problem.

There are a few other things to try according to the mailing lists, but switching from nvidia to nv xorg driver didn't help (didn't think it would, it's failing on both the front end and back end, but it worked 7 hours ago.

The one person in irc.freenode.net / #mythtv-users that started trying to help turned into an ass quickly and stopped helping. That's the 2nd or 3rd time that's happened there. (seriously, I just asked if his proposed problem re:video display issues would be different because I was running separate back end and front end. He said no and to test an a 'known good' machine. I said the front end was known good cause I haven't done anything to it in all this time. He said "You're the boss" and "* support session ended." Even later when I told him I'd played a recording from before the upgrade just fine but one after failed miserably, and also afer i pointed out the mythtv mailing list stuff about the kernel, he hasn't said a damn thing.)

ETA: through some ebuild editing I applied the patch referenced here: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/5608 and am recompiling myth again. I'mma play some quake2 while that's going

ETA2: The patch worked! I have TV back!