Re: [gentoo-user] Encrypted cell 2 gentoo

[wabenbau]

James  wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I've been googling for some guides on setting up encrypted mail
> on a gentoo system and specifically how you would set up the apple
> or android phone on the other end. Lots to read. Guidance on the
> applications (both cell phone and the gentoo workstations. I guess
> that inter-operability is what I'm most curious about. I'm not
> running a MTA, but I could if that helps?

For PGP encrypted mail on android phones you can use K-9 Mail 
together with OpenKeychain or AGP. All of these apps are available
at fdroid.org and also at Google playstore.

A good address for information and apps about privacy on phones is 

https://guardianproject.info

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Neil Bothwick  wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Mar 2016 04:08:15 +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > What I also don't want is too much crap that I don't need, e.g. a
> > networkmanger. Although I set USE="-networkmanager" portage wants
> > to install it when I type "emerge -pv plasma-meta".   
> 
> It uses the geolocation code in the networkmanager library this is a
> hard dependency until someone decided to create a patch.. I too don't
> need NM (I use systemd-networkd) but I have to have NM installed, but
> not running.

THX for the info. I've added -geolocation to my useflags. This pretended
networkmanager from being built.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Nikos Chantziaras  wrote:

> On 18/03/16 23:57, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > KDE 5 is absolutely nothing like KDE3. So by all means try it, but
> > evaluate it on it's own terms. It's not a better KDE3, it's a whole
> > different DE  
> 
> And full of bugs :-P
> 
> Holy crap is it full of bugs. Like, seriously.

I've only installed plasma-desktop, systemsettings5 and dolphin. 
After some hours of playing around, I decided to stay with XFCE,
but to use dolphin as filemanager.

XFCE is much faster and more stable then plasma. With plasma the 
mousepointer is buggy. It changed the cursor theme sometimes to a 
tiny black pointer when moved over certain areas of the desktop.
There were also bugs when I changed the plasma theme. When I've 
chosen breeze-dark, the colors became light and when I've chosen 
breeze, the colors became dark. After some fiddling I've got what 
I wanted, but after a few minutes the panel and the window 
decorations are disappeared and I had to restart the session.

Maybe in some months I will try it again. But for the moment I 
think it's better to use my old environment. The breeze-dark
theme however is something that I really like and so I decided to
use it (slightly modified) for my gtk2 and gtk3 apps and of course 
also for dolphin.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Mick  wrote:

> On Friday 18 Mar 2016 19:29:29 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > What I miss most of all is the fantastic konqueror. It was way
> > better than any other filemanager that I know. Of course I've
> > tested the KDE4 konqueror and also dolphin but it was horrible
> > compared to the old konqueror. Now I'm using thunar. It's far away
> > from being perfect, but it seems to be the lesser of the evils. ;-)
> > 
> > --
> > Regards
> > wabe  
> 
> I'm still using Konq rather than dolphin as a file manager and
> continue to be happy with it.  :-)
> 
> What's stopping you using it?

It's some years ago and when I'm honest, I can't remember exactly 
what displeased me. :-) 
IIRC one thing was that the detailed view mode was not as compact
as it was with konqueror3. And there were some problems with the
theme (missing icons and some other glitches). And IIRC I also 
missed some functions.

Maybe I will try it again with KDE5. But this also depends on the 
dependencies. :-) I'm not sure if I'm willing to install the complete
KDE environment for this test.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Alan Grimes  wrote:

> Philip Webb wrote:
> 
> > So that needs rephrasing : "Why is AG using KDE 5 ? " (smile).
> > Everything works for me using Fluxbox + some KDE 4 apps.  
> 
> The last good version of KDE was 3.5.x... then the flood came... (Qt
> 4) and all the developer started having Ideas about things that could
> go into the new version

Also IMHO KDE 3.5 was the best (K)DE. :-)

But I can't envisage that KDE will ever reach that quality again.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Dale  wrote:

> waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Alan Grimes  wrote:
> >  
> >> Philip Webb wrote:
> >>  
> >>> So that needs rephrasing : "Why is AG using KDE 5 ? " (smile).
> >>> Everything works for me using Fluxbox + some KDE 4 apps.
> >> The last good version of KDE was 3.5.x... then the flood came...
> >> (Qt 4) and all the developer started having Ideas about things
> >> that could go into the new version  
> > Also IMHO KDE 3.5 was the best (K)DE. :-)
> >
> > But I can't envisage that KDE will ever reach that quality again.
> >
> > --
> > Regards
> > wabe
> >
> >  
> 
> 
> You two just said a mouth full and I agree.  That last part of KDE3
> was some good stuff.  To this day, I still can't get my desktop slide
> show to *not* be random.  I filed a bug way back when KDE3 forced
> folks to move to KDE4.  I can see how making it random may require
> some work but disabling it shouldn't take to much work.  Just beat
> the random thing until it dies.  lol 
> 
> That's just one thing tho.  KDE3 was much faster in my opinion. 

What I miss most of all is the fantastic konqueror. It was way better 
than any other filemanager that I know. Of course I've tested the KDE4 
konqueror and also dolphin but it was horrible compared to the old
konqueror. Now I'm using thunar. It's far away from being perfect, but
it seems to be the lesser of the evils. ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Philip Webb  wrote:

> 160318 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Alan Grimes  wrote:  
> >> Philip Webb wrote:  
> >>> So that needs rephrasing : "Why is AG using KDE 5 ? " (smile).
> >>> Everything works for me using Fluxbox + some KDE 4 apps.  
> >> The last good version of KDE was 3.5.x.  Then the flood came (Qt
> >> 4)  
> 
> My conclusion at the time was that my current set-up is slightly
> better : Fluxbox provides the same basics & is simpler than the KDE 3
> environment, while the KDE apps I use (mainly Konsole Gwenview
> Okular) are better in 4 .

Do you have installed the complete KDE4? If not, what packages do
you have installed to configure the look and feel of your KDE apps?
 
> However, there are  2  small items I really miss : Kmahjongg
> Kworldclock . I had them in my previous machine (now stand-by),
> but they need a library which I can't install anymore,
> so I haven't tried to recreate them in my new machine.
> (Yes, I know there is Kmahjongg-4 , but it doesn't do "removed
> tiles").
> 
> > waben...@gmail.com wrote:  
> >> What I miss most of all is the fantastic konqueror.
> >> It was way better than any other filemanager that I know.  
> 
> I use Krusader & recommend it very highly for heavy file-lifting :
> have you tried it ? -- if not, do : you may well like it.

Thanks for your suggestion.

The dependencies are about the same as I would install konqueror. 
Over 20 new packages and also some blockers.

And it seems that it is such a two panel thing, but that's usually 
not my thing. ;-) 
Is it possible to use tabs and just one panel? And does it have a 
tree mode?

--
Regards
wabe

OT: Re: [gentoo-user] Giving Gentoo Another Go

[wabenbau]

Peter Humphrey  wrote:

> On Friday 18 March 2016 12:03:46 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> 
> > Top Oxymorons Number 33: American history  
> 
> Top Oxymorons Number 1a: atonal music.

I don't agree to the second statement. ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Dale  wrote:

> I still use Konqueror but I disabled some USE flags early on since I
> didn't want some of the bloat.  I think I had to enable some since
> they were no longer a option but sort of forced.  Anyway, this is the
> USE flags for mine but since it is a short list, USE flags for other
> packages may affect it more.
> 
> [ebuild   R] kde-apps/konqueror-15.08.3:4/15.08::gentoo 
> USE="bookmarks handbook svg (-aqua) -debug" 0 KiB

I've checked it out right now and portage told me that I would have to 
install 22 new packages and also that there a 4 blockers. And then I
only will have konqueror and no control panel or something like that.
Maybe I will try it when I have much spare time. :-)

> The hard part, getting it to run as root.  KDE doesn't like things
> running as root so it took a hammer and some elbow grease.  I use it
> to edit config files and it has to run as root to do that.  I

As root I only use a console on my system. But I think it was no 
problem to use KDE3 as root. IIRC SUSEs DE for root was KDE3 with some
red background wallpaper to remember the user that he is working in a
dangerous environment. :-)

> generally have it open only when I am doing a update tho.  Obviously,
> I never do internet stuff with it either.  < wags finger >

For browsing I use a VM. I'm too paranoid to do this on my host system.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Philip Webb  wrote:

> 160318 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Do you have installed the complete KDE4? If not, what packages
> > do you have installed to configure the look and feel of your KDE
> > apps ?  
> 
> None that I know of.
> 
> >> I use Krusader & recommend it very highly for heavy file-lifting :
> >> have you tried it ? -- if not, do : you may well like it.  
> > Is it possible to use tabs and just one panel ?
> > Does it have a tree mode ?  
> 
> Yes -- I don't know -- Yes.  There are lots of useful features.

THX for your answer. But after playing around with KDE5 in an VM, I 
think that I probably will try the new dolphin.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: The war continues.

[wabenbau]

Alan McKinnon  wrote:

> > Maybe I will try it again with KDE5. But this also depends on the 
> > dependencies. :-) I'm not sure if I'm willing to install the
> > complete KDE environment for this test.  
> 
> KDE 5 is absolutely nothing like KDE3. So by all means try it, but
> evaluate it on it's own terms. It's not a better KDE3, it's a whole
> different DE

I've installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed in a VM and played a bit with 
KDE5. Despite the fact, that the graphics of a KVM VM isn't really 
fast enough for the fancy effects of KDE5, I'm really impressed.
Dolphin seems to be really usable and the many configuration options
are somewhat overwhelming after so many years of using only gtk 
environments. :-)

The main thing that makes me hesitating is that the whole KDE5 stuff 
is marked ~amd64. I'm running a mostly stable system and I don't 
wanna keywording too much packages. 

What I also don't want is too much crap that I don't need, e.g. a
networkmanger. Although I set USE="-networkmanager" portage wants to 
install it when I type "emerge -pv plasma-meta". 

I think, I should read some information before I try to install KDE5.

A (maybe silly) question: Is it possible to install KDE5 without 
systemd? I'm still using openrc and I don't wanna change this atm.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Need some help with switching KDE setup from i915 to radeon graphics

[wabenbau]

Frank Steinmetzger  wrote:

> Hello Fellows,
> 
> My PC had been running on Intel graphics for 1½ years. Finally, I got
> myself an AMD R7 370 today and installed it (together with a second
> set of 16 Gigs of RAM ^^).

I'm using a R7 250. It has probably an other architecture, so I don't
know if my informations are useful for you.
 
> I could use some help getting it working properly. Here is what I did:
> yesterday I enabled VIDEO_CARDS=radeon in make.conf and rebuilt world
> with --changed-use. I also reconfigured the kernel to build the Intel
> driver as a module and to include the radeon module.

In my make.conf I defined

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon radeonsi"

IIRC this double definition is needed for some functions.

In my kernel config I defined

CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=y
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON_USERPTR=y

Btw.: I don't use a modular kernel, but I think that this makes no
difference.
 
> After installing the card, at first I only had a black screen and
> found out (thanks to #gentoo) that I needed a firmware blob. Once
> that was installed, I had a KMS-enabled VT on my AMD-connected
> monitor. Yay.

That's right. You need some firmware files. 
 
> Now I'm stuck with a malfunctioning X (or more specifically, KDE, as
> it seems). I can run AwesomeWM just fine. But when I try to start
> KDE, I see the first of those fading-in progress icons and then the
> screen goes black.
> 
> I created a test account to have a clean setup of KDE. This starts KDE
> partially, only up to a desktop with an empty panel. There is no mouse
> cursor to move around and no reaction to shortcuts such as Alt+F2.
> 
> What else could I have missed in my migration from Intel to AMD?
> eselect opengl only shows the xorg-x11 option. I had to comment out a
> modeline which I set manually in xorg.conf.

It's ok that eselect opengl only shows the xorg-x11 option. Same on my
system.
 
> See attached:
> - /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/gfx.conf
> - /var/log/Xorg.0.log from running startx with .xinitrc containing
> startkde. You can see those three blocks of modelines at the end. At
> around or just before this point the screen goes dark.

I really don't think that you need any modeline. Your monitor provides 
an EDID data block that contains all needed information. As long as the
monitor has no firmware bug, this should be sufficient.

You probably also don't need a xorg.conf. But this depends on your card
and on the options you wanna use. My xorg.conf contains only a device 
section and nothing else.

Section "Device"
  Identifier"ATI-Card"
  Driver"radeon"
  Option"TearFree"  "on"
  Option"ShadowPrimary" "off"
EndSection

As you can see, there is also an TearFree option for Radeon Cards.
When I don't disable ShadowPrimary, then  X has some rendering 
glitches.

