gentoo - notes

I code mostly in java, so I followed the Gentoo Java Guide to setup my development envirionment. The first step was to emerge the packages that I use:

• Sun
  • Activation Framework (ebuild)
  • Mail (ebuild)
• Apache Software Foundation (mainly from Jakarta)
  • ant (ebuild)
  • commons-beanutils (ebuild)
  • commons-fileupload (ebuild)
  • commons-collections (ebuild)
  • commons-net (ebuild)
  • Element Construction Set (ECS) (ebuild)
  • Poor Obfuscation Implementation (POI)
  • servlet API (ebuild)
  • tomcat (ebuild)
• MySQL
  • MySQL Connector/J (ebuild)
• jfree
  • JFreeChart
• lowagie
  • iText
• logica
  • OpenSMPP toolkit

Next I configured the environment by using java-config as per the documention, using the following commands:
java-config --set-system-vm=sun-jdk-1.4.2.01
java-config --set-system-classpath=commons-beanutils,commons-collections,commons-fileupload,commons-net,ecs,jaf,javamail,jdbc-mysql,servletapi
followed by
env-update; source /etc/profile

// posted by m @ 10:41 pm 0 comments

Spent several hours of frustration, attempting to get pptpclient to a vpn provided by a watchguard firebox. The connection would be established, but I was unable to ping any hosts on the network, so I wasted time playing with routing commands to no effect. Finally stumbled across this line in the log (note it appears only after the connection is established):
Unsupported protocol 0x2145 received
A quick search, to find answer faq, add the line:
"nopcomp"
to the /etc/ppp/options.pptp file and it all started working :-).

Upgrading to 2.6.4
After a bit of stress with gentoo-dev-sources, I followed these steps:

1. download the MPPE/MPPC kernel module for Linux
2. create a symbolic link: ln -s linux-2.6.4-gentoo-r1/ linux-2.6.4
3. patch the kernel: zcat /home/software/linux/linux-2.6.4-mppe-mppc-0.99.patch.gz | patch -p0 -E
4. compile the kernel: make && make modules_install
5. add alias ppp-compress-18 ppp_mppe_mppc to /etc/modules.d/ppp
6. run modules-update
7. run modprobe pp-compress-18 to check it was okay
8. create a symbolic link: ln -s ppp-2.4.2 ppp-2.4.2.orig
9. patch the ppp source (v2.4.2): zcat /home/software/linux/ppp-2.4.2-stdopt-mppe-mppc-0.82.patch.gz | patch -p0 -E
10. install ppp: ./configure && make && make install

Upgrading to 2.6.5
After a bit of stress with mm-dev-sources, I followed these steps from the pptpclient gentoo howto

1. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -a ppp
2. USE="crypt" emerge -a pptpclient
3. modprobe ppp-compress-18 reported FATAL: Module ppp_mppe not found.
4. Followed debian mppe kernel patch howto
5. Recompiled the kernel (added "PPP MPPE compression" as a module)

// posted by m @ 8:19 am 0 comments

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: June 23rd, 2003 contained several pointers to configuring an email system for the home network. In the end I chose Email System for the Home Network, prepared by beowulf. It uses

• postfix as a modern MTA that is compatible with Sendmail
• procmail as a mail delivery agent/filter
• courier-imap as an imap deamon that works with maildir directories
• spamassassin to filter spam. The spamconfig web page simplified the configuration.

Promail looks useful, but I need to spend some more time working out the rules. The following pages look useful:

• Procmail Frequently Asked Questions
• Era Eriksson's Procmail Mini-FAQ
• Procmail documentation project

Biggest issue was setting up crontab for fetching mail. In the end I decided to make the cron job a shell script, and everything worked fine.

After reading this SpamAssassin not as good as before thread, I downloaded RuleDuJour to automatically download new versions of SpamAssassin rulesets. Hopefully this improves performance.

// posted by m @ 10:27 pm 0 comments

Discovered tonight that the home partition really was too small. Fortunately I did have some spare disk space that I was saving for a rainy day, so I formatted it using reiser file system, and used:
tar --create --file - software | tar --extract --preserve-permissions --same-owner --directory /home2 software
to move the data. After updating /etc/fstab and rebooting everything is happy.

And it should be noted that 3GB is much too small for a /usr partition, fortunately I just happened to have an 8GB partition lying around...

// posted by m @ 9:43 pm 0 comments

The following options should improve performance of a Radeon graphics card:

• Option "AGPMode" "4"
• Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"
• Option "AGPFastWrite" "True"

I have dual monitors and for some reason this line:
    (WW) RADEON(1): Only one monitor detected, Second screen will NOT be created
started appearing, and the desktop was cloned. Adding (in the device section):
    Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT, CRT"
will hopefully fix this.

Also while debugging my XF86Config file, I discovered that it was reading the file from /root, rather than /etc/X11. Finally saw the line Using config file: "/root/XF86Config"

// posted by m @ 6:53 am 0 comments