Geek on Two Wheels

Of my three Gentoo machines, two of them are running a rather scary combination of stable and unstable packages and an overlay or two via layman, sprinkled with ebuilds gathered from Gentoo bugzilla along with a few of my own.  It’s become a maintenance nightmare, especially since the non-layman ebuilds are not under version control. I’ve finally fixed that today with a portage overlay of my own.

My server is set up as the master, serving the overlay to the desktop, laptop (which is set up to emerge packages only at home, where I have a local distfiles mirror and distcc to the Core i7 machine is availble) as well as itself.  Since all of my git interactions with the server is done over ssh, the layman URL is pointed to a cgit location so that it can be pulled without special access.

Finally, the whole shebang is mirrored on yangman.ca so that anyone can access it.  The public overlay list is described at http://yangman.ca/gentoo-overlays.xml.

It’s a rather convoluted set up, but it allows the widest access to my overlays without pointing the Internet at my home server.

The first packages to make into the overlay are gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer, giving them the proper version bump love.

Hopefully, this will bring some sanity to my various /usr/local/portage.

Updated 2008-02-27: installation from this ebuild seems to break for certain files due to some missing files. Use at your own risk. I will be working on a better version which should do away with the binary blogs in the CUPS wrapper completely.

It’s no secret that I have issues with Brother’s Linux printer drivers and their programming practices in general.

Last night, my HL-2040 laser printer went on the fritz, refusing to print anything other than test pages and diagnostic information, prompting me to once again descend into the pit of despair where RPMs rule, good code locked up to rot, and DYI IT guys like myself try to hang onto whatever shred of sanity we find.

Long story short, I created an ebuild package for the HL-2040 driver. You can download it from below:

Ebuild for Brother HL-2040 CUPS driver

To install the ebuild, simply extract it to an overlay directory of your choice; the tarball already contains a manifest, and has the correct directory hierarchy. Unmask (currently keyworded ~x86; change as required), emerge, add the printer in CUPS, and you should be good to go.

Please see HOWTO: Installing 3rd Party Ebuilds over at Gentoo Wiki for general instructions on using external ebuilds.