And last but not least, it probably may be important that you 
compile xf86-video-ati with the glamor USE flag. I'm using a stable
gentoo system with only a few exceptions. xf86-video-ati is one of 
it, because version 7.6.1 runs much smoother with my card than the
stable version.

x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-7.6.1 glamor udev

There is also a gentoo radeon wiki available on the net. I used it
to get my card working. I can't remember the URL and I'm too lazy
to search for it right now, sorry for that. ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Need some help with switching KDE setup from i915 to radeon graphics

[wabenbau]

Frank Steinmetzger  wrote:

> Hello Fellows,
> 
> My PC had been running on Intel graphics for 1½ years. Finally, I got
> myself an AMD R7 370 today and installed it (together with a second
> set of 16 Gigs of RAM ^^).

I'm using a R7 250. It has probably an other architecture, so I don't
know if my informations are useful for you.
 
> I could use some help getting it working properly. Here is what I did:
> yesterday I enabled VIDEO_CARDS=radeon in make.conf and rebuilt world
> with --changed-use. I also reconfigured the kernel to build the Intel
> driver as a module and to include the radeon module.

In my make.conf I defined

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon radeonsi"

IIRC this double definition is needed for some functions.

In my kernel config I defined

CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=y
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON_USERPTR=y

Btw.: I don't use a modular kernel, but I think that this makes no
difference.
 
> After installing the card, at first I only had a black screen and
> found out (thanks to #gentoo) that I needed a firmware blob. Once
> that was installed, I had a KMS-enabled VT on my AMD-connected
> monitor. Yay.

That's right. You need some firmware files. 
 
> Now I'm stuck with a malfunctioning X (or more specifically, KDE, as
> it seems). I can run AwesomeWM just fine. But when I try to start
> KDE, I see the first of those fading-in progress icons and then the
> screen goes black.
> 
> I created a test account to have a clean setup of KDE. This starts KDE
> partially, only up to a desktop with an empty panel. There is no mouse
> cursor to move around and no reaction to shortcuts such as Alt+F2.
> 
> What else could I have missed in my migration from Intel to AMD?
> eselect opengl only shows the xorg-x11 option. I had to comment out a
> modeline which I set manually in xorg.conf.

It's ok that eselect opengl only shows the xorg-x11 option. Same on my
system.
 
> See attached:
> - /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/gfx.conf
> - /var/log/Xorg.0.log from running startx with .xinitrc containing
> startkde. You can see those three blocks of modelines at the end. At
> around or just before this point the screen goes dark.

I really don't think that you need any modeline. Your monitor provides 
an EDID data block that contains all needed information. As long as the
monitor has no firmware bug, this should be sufficient.

You probably also don't need a xorg.conf. But this depends on your card
and on the options you wanna use. My xorg.conf contains only a device 
section and nothing else.

Section "Device"
  Identifier"ATI-Card"
  Driver"radeon"
  Option"TearFree"  "on"
  Option"ShadowPrimary" "off"
EndSection

As you can see, there is also an TearFree option for Radeon Cards.
When I don't disable ShadowPrimary, then  X has some rendering 
glitches.

And last but not least, it probably may be important that you 
compile xf86-video-ati with the glamor USE flag. I'm using a stable
gentoo system with only a few exceptions. xf86-video-ati is one of 
it, because version 7.6.1 runs much smoother with my card than the
stable version.

x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-7.6.1 glamor udev

There is also a gentoo radeon wiki available on the net. I used it
to get my card working. I can't remember the URL and I'm too lazy
to search for it right now, sorry for that. ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Xfce2 logout/shutdown delayed for 2 minutes

[wabenbau]

 wrote:

> Manager, so I switched to the console from where I started the X 
> session (Ctrl+Shift+F1) and pressed Ctrl+C. 

Sorry. Meant Ctrl+Alt+F1.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Xfce2 logout/shutdown delayed for 2 minutes

[wabenbau]

Zaam Wu  wrote:

> 
> I am not sure whether this is the right group to post this
> message. But the issue does happen after a Gentoo @world update.
> 
> After login into console, 'startx' will launch Xfce4
> desktop. Everything works like a charm.
> 
> A few days ago:
> 
> 1) @world update;
> 
> 2) reinstall Emacs (USE="gtkgtk3") to USE="athena Xaw3d -gtk
> -gtk3".
> 
> If I logout or shutdown through Xfce4 panel "Shutdown" or "Log
> Out", xfce "Shutdown" or "Lot Out" will be delayed for almost 2
> minutes. During this period, Xfce4 desktop stands still and do
> nothing.
> 
> When I click 'Shutdown" or "Log Out" again, an error message pops
> up:
> 
> Failed to run action "Shut Down"
> Session manager must be in idle state when requesting a
> shutdown
> 
> Interestingly, this issue usually is accompanied with Emacs daemon
> editing. If I does not lanuch Emacs daemon to edit file (no daemon
> process in the whole login session), Xfce4 shutdown or logout
> normally without delay.
> 
> Googled around and a few posts suggest 'rm
> ~/.cache/session/xfce4*'. But still does NOT solve
> my problem.
> 

I had the same problem for at least half a year. My "solution" was 
to kill the X session when I did wanna logout. I don't use a Display 
Manager, so I switched to the console from where I started the X 
session (Ctrl+Shift+F1) and pressed Ctrl+C. 

After I read your mail I did a test and logged out via the XFCE 
logout panel (didn't tried this for about 2 or 3 months). It was a 
really big surprise to me that it works without any delay.

I should mention that I never used or installed Emacs. Nevertheless
I had a delay of about 1 minute before logout finished. During this 
time one of the CPU cores had some load and memory usage increases. 
I could watch this in the gkrellm monitors when composite was enabled.
When composite was disabled then the X display was frozen during the
delay.

I'm sorry that I can't help you. I still don't know what caused the
problem, but now it's gone. Maybe some update fixed it, but dunno.

I'm using gentoo stable with these exceptions:

xfce-extra/xfce4-composite-editor ~amd64
xfce-base/xfwm4 ~amd64
xfce-base/xfce4-panel ~amd64
xfce-base/xfce4-settings ~amd64
xfce-base/xfce4-session ~amd64
xfce-base/xfdesktop ~amd64
xfce-base/xfce4-appfinder ~amd64
xfce-base/libxfce4util ~amd64
xfce-base/libxfce4ui ~amd64
xfce-base/xfconf ~amd64
xfce-base/garcon ~amd64
xfce-base/thunar ~amd64

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] HP Elitebook 2540p

[wabenbau]

"siefke_lis...@web.de"  wrote:

> For SSD must set special option in kernel config?

No. 

But you should insert the "discard" option into /etc/fstab. 
Otherwise you have to use fstrim from time to time.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] HP Elitebook 2540p

[wabenbau]

Neil Bothwick  wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Feb 2016 21:42:05 +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > > For SSD must set special option in kernel config?  
> > 
> > No. 
> > 
> > But you should insert the "discard" option into /etc/fstab. 
> > Otherwise you have to use fstrim from time to time.
> 
> The use of discard is discouraged in many places, because it can
> impact performance. Running fstrim weekly from cron, at a time things
> are quiet, is generally preferred.

This depends on the SSD. On my old SSD (Corsair with sandforce 
controller) discard slowed down write performance significantly.
On my new SSDs (Samsung 850 Pro) I don't notice a performance 
impact.

But you are right. With a cronjob he will be on the safe side
regardless what kind of SSD is inside his laptop.

But a one week interval could IMHO maybe too long. I think trimming
the SSD every day (maybe on shutdown) would be a better idea.

With my old SSD I first used the discard option in fstab. But 
after some days I noticed that write performance was not much 
better then with a conventional hardisk. So I wrote a script that 
trimmed the SSD on every shutdown with fstrim. This process was 
very slow, about 20 Minutes or so. With the 850 Pro, fstrim needs
only some seconds to trim the disk, even when it trims the entire 
free space.

Before I've used the discard option with my 850 Pro SSDs, I run
fstrim manually before my weekly backups. I noticed that always
the complete free space was trimmed. So I decided to run fstrim
manually every day for some time. I experienced, that even then
some GB of the free space were trimmed, on some days even all. 
This depended on how much data was written on my daily update 
procedure. If there were none or only some small compilations 
during the update then the trimmed amount of data was about some 
GB, but when some bigger programs were updated then nearly all 
of the free space was trimmed. 
After some days I give the discard option a try. As I couldn't
notice a performance impact I decided to stay with it.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] HP Elitebook 2540p

[wabenbau]

"siefke_lis...@web.de"  wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Feb 2016 22:01:11 +0100  wrote:
> 
> > Very sparse information. It would be helpful if you would tell us at
> Yes sorry but with this kernel become crazy...
> 
> > VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block...) and also what
> > kind 
> 
> This was last message. Now i run genkernel kernel config and delete
> what not need. But now come: 
> 
> siefke@sisibox ~/.kernel/source/linux-4.4.0-pf3 $ du -sh
> arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage 0arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage

This is ok because this file is just a symlink.

I never used genkernel so I don't know if your home directory is the
right place for kernel sources. 
On my system the kernel sources are located here:

/usr/src/linux/

where "linux" is a symlink to the directory that contains the kernel
sources. 

So arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage is on my system located here:

$ ls -hl /usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 18. Jan 04:46 /usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage 
-> ../../x86/boot/bzImage

When I use "du" on this file I get back the same result, because it's
a symlink and not a "real" file.

$ du -hs /usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage
0   /usr/src/linux/arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage

But when I use "du" not on the symlink but on the "real" file, I get:

$ du -hs /usr/src/linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage
6,2M/usr/src/linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage

> sisibox siefke # lspci
[...]
> SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 6
> port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.6 v
[...]

For a SATA AHCI Controller these kernel options should be sufficient:

CONFIG_ATA
CONFIG_ATA_ACPI
CONFIG_SATA_AHCI

I don't think that you also need this one, but if it doens't work
you can give it a try:

CONFIG_SATA_AHCI_PLATFORM

What filesystem(s) do you use on your laptop? Are you sure they are 
included in the kernel configuration?

For ext4 filesystem you should enable these options:

CONFIG_EXT4_FS
CONFIG_EXT4_USE_FOR_EXT2
CONFIG_EXT4_FS_POSIX_ACL

You should also enable these (regardless what filesystem you use):

CONFIG_DNOTIFY
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER
CONFIG_FANOTIFY


And now for something completely different... ;-)

The error message you've seen could also be caused by a misconfigured
bootloader. Unfortunately you didn't tell us what bootloader you use.

I'm still using the old grub. I don't have any knowledge about grub2, 
gummiboot or efibootmgr. If you use one of these I can't help you with
it's configuration. In this case the gentoo handbook should give you the
information that you need (or some other member of this list).

You should carefully check your bootloader configuration. If for 
example the path to your root-partition is wrong then your system 
cannot boot.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] HP Elitebook 2540p

[wabenbau]

"siefke_lis...@web.de"  wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> i has buy a newer laptop and now again the kernel make trouble. It
> end ever with VFS unable ... so i think something is wrong in 
> SATA configuration. 

Very sparse information. It would be helpful if you would tell us at
least the exact error message (I guess it's something like 
VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block...) and also what kind 
of chipset is inside your laptop (lspci). I'm really too lazy to ask
google about that. ;-)


Some ideas:

The bootloader isn't configured correctly.

Missing filesystem support in kernel.

Kernel SATA driver configuration isn't correct.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting rid of strigi

[wabenbau]

Andrew Lowe  wrote:

> Hi all,
>   Has anyone managed to get rid of strigi, ie it not having to
> be built, yet or is it a case of putting up with it building and then
> finding how to turn it off?
> 
>   Regards,
>   Andrew

It would be no problem to remove it on my system:

emerge -pv --depclean app-misc/strigi

Calculating dependencies... done!
>>> Calculating removal order...

>>> These are the packages that would be unmerged:

 app-misc/strigi
selected: 0.7.8-r1 
   protected: none 
 omitted: none 

All selected packages: =app-misc/strigi-0.7.8-r1

>>> 'Selected' packages are slated for removal.
>>> 'Protected' and 'omitted' packages will not be removed.

Packages installed:   1827
Packages in world:816
Packages in system:   46
Required packages:1826
Number to remove: 1


--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OT: How do I dive into directory from GNOME-type menu?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> > Btw: I don't think that Gimp is a Gnome app. It just has some 
> > dependencies that also Gnome has, but it can be installed and used 
> > without Gnome.
> 
>   GTK+, the base of GNOME, first started out as "Gimp ToolKit".
> That's where the acronym "GTK" came from.  So yes, GIMP is a GNOME
> app.

It's a well known fact that GTK is the acronym for Gimp ToolKit. 
But "Gimp ToolKit" != "Gnome ToolKit" ;-)

Gimp was released some years before Gnome. So what makes you think
that it is a "Gnome app"?

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OT: How do I dive into directory from GNOME-type menu?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

>   This happens when I try to "Save As" from Gnumeric or Gimp or
> AbiWord. I select a directory and try to navigate into it by left
> clicking on the folder icon.  Nothing happens.  If I madly left-click
> away on it for 15 or 20 seconds, the folder finally opens up.  There
> has got to be an easier way.  Note: I'm running ICEWM, not GNOME.
> Gnumeric/Gimp/Abiword are GNOME apps that I'd happily get rid of, if
> the alternatives weren't worse.

