Random thoughts and rants…mostly Linux
I never really liked Google ads. I just had them here in the hope that it would pay for a domain registration or two.
So, that is enough. Since I don’t like ads on my site, they are now gone. 
Target Audience: Gentoo Linux developers or people otherwise interested in trying out Gentoo Prefix on a Gentoo Linux host.
The most often asked questions I hear are either: What is Gentoo Prefix about? or How is this Gentoo Prefix change going to work on normal Gentoo Linux hosts? As such, I have taken the time to put together a small, concise instruction document, here. If you have 20 minutes and 600M of free disk space, I encourage you to try out Gentoo Prefix on your Gentoo Linux host. This way, you can find out “what Gentoo Prefix is about” for yourself instead of just listening to us.
Resources:
You have probably seen the Host Virtual advertisements on the sidebar of gentoo.org website.
I ran into a weird clocksource issue on my VPS that I haven’t seen elsewhere. This issue was that my time would progressively get worse and worse and eventually NTP could not keep up because the clock was so far out of date. This happened on a pretty quick interval, about 1-2 days until I had to manually reset it. I opened up a support case with Host Virtual and the suggestion was to change the kernel’s clocksource to jiffies, from tsc, or vice versa. (or use a newer kernel, but I was already at the latest 2.6.32.x kernel at the time) My kernel’s clocksource was at the default and I had to research the issue some more because I haven’t heard of this before.
In the kernel’s Documentation directory, I found some info. (Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt). There is quite some details in there, but the summary is that the default clocksource was ‘tsc’ on x86. I changed my kernel’s clocksource by the clocksource=jiffies kernel parameter. Rebooted the virtual machine and NTP has been able to keep time since.
I don’t really know the difference here and don’t care to research much more. It is fixed and maybe this info will help someone else someday.
Installing Gentoo Linux on the Genesi EfikaMX (unboxing) is fairly simple. I have completed documentation for this process here. I have enjoyed working on this platform and will highly suggest it for applications that need low power and non-extreme hardware specs. Anyway, I’m not the first to have Gentoo Linux running on EfikaMX, but the first to document the process. Thanks go to Raúl (armin76) for working on the Gentoo stages, Genesi for the support, et al.
I would have a screenshot to show here, but it is hard to take a decent picture on my 40″ “monitor” 
It is no surprise that Gentoo Prefix works fine on arm-linux given the great work being done in Gentoo Linux by the ARM team (armin76, maekke, et al).
For the Genesi Efika MX (unboxing), I now have a binpkg repo setup (for Gentoo Prefix only). This was mainly a fun proof-of-concept that I did. I went from installing 70 packages in about 18 hours, to about 30 minutes using binpkgs.
What does this mean:
Given the relatively small set of arm users and the highly specific use cases for arm hardware, well, there isn’t a very big percentage of users that will keep Ubuntu on their Efika MX when they get it. But, if they do, that means that they can get a complete toolchain and Gentoo Linux userland (including portage package manager) on the host in less than an hour. Of course, they could also get the same packages from the Ubuntu package manager but that isn’t as cool
How to install/get working:
Follow this easy guide that I wrote, here. All 70 packages will occupy about 580MB of space. Then you will have the toolchain and portage (emerge) at your disposal to use on your Ubuntu ARM (cortex-a8, armv7) system.
Have fun.
My linode is now my personal DNS resolver. I have officially ditched the ISP nameservers from this point forward now that I found unbound. Unbound is a lightweight, recursive resolver that is perfect for your LAN, co-located host, or even a single host.
For your single host, emerge unbound, start the service, add 127.0.0.1 to the first nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf. Unbound is setup (by default) to accept connections from localhost and refuse anything else. If you are using dhcp at home (likely) then also emerge openresolv and uncomment name_servers=127.0.0.1 in /etc/resolvconf.conf, openresolv then “intercepts” dhcpcd when it tries to write to /etc/resolv.conf and adds 127.0.0.1 as your first nameserver For your LAN, just configure your router to look to the host that you setup unbound on, with additional configuration.
Finally, you can also have unbound run on your co-located host. Just edit /etc/unbound/unbound.conf to a) listen on an outside interface and b) allow your other host to query it. This will be left as an exercise for the reader, it is easy to figure out.
Lastly, a shout-out to Linux Gazette for an excellent write-up on GoogleDNS (and why you should use something like unbound) and DNS/LAN metaphors. Suggested reading if you feel out of your league with DNS internals, like me.
A quote from the above linked article: “Why outsource to anyone, when you can do a better job locally, at basically no cost in effort?“ and really, that is the truth. Have fun.
In June 2009, I started tracking my gasoline usage in my car via fuelly.com. There is no specific reason that I started doing this, just for fun I guess. I kind of like tracking how much I spend on such things in a neat graphical format. So, 2009 stats (since June): 26 fuel-ups, 8,130 miles, $631.50. You can find my current stats here by clicking on the image below.
DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is a standard to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network. In other words, stream content from my computer to the TV across the LAN. The cool part about this, is that my TV, the LN40B630, can play HD content native, meaning that the computer’s only function is to stream (not process the content, meaning my low power computer can ‘power’ the HD content). The catch is that you have to use firmware not newer than 001012, the 001013 firmware that my TV came with removes the DLNA feature. (I assume they meant for it to only be available on more expensive models).
In my opinion, the easiest way to get DLNA to work for this TV is to use mediatomb. The reason is that this TV needs the mimetype of avi/mkv’s to be video/mpeg and (so far) I have not found any other DLNA software that is able to modify mimetypes like this. You also need to set a custom http header, as I found here.
Here is my config.xml that I am using to stream to the TV. It is not perfect but the majority of the work is done. Tested with mediatomb-0.11.0 only.
Recent Gentoo Commits
