I’m sure it’s painfully aware how much I hate iPods by the amount of content on this page supporting the elimination of DRM. This post just goes to support that.

A friend of mine is having a problem with their iPod. The iTunes library decided to be an ass and get rid of most of their music. So they’re afraid of loosing what’s already on the iPod. So I’m installing Banshee for GNU/Linux as I know that it is able to easily download the songs off of an iPod. That way I can back up her music for her.

Great - but a slight problem. Podsleuth 0.6.1 fails to compile. It complains about not being able to find  gutils. So, for those of you having this problem, after much searching, I found this bug report:

 http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233960

There exists an attachment to provide an ebuild for podsleuth 0.6.2 and a patch. Download it:

 http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=162367

Extract the contents into /usr/local/portage/dev-dotnet. You may need to create the directory. So, it should look like: /usr/local/portage/dev-dotnet/banshee. Placing it in here ensures it won’t be overwritten during an emerge –sync.

Now, if you don’t have a local repository set up, enter the following command to add it to your make.conf:

echo ‘PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”‘ >> /etc/make.conf

Now, try to emerge banshee again and it should use podsleuth-0.6.2. All should be well.

Oh. And it’d better not be your iPod you need this for. Get rid of it, or install rockbox.

But, in the end, it didn’t work out. I had to end up using GTKpod to copy the files, because podsleuth was having trouble recognizing the iPod. So this post was just to provide information for those with similar problems and demonstrate how to solve them with the use of ebuilds and overlays.

Well, it’s that time again. Gentoo is great - you have an incredible amount of control over the distribution. However, that can also be a bad thing. I screwed a few things up, and it got to the point where it’d be faster to spend the two days reinstalling and reconfiguring Gentoo than it would be to fix everything.

Then I screw up again by accidently unpacking the stage3 tarball into the root directory instead of a subdirectory (to use for 32-bit chroot) and that completely ahnilated a number of things (as it replaced a number of necessary files - it didn’t even recognize me as a user anymore! “i have no name!”). So, that’s what I’m up to now. Reinstalling it.

But yet another problem - this time, PAM went crazy. At first, I noticed that I could not log into the box via SSH. I forgot exactly what it said - access denied, permission denied, something along those lines. So I reboot the system hoping it’d somehow fix it (since restarting SSHD did nothing). But - even bigger problem. I could not log in! It prompted me for my username, but as soon as I entered it, said that authentication failed. It never asked me for my password. Not even for root. So I obviously had a delema.

This is where Ubuntu comes in. It is excellent for installing Gentoo. I prefer the bootable CD to Gentoo due to ease of use - I can simply get right into it. Not only that, but I can easily browse the web or even play games (included on CD, from my other HDDs, or quickly download from the repositories). I then chroot into my gentoo environment and there I can re-emerge anything I need to - something I can’t do normally because, well, I can’t log in. I considered simply deleting /etc/pam.d, but I wasn’t sure if that’d create even more problems. (I wanted it to fail to load so it’d let me in.)

Anyway - for those of you also having PAM problems, try the following (ensure you’ve already emerged gentoolkit). Run “equery depends pam” and re-emerge all packages listed. You may want to use the –nodeps option if you have a long list. If you are unable to log in, re-emerge shadow. That should solve that problem. SSH problems? Re-emeber openssh.

Don’t forget to run etc-update!

Edit: Alright - I give up on PAM. Too much trouble. Never liked it. Do yourself a favor: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Remove_PAM

Don’t forget to remove the pam use flags: “euse -D pam”

It’s odd that I had this problem only this time around. Hopefully it finishes soon so I can start GNOME compiling before I head off to bed. It’s 6:00 in the morning; I’m tired.

Oh - and for those who are wondering. Despite the incredible amount of time I have spent installing and configuring gentoo (with all the use flags I use, it needs constant attention as packages fail to compile all the time), it is definatly worth it. I love Ubuntu to death, and it is my first choice all other times, but I can not sacrifice the incredible amount of control and speed improvements Gentoo provides. Because I compile everything for my system and choose only the features I want, it is a god compared to Ubuntu in regards to performance. So, keep that in mind when you consider switching.

Recently, after an update, I experienced some rather irritating problems with GNOME or any other GTK+-based environment (Xfce, GDM). Xinerama was not working properly. That is, I have TwinView enabled, but everything would span both monitors (except for maximized applications). This includes the GNOME panel, GDM login screen, etc. Xfce would recognize only one monitor rather than two. I spent many hours trying to figure out the problem. I initially thought it might bt GTK+, since that was updated before the problem, so I upgraded it even further. That was a mistake. The solution was to downgrade it.

The problem was that I was using the GNOME overlay in layman in order to keep up to date with GNOME (and I believe grab 2.22 before it was unmasked or available in portage). Unfortunatly, it kept going. It upgraded to 2.23, which is an unstable development version of GNOME. It has a number of problems, not just that. For example, the splash screen would not disappear unless you threatened to blow its brains out with the kill applet or xkill. Removing the overlay and “upgrading” (downgrade to 2.22) fixed all the problems.

So, moral of the story, don’t use the GNOME overlay for a home desktop or any sort of production environment. It’s great to keep up to date…but it’s better when the stuff actually works.