I never had this problem with Gimp or any other gtk2 based program.

I'm using XFCE and have no Gnome installed. Works perfect. Many years
ago I used Gimp with KDE3. Also without problems.

Never used Gnumeric or Abiword. I'm using Libreoffice instead.

I don't know what kind of work you do with Gimp. So I can't give you
a recommendation for a replacement. What I can say is that you will
not find a program for Linux with the same features as Gimp. But 
depending on what you wanna do you will maybe find some other tool
that will meet your demands.

Btw: I don't think that Gimp is a Gnome app. It just has some 
dependencies that also Gnome has, but it can be installed and used 
without Gnome.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OT: Simple video editing

[wabenbau]

Neil Bothwick  wrote:

> I'm looking for a simple video editor to remove commercials from
> recorded videos (MP4 format). I don't need fancy effects and I would
> prefer not to transcode the video, just drop the bits I don't need.
> MythTV does this very nicely with MPEG-1 videos, does anyone have any
> recommendations for newer formats?
> 
> Note: I have used eix before, I'm looking for recommendations not
> search results.

avidemux

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Manipulating a mobile external harddisk

[wabenbau]

meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote:

> Is it advisable to try to longen the active time before the disk
> goes idle to prolong the lifetime ?
> Is it possible to do this with hdparm?

I have three external USB disks. Two of them are going to sleep
after a few minutes, one is always spinning.

All of them ignore the hdparm commands. That means I could not 
change any of the disk parameters with hdparm.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Blocking sites for some users

[wabenbau]

"J. Roeleveld"  wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> What do people use these days to filter out websites?
> 
> I would prefer to have a white-list and block everything else. With
> the option to bypass this filter for certain authenticated users.
> 
> Reason: I don't want my daughter to see unsuitable websites when she
> starts looking for cat pictures and instead of wasting time
> identifying every single p*rn site in the world, I would prefer to
> simply white-list sites she wants to go to after checking them.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Joost

I don't use any kind of content filter but I think squidguard
would be a solution for that (there is also a squidguard plugin 
for pfsense).

Another solution would be Sophos UTM. It is a proprietary product
but it is free for personal use.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Shutdown through systemctl as a normal user

[wabenbau]

lukash  wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm reading on the internet that systemctl poweroff should work for
> normal user if he is the only one logged in, he is logged in locally
> and his session is active. I seem to be meeting these conditions:
> 
> # loginctl
>    SESSIONUID USER SEAT
>  2   1000 lukash           seat0
> 
> $ loginctl show-session 2
> Id=2
> User=1000
> Name=lu
> Timestamp=Sat 2016-01-16 17:27:30 CET
> TimestampMonotonic=9614418
> VTNr=7
> Seat=seat0
> Display=:0
> Remote=no
> Service=lightdm
> Desktop=awesome
> Scope=session-2.scope
> Leader=529
> Audit=2
> Type=x11
> Class=user
> Active=yes
> State=active
> IdleHint=no
> IdleSinceHint=0
> IdleSinceHintMonotonic=0
> 
> But invoking the command gives me:
> 
> $ systemctl poweroff
> Failed to set wall message, ignoring: Access denied
> Failed to power off system via logind: Access denied
> Failed to start poweroff.target: Access denied
> 
> How is this supposed to work on Gentoo?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Lukas

IIRC "CONFIG_AUDIT" and "CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_AUDITSYSCALL" must be set
in the kernel configuration. But as I don't use this method I cannot
say this for sure.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Allow work from home?

[wabenbau]

Rich Freeman  wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 10:33 PM,   wrote:
> >
> > Sharing files can be done via SCP/SFTP. If a VPN connection is used,
> > then even NFS or FTP are possibilities.
> 
> I have 100 computers.  I want a user on those 100 computers to be able
> to share a file on their computer with just me.  On windows they just
> right-click and pick sharing, search for my name on the domain, and
> grant me permissions.  You're not going to get an experience anything
> like that with scp or nfs or ftp.  Heck, nfs is almost completely
> insecure in the way most people use it.

I'm an absolute windows noop. I only use it for graphics work. I even
didn't know that such a kind of file sharing is possible with it. :-)
 
> I don't just want to copy a file from point A to point B.  I want to
> have a robust set of permissions and security and so on behind that.
> If a user changes their password, that password gets them access to
> everything they used to have access to, and none of those random
> clients ever see the password.
> 
> Sure, you can do it on linux with lots of NFSv4 and kerberos and all
> that.  But it is painful to set up and almost nobody actually seems to
> do it as a result.  You can also do something like Bitlocker on linux,
> but there isn't a single distro that supports it out of the box
> because it uses a lot of features nobody has bothered to seriously
> develop.  (Before somebody points out LUKS, be aware that Bitlocker
> lets you do full-disk encyption that is secure without having to
> actually type a decryption key at any point.  Remove the hard drive or
> boot from a CD, and the disks are unreadable - you can only read them
> if you boot off them on the original PC.)

I never thought about such operating ranges. But maybe these are some 
of the reasons why windows held 43% of the server OS market share in 
Q4/2013, according to an article that I read some months ago.

> It is just a bit frustrating to behold.  But, I'm getting what I'm
> paying for, so...  :)

That's right. I think that the effort and the outlay to implement all
these features into Linux is relative high. It seems that no vendor
is willing to assume such a financial risk.

Maybe it is time for another crowd founding campaign? ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Allow work from home?

[wabenbau]

Rich Freeman  wrote:

> I do sometimes wonder how the #1 server OS in the world somehow lacks
> decent facilities for graphical remote login, and for sharing files
> across the network.  (For the latter NFS is a real pain to set up in a
> remotely secure fashion - part of the problem is that it is hard to
> use some kind of a UUID to drive file permissions, and kerberos/etc is
> a pain to set up.  There is certainly nothing approaching the ease of
> just setting a password on a share or connecting to a windows domain
> (even a samba-driven one)).

I think Linux is only #1 in the area of web services. For this you 
don't really need a graphical remote login. I think the main reason for 
the windows terminal server is that windows couldn't be configured via 
console login (SSH) in the same way as Linux could.

But of course it would be very nice to have a RDP like feature for 
Linux with the same efficiency as RDP under Windows. This would really 
expand the facilities of Linux as a desktop based server.

Sharing files can be done via SCP/SFTP. If a VPN connection is used, 
then even NFS or FTP are possibilities. For all of these connections 
you can also use graphical clients.

Just my two cents. I'm sure that you are already aware of this.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Allow work from home?

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

>  writes:
> 
> > lee  wrote:
> >
> >> Rich Freeman  writes:
> >> 
> >> > On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 6:38 AM, lee  wrote:
> >> >> Suppose you use a VPN connection.  How do does the client
> >> >> (employee) secure their own network and the machine they're
> >> >> using to work remotely then?
> >> >
> >> > Poorly, most likely.  Your data is probably not nearly as
> >> > important to them as their data is, and most people don't take
> >> > great care of their own data.
> >> 
> >> That's not what I meant to ask.  Assume you are an employee
> >> supposed to work from home through a VPN connection:  How do you
> >> protect your LAN?
> >
> > Depends on the VPN connection. If you use an OpenVPN client on your
> > PC then it is sufficient to use a well configured firewall (ufw,
> > iptables or whatever) on this PC.
> 
> The PC would be connected to the LAN, even if only to have an internet
> connection for the VPN.  I can only guess: Wouldn't that require to
> put this PC behind a firewall that separates it from the LAN to
> protect the LAN?

Of course a separate firewall is better than a firewall on the PC, 
because it may protect the LAN even when the PC is compromised. But 
if the PC is compromised and has access to the LAN through the 
separate firewall (what is mostly the case) then the protection is 
more ore less porous (depending on the firewall rules).

If you don't have a separate firewall but only a firewall on the (not 
compromised) PC, then the LAN should be safe as long as you don't
have enabled IP forwarding on the PC and as long as the VPN is 
configured in a way that there is only a route to your PC and not
to the rest of your LAN. 

Even if you have enabled IP forwarding on the PC and even if the VPN 
has a route to the whole LAN, the LAN should nevertheless be safe 
when the firewall on the PC is configured to block all incoming 
connections. 

Of course the blocking of all incoming connections implies, that the 
PC is acting as a client only.

> > If you use a VPN gateway then you could 
> > configure this gateway (or a firewall behind) in a way that it
> > blocks incoming connections from the VPN tunnel. 
> 
> Hm.  I'd prefer to avoid having to run another machine as such a
> firewall because electricity is way too expensive here.  And I don't
> know if the gateway could be configure in such a way.

All VPN gateways that I know have also a build in firewall. If your
gateway hasn't, then you should ask yourself, what is more expensive -
a separate firewall or a hacked LAN?
But in this case I would prefer to use the PC as OpenVPN client.

> > IMHO there is no more risk to use a VPN connection than with any
> > other Internet connection.
> 
> But it's a double connection, one to the internet, and another one to
> another network, so you'd have to somehow manage to set up some sort
> of double protection. 

See above.

> Setting up a VPN alone is more than difficult enough already.

This depends on the VPN that you (have to) use. If you set up the VPN 
on both sides then you probably can choose what kind of VPN you wanna 
use.

OpenVPN isn't really difficult to set up. If you don't wanna use PSK
but X509 authorization, then the most complicated thing is the creation
of the certs. But with the help of Google (or DuckDuckGo), this is 
quick done. There are lots of information about setting up an OpenVPN 
connection.

--
Regards
wabe 

Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Allow work from home?

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

> Rich Freeman  writes:
> 
> > On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 6:38 AM, lee  wrote:
> >> Suppose you use a VPN connection.  How do does the client
> >> (employee) secure their own network and the machine they're using
> >> to work remotely then?
> >
> > Poorly, most likely.  Your data is probably not nearly as important
> > to them as their data is, and most people don't take great care of
> > their own data.
> 
> That's not what I meant to ask.  Assume you are an employee supposed
> to work from home through a VPN connection:  How do you protect your
> LAN?

Depends on the VPN connection. If you use an OpenVPN client on your PC
then it is sufficient to use a well configured firewall (ufw, iptables 
or whatever) on this PC. If you use a VPN gateway then you could 
configure this gateway (or a firewall behind) in a way that it blocks 
incoming connections from the VPN tunnel. 

IMHO there is no more risk to use a VPN connection than with any other
Internet connection.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Allow work from home?

[wabenbau]

Grant  wrote:

> I'm considering allowing some employees to work from home but I'm
> concerned about the security implications.  Currently everybody shows
> up and logs into their locked down Gentoo system and from there is
> able to access the company webapps which are restricted to the office
> IP address.  I guess I would have to allow webapp access from any IP
> for those users and trust that their computer is secure?  Should that
> not be scary?
> 
> - Grant

I would use OpenVPN for that. If you don't trust their systems, you 
could provide a Live-System media for them if that is possible.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

>   I use the following script to boot up Gentoo on the guest.  I cycled
> through all 4 cards...
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm \
>-cpu host -display gtk -vga cirrus \
>-drive file=gentoo32.img,format=raw \
>-drive file=linuxswap.img,format=raw \
>-net nic,model=virtio \
>-rtc base=localtime,clock=host \
>-net user,hostname=gentoovm,hostfwd=tcp::2022-:22 \
>-m 3G -monitor stdio -name "Gentoo VM" \
>-parallel none \
>${@

Today I tested the -smp option again. I already did this some months
ago with an older qemu version and there it seemed that it slows 
things down. But now it makes my vm a lot snappier (qemu-2.4.1-r2). 

On the guest the xubuntu xfce desktop is much more responsive and 
firefox and all other apps are running a lot smoother when I use 
"-smp 4" (my host CPU is a quadcore CPU).

I don't know for sure if this also effects the speed of the emulated
guest CPU (e.g. while compiling), but I think so.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] eselect OpenCL is wrong.

[wabenbau]

Alan Grimes  wrote:

> Wrong, I say, WRONG!

No reason to go into hysterics. Think of your blood pressure! ;-)

> OpenCl is not OpenGL. It is more of a framework than an API. A high
> end machine may have a number of different OpenCL hosts, the cpu,
> vector cores built into the cpu as in the AMD APU line and intel's
> lame knockoff thereof. =P
> 
> There is also OpenCL support in GPUs, Xeon Phi, FPGA and potentially
> other devices too.
> 
> The game Planet Explorers (available on Steam) demonstrates how this
> should be used. You are given a menu at the start of the game that
> lists the available OpenCL implementations. You then select whatever
> device you want to use for OpenCL that day...
> 
> So there should not be eselect OpenCL, All gentoo needs to do is
> enforce standards on where the relevant libraries are stored and the
> application will select which one to use.

You should better report this to the developers of the respective
applications. I'm not an expert on this, but I think this is nothing 
that the gentoo developers can do.

