Magus's Grimoire [Abridged]

Last night I did my occasional emerge -avtuND world. There was a recursive block happening because two packages had been moved into a third, so e2fsprogs was blocking e2fsprogs-lib, and vice-versa, with sys-libs/com_err and sys-libs/ss also involved. Fortunately, I had the thought "these sound important" and went to do some Googling before I attempted to resolve it for myself, so I avoided the fate of many who got stuck with a non-functional Portage midway through the update (ouch).

Let me comment on that, actually: if you're doing this update, be very careful. Your wget probably depends on com_err, so after emerging com_err you will be unable to fetch the distfiles for e2fsprogs-lib, which is what you need to resupply com_err under the new packaging. Make sure to fetch all needed distfiles before unmerging com_err! In fact, do some research on this for yourself.

So, that went fine. Then I did my usual world update, and left it to go overnight while I went to sleep. I know I heard my music start from my at job at 10am. Sometime between then and noon, it stopped. When I got up, I couldn't get any display at all. I actually hard-reset the darn thing. I've been experiencing intermittent problems of varying degrees (irssi segfaulted, firefox has done all kinds of special things, either my window manager or X has outright crashed, etc.) all day. I'm not sure what's wrong. I've been selectively remerging things in case it helps. (revdep-rebuild continues to show nothing needing rebuilding, and everything in /etc is up to date.) This is really frustrating.

I still love Gentoo, I'm just a little irritated with it right now.

I just got a new display for my desktop, an Acer AL2216W widescreen LCD. It has a native display resolution of 1680x1050. It's quite adequate, especially since it finally has me off of CRT, giving me a ton more desk space.

The problem is that the video card in my computer (that onboard Intel 950 described in the spec) doesn't have an internal mode for 1680x1050. But it can actually supoprt that resolution, it just needs to be convinced. Fortunately, someone clever has written a program which pokes the appropriate values into the appropriate places to convince this kind of video card that it supports resolutions it doesn't know it supports.

Unfortunately, I've already misplaced the link for the very nice walkthrough I used. But the little program is called 915resolution. It's as simple as running that with one line to overwrite a resolution you're not going to use (that's anything, with an LCD you want to be in native resolution anyway) with one you want to. This only affects RAM, so it has to be rerun every time you boot. That's good news, as it means you can't break anything permanently unless you try really hard.

Gentoo makes it even easier for you. The 915resolution package comes with a nice init.d script. Just drop an appropriate line into /etc/conf.d/915resolution, add it to whatever runlevels you need to, and you're good to go.

As for me, I'm enjoying my increased desk space (nearly 4 sq. ft.), my increased screen real-estate (453280 px), and not having to shove my face up to the screen and/or squint to read text in an XTerm at default resolution (a significant gain in effective screen space).

In the past I've had trouble configuring my computers both to send mail out to the internet and to deliver locally generated mail locally*. The problem is that I've been trying to use little lightweight MTAs like ssmtp and msmtp. This time I went ahead and did a Postfix installation.

I followed the guide at the Gentoo Wiki. It was easy and it works. It's possible that some ISPs will reject my mail because it comes from a dynamic IP (coming, as it does, from a computer sitting on our home network which gets its IP from our cable company). If this becomes a problem, they have nice directions for having Postfix route the mail via your ISP, which I figure I should be able to use to get it working.

A nice side benefit of this setup is that, being a full-blown MTA, I can theoretically ditch Gmail and give myself an email address at my domain (available thanks to dynamic DNS from DynDNS). I'm not sure I want to do that just yet...I'd be trading off not having to let Google snoop my mail for a downgrade in delivery reliability (if the network connection goes down, or the power goes out at home, or the IP changes and the DNS takes a while to propagate, or one of my housemates chokes the bandwidth on the connection, or something else interferes with my access). But my quick test did show that I can both send and receive mail directly. (If anybody wants to help me play with that a little, let me know.)

* (For those who don't know, a lot of *NIX system processes which run quietly in the background will send an email to the machine administrator when something goes wrong. If the thing which went wrong involves the network connection, it's useful for one of the places this mail gets delivered to be local to the machine.)