Stuart Herbert

… but I’ve finally managed to get FreeNX into Gentoo for testing.

To be honest, I’m writing from the nxserver-personal-1.4 ebuild that I committed at the same time. And, so far, I haven’t managed to get it working from NXclient on Gentoo – only with the NXclient on Windows. Still, suspend and re-connect work – which is fantastic news for a laptop user like me

Most of KDE 3.3 seems to work fine. But, alas, KMail 1.7 is eating 100% on a regular basis, making it (and my machine) pretty much unusable Seems to happen whenever I switch folders, so maybe it’s a problem with the KMail indexes? I’m going to try moving my mail into an IMAP server, to see if that works around the problem.

And so far I haven’t managed to get the new OpenPGP support working, preventing me from signing emails. This one may be a Gentoo problem – bug #66102 looks the likely culprit there.

… and as a result, I’ve now had to make it so that all comments on here require moderator approval first

Can’t believe it’s been a week since the last update.

I’ve been busy breaking the Portage tree, by slowly moving packages from the dumping ground that is net-ww to more managable places like the new www-* categories. Our tools for moving things around aren’t very sophisticated, and our tools for spotting what has broken afterwards fall in the same category, so my apologies if anything broke for you. Let me know, or file a bug, and I’ll get it fixed asap.

Thanks to dju` (/me waves), there’s a new version of webapp-config coming soon, that gives you even more control over how web-based apps are installed. You’ll be able to specify the exact permissions that each type of file needs. Right now, it’s installing files with no permissions at all, but I’m sure I’ll soon find the typo causing that

We haven’t forgotten everyone waiting for PHP 5 either. The ebuilds are in Portage, and they seem to work well. There’s been some confusion because of the additional USE flags (basically, when I wrote the ebuilds for PHP 5, I made it so that you can switch everything off if you need to – and some people do), but I’m planning on dealing with that through a mixture of documentation and cascading profiles.

We (as in robbat2 and I) have decided that we’re not going to support installing PHP 4 and PHP 5 on the same box. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. Blame the upstream PHP people for their lack of foresight, not us This means that we have to get the other Gentoo devs to test all the packages that need PHP, so that we can find out what does and what does not work with PHP 5.

The magic bug is 60438. It’s currently tracking 40-odd other bugs that all need resolving before we can mark PHP 5 as stable. Keep an eye on it – I’m sure it’ll prove an interesting insight into just what it takes to add a major revision of a major package into a Linux distro. There’s a lot more work than most people (including quite a few devs) think!

The Sparc box arrived this evening (thank you Colin!), so this weekend’s job is to get Gentoo installed. If anyone has a HP B2000 they’d be willing to donate, please let me know.

And that’s just the geek life

Especially for Naomi, who’s very sweet, I’ve posted some new castle pictures from the weekend’s trip down to Pembroke, and also some pictures of Warwick Castle from earlier in the year.

Let’s take a look at some of the nonsense you can find about PHP 5 around the Net …

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