And I think it's better to have "eselect OpenCL" than nothing.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> what's taking so long when emerging packages despite distcc is used?
> 
> I have disallowed compiling on the local machine (which is the one
> emerge is running on) through distcc settings because the local
> machine is relatively slow.  Yet I can see some gcc processes running
> on the local machine, and emerging goes painfully slow.  Using distcc
> doesn't seem to make it any faster, though disabling local compiling
> seems to help a bit.
> 
> Some compilations are being run on the remote machine, so distcc does
> work.  The log file on the remote machine shows compilation times of a
> few milliseconds up to about 1.5 seconds at most.  The distcc server
> would be finished with the emerging within maybe 15 minutes, and the
> client takes several hours already.
> 
> Is there something going wrong?  Is there a way to speed things up as
> much as I would expect from using distcc?

P.S.: distccmon is a good tool to watch the compilation processes.

Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> what's taking so long when emerging packages despite distcc is used?
> 
> I have disallowed compiling on the local machine (which is the one
> emerge is running on) through distcc settings because the local
> machine is relatively slow.  Yet I can see some gcc processes running
> on the local machine, and emerging goes painfully slow.  Using distcc
> doesn't seem to make it any faster, though disabling local compiling
> seems to help a bit.
> 
> Some compilations are being run on the remote machine, so distcc does
> work.  The log file on the remote machine shows compilation times of a
> few milliseconds up to about 1.5 seconds at most.  The distcc server
> would be finished with the emerging within maybe 15 minutes, and the
> client takes several hours already.
> 
> Is there something going wrong?  Is there a way to speed things up as
> much as I would expect from using distcc?

You can try pump mode. Preprocessing is then done on the remote server.
Depending on your hardware, this could be faster.

But read carefully the  manpages of pump and distcc before you use it. 
There are some restrictions you should be aware of.

You can also try to optimize the number of concurrent compile processes 
(-j). Watching the load counts of your client and server(s) will help
you to find out the best value.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

>  writes:
> 
> > lee  wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> what's taking so long when emerging packages despite distcc is
> >> used?
> >> 
> >> I have disallowed compiling on the local machine (which is the one
> >> emerge is running on) through distcc settings because the local
> >> machine is relatively slow.  Yet I can see some gcc processes
> >> running on the local machine, and emerging goes painfully slow.
> >> Using distcc doesn't seem to make it any faster, though disabling
> >> local compiling seems to help a bit.
> >> 
> >> Some compilations are being run on the remote machine, so distcc
> >> does work.  The log file on the remote machine shows compilation
> >> times of a few milliseconds up to about 1.5 seconds at most.  The
> >> distcc server would be finished with the emerging within maybe 15
> >> minutes, and the client takes several hours already.
> >> 
> >> Is there something going wrong?  Is there a way to speed things up
> >> as much as I would expect from using distcc?
> >
> > You can try pump mode. Preprocessing is then done on the remote
> > server. Depending on your hardware, this could be faster.
> >
> > But read carefully the  manpages of pump and distcc before you use
> > it. There are some restrictions you should be aware of.
> 
> I followed the instructions on the wiki which suggest to have
> 'FEATURES="distcc distcc-pump"' in make.conf and give instructions how
> to set the CPUs.

I didn't read the wiki. It's some years ago that I used distcc and IIRC
there was no wiki available for it.
 
> > You can also try to optimize the number of concurrent compile
> > processes (-j). Watching the load counts of your client and
> > server(s) will help you to find out the best value.
> 
> Using -j doesn't really help.  The server is pretty much idling --- or
> you could say waiting for stuff to compile --- while the client
> progresses awfully slowly and isn't overloaded with compilation
> processes.  If the server would get more load, emerging could be much
> much faster.
>
> Can it be that the client is simply too slow compared to the server to
> give it any significant load?  (The client isn't exactly slow; it's
> slow compared to the server.)

I used a pentium 4 laptop as client and two phenom2 quadcore pc as 
server. I don't remember the settings that I used but I think it
was something about -j10 or so.

When I compiled large programs, the load count of the servers was
high most of the time and they were very busy with compiling. Only
at linking time they were waiting for new data.
Compilation time was much lower than without distcc.

However when I compiled small programs, the benefit of distcc was 
very small or even null. Also compilation time of OpenOffice was
very long, because of the -j1 setting in the ebuild.

I don't know the reason of your problem. Maybe you should try it
without pump mode to see if this makes a difference.

Have you used distccmon to see what happens while compiling? IIRC
it shows you exactly what's going on at each host (preprocessing,
compiling, waiting). Maybe this will bring some light into the 
whole thing.

And as Dale already said, network speed is very important.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[wabenbau]

 wrote:

> 
> I used a pentium 4 laptop as client and two phenom2 quadcore pc as 
> server. I don't remember the settings that I used but I think it
> was something about -j10 or so.

Sorry, I think it was about -j16 (twice the totally amount of CPUs).

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[wabenbau]

Frank Steinmetzger  wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 04, 2016 at 09:48:42PM +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > P.S.: distccmon is a good tool to watch the compilation processes.
> 
> I never got it to display anything. I just tried it again: synced
> portage and ran a world update -- 16 Packages, among them
> kdevplatform, a lengthy Qt package (which by the way is one of those
> who benefit greatly from compression if distcc’ed over a slow
> network).
> 
> At no time during building did I see any activity in distccmon-gui. I
> started it on both client and server and as my own user as well as
> root. Nada. Can you give a suggestion? Thanks.
> 

I remembered something:

It is important to use the same value for the DISTCC_DIR environment 
variable as the user running the client and that this directory is 
readable by the user that is running distccmon. 

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[wabenbau]

Frank Steinmetzger  wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 04, 2016 at 09:48:42PM +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > P.S.: distccmon is a good tool to watch the compilation processes.
> 
> I never got it to display anything. I just tried it again: synced
> portage and ran a world update -- 16 Packages, among them
> kdevplatform, a lengthy Qt package (which by the way is one of those
> who benefit greatly from compression if distcc’ed over a slow
> network).
> 
> At no time during building did I see any activity in distccmon-gui. I
> started it on both client and server and as my own user as well as
> root. Nada. Can you give a suggestion? Thanks.

It's a long time ago and I can't remember any problems or difficulties
with distccmon. IIRC I run it on the client and I used the gui as well 
as the text version. 

I don't remember wich UID I used for distccmon. Maybe it is necessary
to run it as user portage.

I would like to test it, but I don't have a second linux host that I
could use for a test. Only some xubuntu qemu VMs that are installed 
on my gentoo box. And I don't know if these are working with distcc 
and a gentoo host without problems. 

And as I'm down with a ugly cold, I don't have enough power to build 
up a test environment with some old hardware or struggle with bitchy 
VMs. 

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: QEMU/distcc combination question64-

[wabenbau]

Jonathan Callen  wrote:

> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA512
> 
> On 01/02/2016 01:27 PM, waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 02, 2016 at 02:56:58PM +0300, Andrew Savchenko wrote
> > 
> >> For 32-bit distcc on 64-bit host there is no need to chroot or 
> >> create VM (hey, they're hellishly slow!). Just add -m32 to your 
> >> *FLAGS to force 32-bit arch. (In some rare cases ebuild ignores 
> >> {C,CXX,F,FC}FLAGS, while this is a bug and should be fixed, this 
> >> can be worked around on distcc server by forcing -m32 for each 
> >> gcc call.
> > 
> > -m32 in a 64-environment works for "Hello World".  More complex
> > code that requires arch-specific headers and libs will have
> > problems.  It "works" with Gentoo distcc.  Rather than erroring
> > out, it sends the work back to my Atom netbook, and says "Sorry,
> > you have to do this yourself". This defeats the point of distcc.
> > Outside of Gentoo distcc, the errors stop the build.  So yes, I do
> > need a 32-bit environment.
> > 
> > I ran into this, trying to manually build Pale Moon (a Firefox
> > fork) for my Atom netbook from a 64-bit environment.  It doesn't
> > work. Mozilla and its derivatives all use the same weird build
> > scripts. See...
> > https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=37=10002
> > 
> > I eventually re-installed 32-bit Gentoo on my ancient Core2
> > machine. Since it only has 3 gigs of RAM, it's not losing anything.
> > It successfully built the Atom-specific branch (a bunch of
> > "web-developer" stuff removed) for my netbook.  My netbook is
> > actually "-march=bonnell" 
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_%28microarchitecture%29 I
> > selected that instead of the generic "-march=atom".
> > 
> > By the way, Atom-specific-source Pale Moon builds are really snappy
> > on a newer machine when built with "-march=native".  On the other
> > hand, the Firefox developers have utterly gone off the deep end.
> > The Atrocious^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Australis GUI was the final straw
> > that drove me away.
> > 
> 
> 
> I think that you misunderstand how distcc works.  The distcc process
> *only* sends preprocessed data to the remote machine, and *only* gets
> back object code.  All preprocessing (headers) and linking (libraries,
> combining *.o files) is *always* done on the host that the packages
> will be used on, because slightly different versions would otherwise
> cause problems.  So your problem with "arch-specific headers and
> libraries" *always* causes that part to run on the netbook, even if
> the remote distcc server is exactly the same arch, etc.

When you use distcc pump mode then also the preprocessing is done by 
the remote servers. This will cause problems when the include files on 
client and servers are not identical.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] radeon screen resolution

[wabenbau]

john  wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Dec 2015 11:05:12 +0200
> Alan McKinnon  wrote:
> 
> > On 29/12/2015 11:01, Mick wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 29 Dec 2015 02:00:33 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > >
> > >> There is a kernel option DRM_LOAD_EDID_FIRMWARE. It allows you to
> > >> specify an EDID data set instead of probing for it. If your
> > >> problem is caused by broken EDID data, this option maybe will
> > >> help you to run the monitor at its full resolution.
> > >>
> > >> --
> > >> Regards
> > >> wabe
> > >
> > > How would you know what to specify for EDID data, unless the
> > > monitor told you what it is?
> > >
> > 
> > or if the monitor manufacturer told you what it should be
> > 
> > /alanm
> > 
> 
> I have had a play with that but no success yet. I have followed the
> howto but no success yet but I think now I will have to find .bin file
> or settings from manufacturer.

Maybe you can somehow extract it (hexedit?) from the windows monitor 
driver that was probably delivered with the monitor. 

After I installed the driver for the LG monitor, I was able to use it 
at full resolution under windows. So I think that the EDID data (or 
something equivalent) was included in the driver.

I never used that kernel option. So I can't tell you more.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] radeon screen resolution

[wabenbau]

john  wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Dec 2015 11:05:12 +0200
> Alan McKinnon  wrote:
> 
> > On 29/12/2015 11:01, Mick wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 29 Dec 2015 02:00:33 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > >
> > >> There is a kernel option DRM_LOAD_EDID_FIRMWARE. It allows you to
> > >> specify an EDID data set instead of probing for it. If your
> > >> problem is caused by broken EDID data, this option maybe will
> > >> help you to run the monitor at its full resolution.
> > >>
> > >> --
> > >> Regards
> > >> wabe
> > >
> > > How would you know what to specify for EDID data, unless the
> > > monitor told you what it is?
> > >
> > 
> > or if the monitor manufacturer told you what it should be
> > 
> > /alanm
> > 
> 
> I have had a play with that but no success yet. I have followed the
> howto but no success yet but I think now I will have to find .bin file
> or settings from manufacturer.
> 
> Darn these gaming monitors!
> 
> Thanks
> 
> John

When you install x11-misc/read-edid you will get the programs get-edid 
and parse-edid. If you type

get-edid | parse-edid

you will get something like this:

===

256-byte EDID successfully retrieved from i2c bus 8
Looks like i2c was successful. Have a good day.
Checksum Correct

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "U32D970"
ModelName "U32D970"
VendorName "SAM"
# Monitor Manufactured week 20 of 2014
# EDID version 1.4
# Digital Display
DisplaySize 700 390
Gamma 2.20
Option "DPMS" "true"
Horizsync 30-134
VertRefresh 56-75
# Maximum pixel clock is 540MHz
#Not giving standard mode: 1152x864, 75Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1280x800, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1280x720, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1280x1024, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1440x900, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1600x900, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1680x1050, 60Hz

#Extension block found. Parsing...
Modeline"Mode 2" 148.500 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 
1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline"Mode 0" +hsync -vsync 
Modeline"Mode 1" +hsync -vsync 
Modeline"Mode 3" +hsync +vsync 
Option "PreferredMode" "Mode 2"
EndSection

===

In former times it was possible to insert these informations into
/etc/X11/xorg.conf. But I'm not sure if this still works nowadays,
in particular the Modeline definition.

But maybe you can see if something is wrong with the EDID data of
your monitor.

I could also provide you the EDID data from my monitor. Maybe you
can use it with the DRM_LOAD_EDID_FIRMWARE kernel option. But this
is just an idea. I have no clue how to do this in detail. :-)

P.S.:
When you have only tried x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati then you should
also try x11-drivers/xf86-video-amdgpu. Maybe this driver works
better with your monitor. 

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] radeon screen resolution

[wabenbau]

Mick  wrote:

> On Monday 28 Dec 2015 21:05:56 john wrote:
> 
> > Hmm,
> > thanks, I have now tried an old monitor and its screen
> > resolution was good (ie 1920x1080) so I think it's the monitor.
> > I have a R9 280 radeon card which is pretty new but the monitor is
> > very new (display port only, acer xb240h model) so I guess it's
> > something do do with that, perhaps EDID but not really sure. The
> > whole graphics stack is pretty bemusing and I would love to make
> > sense of it all.
> 
> Have a look here for setting up your card:
> 
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Amdgpu
> 
> 
> and here for setting up the driver
> 'x11-drivers/xf86-video-displaylink' to get your DP going:
> 
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/DisplayLink

I don't think that this is necessary. The Acer XB240H doesn't have a
DisplayLink connector. It has a DisplyPort connector and for this you
don't need a special driver. 

IIRC you also don't need a special kernel option to use DisplayPort.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] radeon screen resolution

[wabenbau]

john  wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Dec 2015 13:41:57 +
> Mick  wrote:
> 
> > On Monday 28 Dec 2015 09:11:10 john wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > I have installed Gentoo on to another partition in order to use
> > > radeon drivers for desktop instead of fglrx.
> > > 
> > > When I start my resolution is very small (1280x600) and only uses
> > > half the screen. My max resolution is 1920*1080 so I have a big
> > > black border around my screen. I can startx which works but cannot
> > > change the resolution to anything bigger. GRUB splash uses full
> > > screen but when the kernel loads it switches to small resolution.
> > > 
> > > The only thing I can think of which is causing this issue is UEFI.
> > > In my other set (fglrx) up I have simple framebuffer enabled which
> > > works when I set up resolution in grub default.
> > > 
> > > Strangely enough when I start system rescue cd in UEFI mode I get
> > > the same problem with small resolution but not if I do not boot in
> > > UEFI mode.
> > 
> > Hmm ... I don't get such problems here on 3 PCs running different
> > amd/radeon cards and all with radeon drivers.
> > 
> > You haven't said which card you're running.  If it is a very recent
> > model the radeon drivers may not have caught up with it yet?
> > 
> > If you need to compare kernel settings let me know, although there
> > are wiki pages that are quite detailed on this topic.
> > 
> > 
> > > Anyone come across this or got this to work properly with
> > > radeon/UEFI?
> > > 
> > > Moral, don't use UEFI I guess but that's the future???!!
> > > 
> > > John
> > 
> > On PC boots in UEFI (directly boots the efi binary, no boot
> > managers) and it has no such problems on 2 x 1920*1080 monitors.
> > 
> 
> Hmm,
> thanks, I have now tried an old monitor and its screen
> resolution was good (ie 1920x1080) so I think it's the monitor.
> I have a R9 280 radeon card which is pretty new but the monitor is
> very new (display port only, acer xb240h model) so I guess it's
> something do do with that, perhaps EDID but not really sure. The
> whole graphics stack is pretty bemusing and I would love to make
> sense of it all.

Several months ago I was thinking about buying a LG monitor with 
Cinema4k (4096x2160) resolution. The monitor that I received had some
firmware bugs. One bug was that the monitor shows a broken (somewhat
incomplete) EDID block. So it was not possible to use the full 
resolution with the radeon driver but only UHD resolution (3840x2160).

I read somewhere that this monitor maybe would run fine with the fglrx 
driver. But because I don't like proprietary software and because the 
monitor also had some other bugs and IMHO also a poor picture quality, 
I decided to sent it back. 

There is a kernel option DRM_LOAD_EDID_FIRMWARE. It allows you to 
specify an EDID data set instead of probing for it. If your problem
is caused by broken EDID data, this option maybe will help you to run
the monitor at its full resolution.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] QEMU unable to initialize audio

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 10:48:28PM +, Ian Bloss wrote
> > Libsdl and libsdl2 built with sound use flag on host?
> 
>   I didn't bother enabling alsa except for packages that actually need
> it.  I've enabled it for libsdl, but not for sdl2, because I didn't
> realize libsdl2 even existed.  According to equery, the only package
> pulling in libsdl2 is qemu, and that's because I set the flag.  If I
> remove the "alsa2" flag from qemu, will it work properly with "alsa"
> alone?

On my host system I use alsa and no pulseaudio. However it doesn't 
make any difference if I set the alsa USE-flag for qemu or not.

I don't know if qemu runs flawless without sdl2 USE-flag. But you can
easily test this.

Btw. Since I reverted from qemu-2.5.0 back to qemu-2.4.1-r2, qemu 
hangs no longer when I specify ac97, hda or es1370 as sound hardware
emulation. But I have to start the xfce mixer application on the 
guest OS after the desktop is loaded. If I don't do this, then one 
core on my host is always at 100% load and qemu is slow and sometimes
doesn't respond for some seconds. But no error message appears on 
guest or host.
Strange is, that the guest OS doesn't show a high load but only the 
host OS. After I started the xfce-mixer app on guest OS, everything 
is smooth and host load count normalizes. 

I now use qemu with "-soundhw es1370" and am have automated the start 
of the mixer app. With this, sound is working fine.

As I already said, when I use sb16 or gus then I have no sound at all.
Only ac97, hda and es1370 are working for me. Maybe this has something
to do with the guest OS.

Here are the USE-flags that I use for qemu, libsdl and libsdl2.

app-emulation/qemu-2.4.1-r2 aio caps curl fdt filecaps gtk gtk2 jpeg lzo 
ncurses nfs nls opengl pin-upstream-blobs png python sasl sdl sdl2 seccomp 
spice threads usb uuid vde vhost-net vnc xattr xfs -accessibility -alsa 
-bluetooth -debug -glusterfs -infiniband -iscsi -numa -pulseaudio -rbd -selinux 
-smartcard -snappy -ssh -static -static-softmmu -static-user -systemtap -tci 
-test -tls -usbredir -virtfs -vte -xen

media-libs/libsdl-1.2.15-r9 X alsa dga fbcon joystick opengl oss sound video xv 
-aalib -custom-cflags -libcaca -nas -pulseaudio -static-libs -tslib -xinerama

media-libs/libsdl2-2.0.3-r200 X alsa dbus joystick opengl oss sound threads 
udev video xscreensaver -altivec -custom-cflags -fusionsound -gles -haptic -nas 
-pulseaudio -static-libs -tslib -wayland -xinerama

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] [Sort of solved] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 05:43:17AM +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote
> 
> > Have you installed x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting on the guest?
> 
>   Cannot be done on my machines.  On 2 physical machines, and on the
> Gentoo guest, I get...

You don't have to install it on the physical machines but only on the
guests.
 
> > emerge -pv xf86-video-modesetting
> > 
> > These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
> > 
> > Calculating dependencies... done!
> > [ebuild  N ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting-0.9.0::gentoo
> > 298 KiB [blocks B  ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting
> > ("x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting" is blocking
> > x11-base/xorg-server-1.17.4)
> > 
> > Total: 1 package (1 new), Size of downloads: 298 KiB
> > Conflict: 1 block (1 unsatisfied)
> > 
> >  * Error: The above package list contains packages which cannot be
> >  * installed at the same time on the same system.
> 
>   On the guest, I unmerged xorg-server and tried emerging
> xf86-video-modesetting.  The result was that it would've pulled in
> xorg-server, which would again have blocked xf86-video-modesetting.
> Wierd.

That's indeed strange. As I said, I have no experiences with gentoo
as guest OS.

Maybe it will help to recompile xorg-server without the xorg USE flag
on the guest machine. When you can connect via ssh then you can revert
it easily when it fails.

And use emerge --backtrack=999 :-)
 
> > Have you compiled the guest kernel with CONFIG_DRM_CIRRUS_QEMU?
> > 
> > If yes, then I guess that you don't need xf86-video-cirrus at all.
> > 
> > > With "-vga
> > > std" X doesn't start up at all.
> > 
> > You probably need to compile the guest kernel with CONFIG_DRM_BOCHS
> > for "-vga std".
> >  
> > >   Any suggestions for improvement?
> > 
> > There is also a kernel option for a KMS enabled DRM driver for the 
> > VMware SVGA virtual hardware (CONFIG_DRM_VMWGFX). I think that the 
> > performance of this driver is better than the performance of the
> > cirrus driver.
> 
>   As I mentioned earlier vmware, cirrus, and bochs all ticked off in
> "make menuconfig".  Now that I have something working, I think I'll

These options are depending on CONFIG_HAS_IOMEM, CONFIG_DRM and 
CONFIG_PCI. You must activate all of these options too.

> make a copy of the 10-gig guest disk image before any further
> tweaking that might render it inoperative again.

Backups are always a good idea.
 
> >   I think that you also need x11-drivers/xf86-video-vmware installed
> > on the guest if you want to use "-vga vmware".
> 
>   I've tried that earlier, when things weren't working.  Maybe it'll
> work this time.

Good luck.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] [Sort of solved] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 06:26:18PM +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote
> 
>   My Google search turned up
> https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7456850.html which suggested
> VIDEO_CARDS="cirrus modesetting vesa", emerging world, and setting and
> running CIRRUS in the guest.  I did that.  With "-vga cirrus" I get a
> framebuffer X display in the Gentoo guest, which looks half-decent.
> xrandr reports...
> 
> Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096
> VGA-0 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y
> axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768  60.00*+
>1280x1024 60.02  
>1280x960  60.00  
>1280x800  59.8159.91  
>1280x768  59.8759.99  
>800x600   60.3256.25  
>848x480   60.00  
>640x480   59.94
> 
> 
>   There is no documentation for "video_cards_modesetting" or
> "modesetting" flags.  I filed bug report...
> 
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569082
> 
> ...asking for it to be documented.  "emerge -pv xorg-drivers" doesn't
> show it, and there's nothing in /usr/portage/profiles/*.desc
>   File-attached is the X log.  It complains about not finding the
> cirrus driver.  But when I emerged xf86-video-cirrus, the log
> complained that the cirrus driver couldn't be loaded because it
> conflicted with a "kernel module" (actually built in). 

Have you installed x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting on the guest?

Have you compiled the guest kernel with CONFIG_DRM_CIRRUS_QEMU?

If yes, then I guess that you don't need xf86-video-cirrus at all.

> With "-vga
> std" X doesn't start up at all.

You probably need to compile the guest kernel with CONFIG_DRM_BOCHS
for "-vga std".
 
>   Any suggestions for improvement?

There is also a kernel option for a KMS enabled DRM driver for the 
VMware SVGA virtual hardware (CONFIG_DRM_VMWGFX). I think that the 
performance of this driver is better than the performance of the
cirrus driver.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] [Sort of solved] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

 wrote:

> There is also a kernel option for a KMS enabled DRM driver for the 
> VMware SVGA virtual hardware (CONFIG_DRM_VMWGFX). I think that the 
> performance of this driver is better than the performance of the
> cirrus driver.

I think that you also need x11-drivers/xf86-video-vmware installed
on the guest if you want to use "-vga vmware".

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 04:47:35AM +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote
> > waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:
> > 
> > >   I'm now at the configuring-the-kernel stage of the Gentoo guest
> > > install.  I had originally expected to pull in the .config from
> > > the host machine, make a few tweaks, and get going.  However, it
> > > appears that multiple video and sound and network cards are
> > > supported, none of which match those on the host.  Which ones do
> > > people recommend selecting?
> > > 
> > 
> > That's what I'm using to start qemu:
> > 
> > qemu-system-x86_64 -machine accel=kvm -cpu host -m 4096 -enable-kvm
> > -name vm-01 -net nic,model=virtio -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2022-:22
> > -localtime -hda /path/to/image.qcow2 -display gtk -vga vmware
> 
>   I can't get X to work on the guest.  Text console is OK, but no X.
> I ticked support for cirrus, bochs, qxl, and vmware emulation in the
> guest kernel.  I wonder if I missed something.  I also emerged the
> corresponding X drivers.  vmware was a pain because I had to rebuild
> mesa and other stuff to emerge the vmware video driver.
> 
>   File-attached are Xorg logs for failed attempts with vga=
> cirrus/std/vmware.  QEMU refused to start when I specified -vga qxl.
> The vmware log looks like it started X properly, but it immediately
> dumped me out, and gave an all-red QEMU window.  I ssh'd in from the
> host to set up the next card.  I know that the all-red window was a
> text console.  To reboot, I blindly typed "su -", followed by root
> password, followed by "halt -p", and the QEMU session halted.
> 
>   I use the following script to boot up Gentoo on the guest.  I cycled
> through all 4 cards...
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm \
>-cpu host -display gtk -vga cirrus \
>-drive file=gentoo32.img,format=raw \
>-drive file=linuxswap.img,format=raw \
>-net nic,model=virtio \
>-rtc base=localtime,clock=host \
>-net user,hostname=gentoovm,hostfwd=tcp::2022-:22 \
>-m 3G -monitor stdio -name "Gentoo VM" \
>-parallel none \
>${@
> 

I never used gentoo as guest OS, only xubuntu and OpenSuse. So I can't
give you tips for your gentoo guest installation.

Have you also tried it without the -monitor option?

Here some infos about my host and guest OS.

Host: gentoo, kernel 4.1.7-hardened-r1, qemu-2.5.0, 
x11-base/xorg-server-1.17.4, x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-7.6.1

Guest: xubuntu 14.04.3 LTS, kernel 3.13.0-74-generic, vmware VGA emulation

If screen resolution and performance isn't that important for you then
you could also try to connect via vnc or spice.

Attached is my guest xorg.log.

--
Regards
wabe

Xorg.0.log.bz2
Description: application/bzip

Re: [gentoo-user] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> > I'm using a gtk window and not spice or vnc because this gives me
> > the best performance. And I'm using vmware as VGA card emulation
> > because it gives me the highest resolution (2368x1770).
> > 
> > Performance is not super snappy but it's good enough for regular use
> > like browsing the net and so on.
> 
>   I intend to use it mostly for distcc.  I still have an ancient OS/2
> machine with Galactic Civilizations on it.  Since I still have the CD
> images,  I'll also try to get that going in QEMU one of these days.
> My LCD is 1920x1080, so performance is more important than humoungous
> display size.

On my system only vmware VGA is able to provide a resolution as high as
or higher than 1920x1080. Performance of vmware VGA is also better then 
the other (std, cirrus) emulations.

But it could be that this depends on the guest OS.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Recommended pseudo-hardware for QEMU guest machine?

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

>   I'm now at the configuring-the-kernel stage of the Gentoo guest
> install.  I had originally expected to pull in the .config from the
> host machine, make a few tweaks, and get going.  However, it appears
> that multiple video and sound and network cards are supported, none
> of which match those on the host.  Which ones do people recommend
> selecting?
> 

That's what I'm using to start qemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 -machine accel=kvm -cpu host -m 4096 -enable-kvm -name vm-01 
-net nic,model=virtio -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2022-:22 -localtime -hda 
/path/to/image.qcow2 -display gtk -vga vmware

Since upgrade to >=qemu-2.4 I cannot use sound card emulation any more
because it either doesn't work at all (e.g. sb16, gus) or it freezes
the guest (e.g. ac97, hda).

Before I did the upgrade yesterday I used -soundhw ac97 and it worked
very well. Till now I have not found a solution for this problem.

I'm using a gtk window and not spice or vnc because this gives me the
best performance. And I'm using vmware as VGA card emulation because 
it gives me the highest resolution (2368x1770).

Performance is not super snappy but it's good enough for regular use
like browsing the net and so on.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Make QEMU guest visible to other machines on LAN

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

>   Apologies if this is a duplicate/triplicate.  I don't think the
> first attempts got through.  Going through my backup provider
> (dialup) this time.
> 
>   I have QEMU installed on a 64-bit Gentoo machine.  I'm now
> installing a 32-bit Gentoo guest.  The "cdrom" (actually the minimal
> install ISO file) boots, and dhcpcd hands out IP address 10.0.2.15
> and gateway 10.0.2.2.  The install can connect to the outside world
> via the "links" browser and it can ssh into the host machine
> 192.168.123.249 and visa versa.  But the host ssh's into the guest
> install session via a port redirection into itself. ( ssh -p 
> localhost ) 
> 
>   For various reasons, I need another physical machine on my small
> home LAN to be able to talk directly to the 32-bit guest.  I've read
> the "Network setup" at http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KvmOnGentoo
> Is the /etc/conf.d/net being reffered to, the one on the host or on
> the guest? The webpage doesn't say explicitly.

It seems like you are using the hostfwd option to redirect incoming 
connections to the host to the guest. Then it should also be able to 
connect from another physical machine to your guest.

Im using 

-net user,hostfwd=tcp::2022-:22

and can connect not only from the host but also from other physical
machines to the guest via ssh.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive noise

[wabenbau]

"J. Roeleveld"  wrote:

> >Since about three years I'm using four 3TB WD red HDs as storage
> >drives
> >
> >and I bought two more some months ago. No failures with all of these 
> >drives so far.
> >
> >--
> >Regards
> >wabe
> 
> I've got 16 3TB WD Reds running 24/7 for a little over 3 years. 
> Only had 1 failure (Smart complaining) in that time.
> 
> I find that decent odds.

That sounds good. It seems that it was a good decision to buy these
drives.

The time will show how reliable they are when the warranty period is 
up. :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive noise

[wabenbau]

Ian Bloss  wrote:

> I've had more Seagates die over time than any other brand, I would
> recommend getting your money back asap and finding another brand.
> 
> I work IT at a school and we no longer purchase seagate drives for
> their failure rate.

A friend of mine is using Seagate ES drives since many years in his 
servers. He replaces all his drives after the five years warranty time
is up and as far as I can remember he told me, that he never had a 
failure with all of his drives. He gave me two of his old drives and 
I used them for some years in a RAID-1 array in one of my machines 
till I replaced them with SSDs recently. They are still ok. The only 
bad  thing about these drives is their high noise level. Server drives
are usually located in a server room and not in an office and so they 
are not designed to be silent. :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive noise

[wabenbau]

Dale  wrote:

> I think I'm leery of all drives now.  I've had WDs fail, Seagate and
> some other brand.  I just keep buying bad stuff.  :-(   I'm glad I
> don't have to buy pacemakers.   :/ 

It seems that many many years ago HDs were more reliable then today. 
I have five 4GB IBM SCSI HDs and one 40GB Seagate IDE HD in my cupboard 
that I've used 24/7 for about 8 years. They were still intact when I 
replaced  them.
But its hardly surprising that a drive with a capacity of some TB has 
a higher risk of failure than a drive with a capacity of 4GB or 40GB.

Since about three years I'm using four 3TB WD red HDs as storage drives 
and I bought two more some months ago. No failures with all of these 
drives so far.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] libpcre && blender: Confusion?

[wabenbau]

meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote:

> Alan McKinnon  [15-12-06 08:24]:
> > On 06/12/2015 05:47, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > from builder.blender.org I regularily download the daily
> > > developers build of blender.
> > > 
> > > In the last few days the developers seem to include code to access
> > > libpcre into blender -- which will not be found on my system.
> > > 
> > > eix says:
> > > #>eix libpcre 
> > > [I] dev-libs/libpcre
> > >  Available versions:  (3) 7.9-r1 8.35 8.36 ~8.37-r2 8.38
> > >{bzip2 +cxx doc +jit libedit pcre16 pcre32 +readline
> > > +recursion-limit static-libs unicode zlib ABI_MIPS="n32 n64 o32"
> > > ABI_PPC="32 64" ABI_S390="32 64" ABI_X86="32 64 x32"} Installed
> > > versions:  8.38(3)(17:22:37 11/26/15)(bzip2 cxx jit pcre16
> > > readline recursion-limit unicode zlib -libedit -pcre32
> > > -static-libs ABI_MIPS="-n32 -n64 -o32" ABI_PPC="-32 -64"
> > > ABI_S390="-32 -64" ABI_X86="64 -32 -x32") Homepage:
> > > http://www.pcre.org/ Description: Perl-compatible regular
> > > expression library
> > > 
> > > For me it reads as if libpcre-8.38 is included, which is version
> > > "3" (due to the litlle "(3)").
> > > 
> > > ldd blender says:
> > > #>ldd blender
> > >   linux-vdso.so.1 (0x7f58c1f2f000)
> > >   librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x7f58c1b08000)
> > >   libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libfreetype.so.6
> > > (0x7f58c185d000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0
> > > (0x7f58c1641000) libpcre.so.3 => not found
> > >   libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib64/libxml2.so.2
> > > (0x7f58c12d6000) libGLU.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libGLU.so.1
> > > (0x7f58c1053000) libGL.so.1
> > > => /usr/lib64/opengl/nvidia/lib/libGL.so.1 (0x7f58c0d1f000)
> > > libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libX11.so.6 (0x7f58c09d8000)
> > > libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXi.so.6 (0x7f58c07c7000)
> > > libXxf86vm.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libXxf86vm.so.1
> > > (0x7f58c05c1000) libutil.so.1 => /lib64/libutil.so.1
> > > (0x7f58c03be000) libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2
> > > (0x7f58c01ba000) libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6
> > > (0x7f58bfe1b000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
> > > (0x7f58c1d1) libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6
> > > (0x7f58bfb17000) libstdc++.so.6
> > > => /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.9.3/libstdc++.so.6
> > > (0x7f58bf803000) libgcc_s.so.1
> > > => /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.9.3/libgcc_s.so.1
> > > (0x7f58bf5ec000) libz.so.1 => /lib64/libz.so.1
> > > (0x7f58bf3d6000) libbz2.so.1 => /lib64/libbz2.so.1
> > > (0x7f58bf1c6000) libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib64/libpng16.so.16
> > > (0x7f58bef9) libnvidia-tls.so.358.16
> > > => /usr/lib64/libnvidia-tls.so.358.16 (0x7f58bed8c000)
> > > libnvidia-glcore.so.358.16
> > > => /usr/lib64/libnvidia-glcore.so.358.16 (0x7f58bd12b000)
> > > libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXext.so.6 (0x7f58bcf18000)
> > > libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libxcb.so.1 (0x7f58bccf4000)
> > > libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXau.so.6 (0x7f58bcaf)
> > > libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x7f58bc8ea000)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Before I screw up the library pool with a quick and dirty symlink
> > > based on my assumption above...I better ask... :)
> > > 
> > > What exactly is libpcre.so.3 or for what stands it for?
> > > Is the installed libpcre the one which is needed?
> > > How can I fix it?
> > 
> > libpcre provides a regex library for apps to use. The version you
> > have will probably not work, as it is .so version 1 and blender
> > wants version 3. So a symlink is not the correct way to go.
> > 
> > You are using the daily dev build so most likely those devs aren't
> > using Gentoo and do have libpcre.so.3 from somewhere.
> > 
> > How critical is this error anyway? I can't imagine it would stop
> > blender from working entirely. Do you download a source or a binary
> > daily build?
> > 
> > Some things to try:
> > 
> > - symlink it anyway and see if the regex functions in blender now
> > work
> > - if blender is a binary download, search it's files for libpcre.so*
> > Maybe it's there and you just need to tweak LDPATH
> > 
> > -- 
> > Alan McKinnon
> > alan.mckin...@gmail.com
> > 
> > 
> 
> The blender download is a binary blob. For a longer time I used to
> build blender myself from a daily snapshot of the repository, but
> this became more and more complicate and finally I gave up.
> I started to download the binaries directly from the build bot
> builder.blender.org.
> This works - until now.
> The error stops the start of blender.
> ldd gives "libprce.so.3 not found" (see above) indicating, that
> blender won't start at all.
> The binary blob does not contain any libpcre -- I checked that
> before. 
> 
> Well, I think I have to open a bugreport for Ton...
> 
> Anyway: Thanks for your help, Alan!
> Best regards
> Meino

Version 8.3.8 is the latest version of pcre. The newer versions
available at http://www.pcre.org/ are for pcre2. The 

Re: [gentoo-user] Console fonts revisited

[wabenbau]

Peter Humphrey  wrote:

> A question for Wabe: are you talking about X fonts? I've been working
> on console fonts on a machine that has no X or other GUI. It's bad
> enough that terminus-font needs a few X libraries, without going the
> whole hog.

That's right. I talked about X fonts. Didn't noticed that you are
talking about "real" console fonts. My weird understanding was that 
every terminal is a console. But now I realized that this assumption
wasn't correct.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Console fonts revisited

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 10:02:59AM +, Peter Humphrey wrote
> 
> > A question for Wabe: are you talking about X fonts? I've been
> > working on console fonts on a machine that has no X or other GUI.
> > It's bad enough that terminus-font needs a few X libraries, without
> > going the whole hog.
> 
>   Speaking of console fonts, is there a 24 pixel-wide font available,
> or are there font-editors that can easily double or triple the width
> of a font?  I have a 1920x1080 monitor, and 8-pixel-wide fonts are
> unreadable with a 240-column-wide display.  I currently have...
> 
> consolefont="sun12x22"
> 
> ...in /etc/conf.d/consolefont.  Remember to run...
> 
> rc-update add consolefont boot
> 
> ...to make it take effect.  That's 160 columns across, and readable,
> but still too much.  A 24-pixel-wide font would give me 80 columns
> across.
> 

Try consolefont="ter-124n". But as Peter said, the terminus-font needs
some X libraries. I never noticed that, because on my system X was
already installed before I installed media-fonts/terminus-font.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Console fonts revisited

[wabenbau]

waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 08:45:43PM +0100, waben...@gmail.com wrote
> 
> > Try consolefont="ter-124n". But as Peter said, the terminus-font
> > needs some X libraries. I never noticed that, because on my system
> > X was already installed before I installed
> > media-fonts/terminus-font.
> 
>   I couldn't get anything less than 120 columns across.  Here's the
> scriptlet "listres" I used to check all the terminal fonts.  Note that
> it does *NOT* begin with #!/bin/bash and is not chmod'ed executable.
> That's because COLUMNS and LINES are not environment variables, but
> are shell variables.  So they are not inherited by a deeper script.
> 
> cd /usr/share/consolefonts
> for cfont in ter-*
> do
>setfont ${cfont}
>echo "${cfont} ${COLUMNS} ${LINES}"
> done
> cd
> 
>   I had to "source" it to stay within the same shell level...
> 
>  . listres > /dev/shm/screensize.txt

That's because the fonts hight is twice its width. The biggest terminus
font size is 32px. That's in fact a 16x32 matrix. With a screen size of
1920x1080 that will give you 120 columns and 33 lines.

It seems that there is no bigger console font available. 

Sorry, I really didn't considered that well enough before I made my 
suggestion. If I would have used my brain I would have realized that
I'm using ter-132n and have 240 columns and 67 lines on my UHD screen
and that this font size would give you 120x33 chars on your screen.

My screen is huge (32") and so the font is readable from my working 
distance. Usually I only work on the console when I make backups in 
single user mode or when I'm testing different options for the GPU 
driver. So I can live with that fontsize. But nevertheless I would also
appreciate a somewhat bigger font.

Just now I searched for BDF in the package DB (eix bdf) and found some
tools for converting X fonts to console fonts. I never used these tools
and so cannot say if they are helpful for you. If you achieve good
results with these programs please give me a hint. 

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Console fonts revisited

[wabenbau]

Alan Mackenzie  wrote:

> Hello, Peter.
> 
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:53:23PM +, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > Hello list,
> 
> > Some time ago I was looking for a console font whose zero had no
> > diagonal bar, because nowadays I find that makes it resemble an
> > eight too closely.
> 
> It's horrible, isn't it?
> 
> > At the time I said I'd found a font editor called nafe, which had
> > allowed me to delete the offending bar. At the time I was prepared
> > to put up with all ASCII line characters being shown as ? marks -
> > as used in many ncurses applications like the kernel menuconfig. I
> > assume the editor had truncated the font file.
> 
> > Today I've revisited the problem and I've found a GTK font editor
> > in the portage tree which has allowed me to do a proper job. It's
> > x11-misc/gbdfed, which is simplicity itself to run. I wish I'd
> > found it the first time! I'm a happy bunny now.
> 
> I found another way of editing these fonts: media-gfx/psf-tools.  In
> particular, it contains psf2txt, which converts a font to a readable
> and editable representation, and txt2psf which converts the text file
> back into a font.
> 
> I spent quite a long time playing with these programs back in
> September, getting rid of that blasted zero stroke.  Trouble was, if
> I got rid of the whole stroke, it looked too much like a capital o,
> and if I got rid of just the middle bit, there was a sort of "shadow
> S" going through the whole character.
> 
> > Just an update in case anyone's interested.
> 
> And from me: somehow, in the end, I never got round to installing any
> of the fonts I so painfully crafted.  So I am still stuck with that
> nasty slash through the zero.  One of these days, maybe .

I'm using "Droid Sans Mono Slashed" as base font and for my eyes, its
slashed zero doesn't look like an eight.
But if you don't like the slash, there is also a "Droid Sans Mono 
Dotted" and also a plain "Droid Sans Mono" without any "0-Extensions".

There is another monotype font that is maybe interesting for you. It's
called "Source Code Pro". But be warned, it has a dotted zero. ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Autostart of an application for a headless embedded system

[wabenbau]

meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a Gentoo on my embedded system (Arietta G25, very tiny). 
> If this system is booted (no display, no monitor, only one LED) 
> an application (console only) should start, do its job and if done
> shutdown the system. The application runs as root.
> The system has no connection to the outside, so there are no
> security related concerns...
> 
> 
> What is the best place to call that application?

If you use openrc then /etc/local.d/ would be a good place.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] firefox profile uses 100% CPU

[wabenbau]

the...@sys-concept.com wrote:

> 
> 
> Thelma
> 
> On 11/12/2015 08:22 PM, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
> > 
> > [...]
> >> Though, I can not import the bookmarks, I'm on Firefox-bin-38.3.0
> >> There is no entry: Bookmarks ==> Manage Bookmarks
> >> I have: Bookmarks ==> Show All Bookmarks
> >> where I can restore and backup bookmars. I've tried to restore
> >> bookmarks from file: bookmarks-2015-11-12.json
> >> but I'm getting an error message: "Unable to process the backup
> >> file."
> > 
> > Try to save the bookmarks as HTML file (E
> > 
> > Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks 
> > Import and Backup -> Export Bookmarks to HTML...
> > 
> 
> I tried that, it didn't work either.
> 
> Thelma

Last but not least you can extract the bookmarks from the .json file.

If you wanna do that, I can provide a macro file for nedit, an old but
great text editor. With this macro it will be easy to extract the URLs
from the bookmarks file. Of course you have to insert every extracted 
URL into firefox and bookmark it. But I think this is better than to 
loose the bookmarks.

I'm sure that this also can be done by a shell script but my knowledge 
of bash programming isn't good enough to write such a script.

If you wanna do this, install app-editors/nedit and give me a hint. Then
I'll post the macro and give you instructions how to load and execute the 
macro with nedit.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] firefox profile uses 100% CPU

[wabenbau]

the...@sys-concept.com wrote:

[...]
> Though, I can not import the bookmarks, I'm on Firefox-bin-38.3.0
> There is no entry: Bookmarks ==> Manage Bookmarks
> I have: Bookmarks ==> Show All Bookmarks
> where I can restore and backup bookmars. I've tried to restore
> bookmarks from file: bookmarks-2015-11-12.json
> but I'm getting an error message: "Unable to process the backup file."

Try to save the bookmarks as HTML file (E

Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks 
Import and Backup -> Export Bookmarks to HTML...

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] firefox profile uses 100% CPU

[wabenbau]

the...@sys-concept.com wrote:

> 
> 
> Thelma
> 
> On 11/12/2015 05:30 PM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 01:56:28PM -0700, the...@sys-concept.com
> > wrote
> > 
> >> I do agree, but I'm looking for a way to fix it. What file should I
> >> delete from Firefox profile.  I just want to retain bookmarks,
> >> passwords etc.
> > 
> >   Do *NOT* delete any files just see.  I would suggest the following
> > course of action...
> > 
> > * Do not start any of the profiles unless the instructions say to
> > * Create 2 new profiles; call them "salvage1" and salvage2"
> >   ***IMPORTANT*** If copying any specific file to "salvage1" screws
> > up that profile, do ***NOT*** copy it to "salvage2".
> > * Copy the "places.sqlite" file from the bad profile over top of the
> >   "places.sqlite" file in the "salvage1" profile
> > * Start up the "salvage1" profile.  Try surfing for a few minutes.
> > If it works, close "salvage1" and copy "places.sqlite" to the same
> > place in the "salvage2" profile, and skip "Restoring bookmarks from
> > backups".
> > 
> > "Restoring bookmarks from backups" (ONLY IF places.sqlite IS
> > DAMAGED)
> > =
> > * Copy all the files from the "bookmarksbackup" folder in the bad
> >   profile to the "bookmarksbackup" folder in the "salvage1" profile.
> > * Start up the "salvage1" profile.  Select...
> >   Bookmarks ==> Manage Bookmarks
> >   From the Bookmarks Manager select...
> >   Tools ==> Restore
> >   ...and select a backup.  Obviously, the more recent the better.
> > If this works, close the browser ("salvage1") and repeat with the
> >   "salvage2" profile.
> > =
> > 
> >   There are several more items...
> > https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data
> > 
> > Passwords are stored in the key3.db and logins.json files.
> > 
> > Site-specific preferences are stored in the permissions.sqlite and
> > content-prefs.sqlite files.
> > 
> > Search engines are stored in the search.sqlite file and
> > searchplugins folder.
> > 
> > Personal dictionary is stored in persdict.dat
> > 
> > etc, etc.  I know that it's painfull, but...
> > 
> > 1) Make sure "salvage1" and "salvage2" are both shut down.
> > 2) Copy over *ONE* file listed on the above webpage at a time to the
> >   "salvage1" profile, and launch "salvage1" and try it out.
> > 3) If it works, shut down "salvage1", and copy the same file over to
> >the "salvage2" profile.  If "salvage1" dies, you've found a
> > culprit. Copy the file of the same name from the "salvage2" profile
> > to the "salvage1" profile.
> > 4) GOTO 1 (i.e. "rinse, lather, repeat") and repeat for every file
> >listed on the webpage I pointed to.  There may be more than 1
> >corrupted file
> > 
> >   After you're finished, you can go to
> > 
> > Tools ==> Switch Profile ==> Manage Profiles
> > 
> >   There, you can rename or delete the old profile, and rename
> > "salvage1" to the name of your old profile.  Note that this will
> > only affect the name that it is invoked with by the "-P" option.
> > It will not change the directory name.
> 
> Thank you for detailed instructions, that was a good idea but I'm
> puzzled and surprised by the result.
> 
> I created two new profiles:
> salvage1 (new)
> salvage2 (new)
> test (this profile is damaged)
> 
> Originally started profile salvage1, salvage2 to create all the
> necessary files.
> 
> I've copied all the files from: .mozilla/firefox/tscsip8f.test/ (not
> sub-folders)
> to: salvage1 profile, indeed something is dammage CPU goes 100%
> Deleted "salvage1" and recreated it.
> 
> Now, I copied files "one by one" from test profile to salvage1 and
> started "salvage1" every time to make sure it work. At the same time I
> copied the same file from "test" to "salvage2" (without starting
> "salvage2"); I was only starting "salvege1" after each file I copied.
> I finished copping all the file from test "one-by-one" starting the
> profile "salvage1" and it worked but when I started profile "salvage2"
> the CPU when 100%.
> So it seems to me every time I was restarting profile "salvage1"
> Firefox was correcting the error some how.
> 
> Though, I can not import the bookmarks, I'm on Firefox-bin-38.3.0
> There is no entry: Bookmarks ==> Manage Bookmarks
> I have: Bookmarks ==> Show All Bookmarks
> where I can restore and backup bookmars. I've tried to restore
> bookmarks from file: bookmarks-2015-11-12.json
> but I'm getting an error message: "Unable to process the backup file."
> 
> --
> Thelma

Maybe you'll find some help here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_process_the_backup_file_-_Firefox

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] firefox profile uses 100% CPU

[wabenbau]

 wrote:

> the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > Though, I can not import the bookmarks, I'm on Firefox-bin-38.3.0
> > There is no entry: Bookmarks ==> Manage Bookmarks
> > I have: Bookmarks ==> Show All Bookmarks
> > where I can restore and backup bookmars. I've tried to restore
> > bookmarks from file: bookmarks-2015-11-12.json
> > but I'm getting an error message: "Unable to process the backup
> > file."
> 
> Try to save the bookmarks as HTML file (E
> 
> Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks 
>   Import and Backup -> Export Bookmarks to HTML...

Sorry, my mistake. I think you cannot save the bookmarks as the profile 
isn't working anymore. Right?

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] All sorts of digest verification failures

[wabenbau]

Grant Edwards  wrote:

> After an emerge --sync that appeared to work with no problems, my
> "emerge -auvND world" command is reporting that the Changelong files
> are broken for about 2/3 of the packages it wants to update:
> 
> !!! Digest verification failed:
> !!! /usr/portage/dev-libs/libxml2/ChangeLog
> !!! Reason: Filesize does not match recorded size
> !!! Got: 5221
> !!! Expected: 5038
> 
> !!! Digest verification failed:
> !!! /usr/portage/app-text/iso-codes/ChangeLog
> !!! Reason: Filesize does not match recorded size
> !!! Got: 4195
> !!! Expected: 4014
> 
> [ ... and so on for another dozen or so packages ... ]
> 
> I removed the emerge timestamp, sync'ed again, and got the same
> result.  Based on past experiences, I'm guessing that if I wait a day
> or two and sync again the problems will go away.
> 
> But I am curious what causes these temporary breakages.  Does anybody
> know how this happens?

Try it again. I just synced and received new Manifest and Changelog
files for every(?) package of the portage tree. But no report of bad 
digest.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] LINGUAS issue

[wabenbau]

Francisco Ares  wrote:

> Hi, all.
> 
> My locale language is "pt_BR" (Brazilian Portuguese), and many
> applications now support native translations.
> 
> And there is the "pt" possible LINGUAS entry, and there is no "pt_PT"
> (Portugal spoken Portuguese), for instance, neither any derivatives
> for other Portuguese speaking countries, which possibly have their
> own regional differences.

You can add locales by editing /etc/locale.gen and running locale-gen.
As i saw in /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED, pt_PT is supported.

> There are a few applications that do not distinguish "pt_BR" from
> "pt" and treat Portuguese language as simply "pt". An example is the
> OCR program "tesseract", that builds language specifics according to
> the LINGUAS environment variable.
> 
> Is there a way for specifying particular "LINGUAS" for individual
> packages?  I would not like to have to build dozens of applications to
> include "pt" to my "LINGUAS" definition just to have "tesseract" to
> include my native language support.  I've found some old messages
> about this on the net, but did not get any real solution.

You can define package specific environment variables for package 
builds in /etc/portage/env/

If you need package specific environment variables for runtime you
could create simple scripts to set the env and start the program.

#!/bin/sh
#
# start_tesseract.sh
#
LINGUAS="pt"
tesseract

Then modify the according menu entries / starter buttons to use the 
script.
 
> Or should I ask the "tesseract" package maintainer to add "pt_BR" to
> the available options?

That's a good idea.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OpenSSH upgrade warning

[wabenbau]

Michael Orlitzky  wrote:

> On 11/10/2015 11:13 AM, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> > 
> > What would take longer?
> > brute-forcing your root-password or a 4096 byte ssh key?
> > 
> 
> My password, by a lot. The password needs to be brute-forced over the
> network, first of all.
> 
> And a 4096-bit public encryption key doesn't provide 4096 bits of
> security -- you're thinking of symmetric encryption. Regardless, if
> someone is brute-forcing passwords, it would take them "twice" as long
> to brute-force both my root password and the password on my SSH key as
> it would to do the root password alone. I can do better than 2x by
> adding a character to my password. And that's pointless, because it
> would already take forever. No-more-Earth forever.
> 
> 
> > 
> >> All of the good attacks (shoot me, bribe me, steal the hardware,
> >> etc.) that I can think of work just fine against the two-factor
> >> auth. The only other way to get the root password is to be there
> >> when I transfer it from my brain to the terminal, in which case
> >> you have the SSH key, too.
> > 
> > The ssh-key is stored on your desktop/laptop. Secured with a
> > passphrase.
> > 
> 
> If my machine is compromised, the attacker can see both the SSH key
> password when I type it, and the root password when I type that.

That's right. If an attacker has the full control over your machine
then it doesn't make any difference. 

But if he can only see what you are typing, for example by a keylogger 
or by detecting the electromagentic radiation of your keyboard or by 
watching your keyboard with a camera, then he can do nothing with the 
root password of your server when root login with password is forbidden.

Just my two cents. ;-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OpenSSH upgrade warning

[wabenbau]

Michael Orlitzky  wrote:

> On 11/10/2015 03:52 PM, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > 
> > That's right. If an attacker has the full control over your machine
> > then it doesn't make any difference. 
> > 
> > But if he can only see what you are typing, for example by a
> > keylogger or by detecting the electromagentic radiation of your
> > keyboard or by watching your keyboard with a camera, then he can do
> > nothing with the root password of your server when root login with
> > password is forbidden.
> > 
> 
> I said I would give up but I lied.
> 
> The scenario that we're talking about has the user log in via an SSH
> key to some server. Once he's logged in to the server, the user uses
> "su" or "sudo" to become root. This requires that he type the root
> password. So a keyboard camera would still obtain the password.
> 
> If you never actually obtain root access, of course you are safe =)

You can disable password login for that user on the server. Then he 
can only login via ssh key. Only with the knowledge of the root
password it is not possible to gain root access to the server. An
attacker also needs the ssh key. And with a camera, keylogger, or
measuring radiation he can not fetch that key.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OpenSSH upgrade warning

[wabenbau]

Dale  wrote:

> Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> > On 11/10/2015 04:11 PM, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> You can disable password login for that user on the server. Then
> >> he can only login via ssh key. Only with the knowledge of the root
> >> password it is not possible to gain root access to the server. An
> >> attacker also needs the ssh key. And with a camera, keylogger, or
> >> measuring radiation he can not fetch that key.
> >>
> > This is pretty close to what I originally asked for, thank you.
> > If you disable all password logins to the server AND disable remote
> > root logins altogether, then you can stop someone from gaining root
> > by peeking over your shoulder as you type.
> >
> > Unless they bash you over the head and swipe your laptop. But still,
> > I'll take it.
> >
> >
> >
> 
> Now I'm curious.  Just how often does all this stuff take place?   I
> figure when hackers attack, they go straight for root access anyway.
> If that access is disabled then they will never get in, no matter how
> long they try.  From what little I know, even if they have the root
> password they still can't get in unless they also have the other user
> account to login with first. 

A server is called is called a server because it has has something to
serve. ;-) If these services (web, ftp, mail, file or whatever else) 
are  accessible through a public network (Internet, Intranet, WLAN) 
then attackers are are looking for vulnerabilities in these services.
Often they use exploit-kits like blackhole for that. If they find a
vulnerability, they trying to exploit it. If the attackers are 
successful or not, depends also on how good the server is hardened, 
that means how good it is protected against such vulnerable services.

There are different mechanisms for such protections. For example 
simple chroot()jails or, much more complex, access control systems
like apparmor and selinux for isolating services, and SSP and PAX for
protection against stack- and bufferoverflow based exploits.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] New Gentoo box

[wabenbau]

the...@sys-concept.com wrote:

> Regarding better motherboard my preference is one that use 100%
> Jpanese capacitors, if I'm not mistaken  Gigabit is one of them.

Nearly six years ago I've bought four Gigabyte Ultra Durable mobos 
equipped with solid state capacitors. Two of these boards are running
24/7, the other two boards are running about 12h/day.

All mobos are still working without any problems. So I think my next
board will also be a Gigabyte UD.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Can I suppress the bleep when shutting down?

[wabenbau]

Alan Mackenzie  wrote:

> Hello, Gentoo.
> 
> Every time I shut down my gentoo system with "shutdown -h now", it
> beeps at me.  This is becoming steadily more irritating as the months
> go by. Just what is this beep supposed to be telling me?  I _know_
> I'm shutting the machine down.
> 
> Can anybody here tell me how to disable this ing annoyance?
> 
> Many thanks in advance!
> 

IIRC you must disable CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR in the Kernel config.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OT:: free pop3 mail box?

[wabenbau]

 wrote:

> James  wrote:
> 
> > Folks,
> > 
> > I do not want gmail or any other big (brother) organization email.
> > I just need a simple pop3 (small) email box, in case my
> > (underconstruction) email server is not happy. Low traffic.
> > Temporary is fine too.
> > 
> > Suggestions most welcome.
> > 
> > Tia,
> > James
> > 
> 
> Take a look at mailbox.org.

Sorry, I overlooked that you are searching a free mail provider.
Mailbox.org isn't free of charge, but it isn't expensive and they claim
to respect privacy.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] OT:: free pop3 mail box?

[wabenbau]

James  wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> I do not want gmail or any other big (brother) organization email.
> I just need a simple pop3 (small) email box, in case my
> (underconstruction) email server is not happy. Low traffic.
> Temporary is fine too.
> 
> Suggestions most welcome.
> 
> Tia,
> James
> 

Take a look at mailbox.org.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] THE SCREAM.

[wabenbau]

Alan Grimes  wrote:

> 
> You know that famous Van Gough painting? That kinda haunts you because
> it's absolutely silent...

"The Scream" is painted by Edvard Munch. Van Gogh (not Gough!) is well 
known for his paintings of sunflowers and cypresses. 

Yes I know, I'm a smart ass sometimes. :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] THE SCREAM.

[wabenbau]

Lee  wrote:

> On Sep 29, 2015 11:17 AM,  wrote:
> >
> > Alan Grimes  wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > You know that famous Van Gough painting? That kinda haunts you
> > > because it's absolutely silent...
> >
> > "The Scream" is painted by Edvard Munch. Van Gogh (not Gough!) is
> > well known for his paintings of sunflowers and cypresses.
> >
> > Yes I know, I'm a smart ass sometimes. :-)
> >
> > --
> > Regards
> > wabe
> >
> 
> A common error. Both artists painted in impressionist style as well,
> and both had struggles with mental illness

I'm not an expert on paintings but AFAIK Van Gogh was rather an 
expressionist than an impressionist.

Can't say anything about Munch. All I know is that he painted
The Scream.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] black screen on boot when udevevents are processed

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

>  writes:
> 
> > lee  wrote:
> >
> >>  writes:
> >> 
> >> > lee  wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> Hi,
> >> >> 
> >> >> I'm getting a black screen during booting, with the last
> >> >> message I can see being that udevevents are being processed.
> >> >> 
> >> >> This happens with an NVIDIA GTX770 connected to a 4k display
> >> >> via a display port cable, and only when the monitor is
> >> >> configured to use display port 1.2 rather than 1.1.  With 1.1,
> >> >> I can get only 30Hz refresh rate, so I want to use 1.2, which
> >> >> should allow 60.
> >> >> 
> >> >> Installed are nvidia-drivers 343.36.
> >> >> 
> >> >> Do I need a very special display port cable for this, or what
> >> >> might the issue?  Both the graphics card and the monitor should
> >> >> be able to do the full resolution at 60Hz just fine.
> >> >
> >> > You need a DP cable that is able to handle a resolution of
> >> > 4k@60Hz. Not all DP cables can do this.
> >> 
> >> Hm, I bought this cable today, so I'd think it should be ok ---
> >> but I didn't explicitly specify that it must be one that does
> >> 4k@60.  I didn't know I might have to.
> >> 
> >> Is there any way to tell?  The sticker on the package only says
> >> DP/DP 2.0m.
> >
> > It should be certified to DP 1.1a at least.
> >
> > Excerpt from
> >
> > https://web.archive.org/web/20140327103747/http://www.displayport.org/faq/
> >
> > 
> >
> > Q: Where can I buy a DP 1.2 cable? Most of the cables are certified
> > to DP 1.1a.
> >
> > A: The DisplayPort version 1.2 standard was designed to utilize the
> > Standard Display cable. We did this intentionally to avoid customer
> > confusion. A DisplayPort cable is a DisplayPort cable; EXCEPT if it
> > a “reduced bit rate” (or RBR) cable, which is typically a 15m cable
> > designed for projector applications, and they only support up to
> > 1080P; OR if it is an active cable, which will not support the new
> > HBR2 rate introduced in the DP 1.2 standard.
> >
> > So a cable that was tested to meet the DP 1.1a requirments also
> > meets the DP 1.2 requirements.
> >
> > 
> >
> > But this is theory. I've made the experience that some cables
> > doesn't work with 4k@60Hz although they are so-called 1.1a/1.2
> > certified. I've bought four faulty cables before I found the two
> > that I'm using now. One of the faulty cables doesn't work at all at
> > full resolution, the others are working but the picture had a lot
> > of errors and was sometimes black for some seconds.
> >
> > The two cables which I'm using now are a CROMO 41532 (2m length)
> > and a CROMO 41533 (3m length).
> >
> > Do you have the opportunity to test the cable with some other
> > system, e.g. some live system (knoppix?) or some windows system? I
> > would do this first before buying a new cable. 
> 
> Thank you very much for all the info!
> 
> I finally got a cable that works.  It's from Delock and says 82771 on
> the back of the package where the EAN code is.  I like it, it seems to
> be good quality, and most importantly, it works.

Then you really had luck. I had two faulty cables from Delock and I
decided not to buy a cable from Delock again.
 
> However, I can see the BIOS and the boot manager menu, then during
> booting, the screen goes black and the monitor says "no signal"
> (probably when the nvidia module is loaded).  So I logged in blindly
> and started X11 and got a picture again.
> 
> The monitor info says 4k@60Hz in the BIOS and when X11 is running.  So
> there must be some setting which causes the graphics card to blank out
> on the console.
> 
> Any idea what that could be?

That's strange. I would understand a message like "Frequencies out of 
range" or something like that. But "No signal" indicates, that the 
monitor gets no signal at all. 

What happens when you switch from X to text console (Alt + Strg + F1)?

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] mpv upgrade warning

[wabenbau]

Dale  wrote:

> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > On 19/09/2015 20:59, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> >> On 19 September 2015 19:55:45 BST, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>
> >> Daniel Frey  wrote:
> >>
> >> I actually forgot I posted this, was rather sleepy. I also
> >> had to fight udev changing sda to sdf for no damn good reason,
> >> wound up having to use UUIDs (which I've never had to use before.)
> >>
> >>
> >> Because I'm a lazy guy, I'm using labels instead of UUIDs.
> >> They have the advantage that I don't have to change fstab when I
> >> must replace a disk. 
> >>
> >> --
> >> Regards
> >> wabe
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Strictly speaking, you don't have to do that with UUIDs as you can
> >> change it to match the old one. That big advantage of labels is
> >> that they are human-readable.
> > Well I can read UUIDs, they are hex gibberish but still readable.
> >
> > Labels are human *understandable*
> >
> >
> 
> 
> Plus if the label is say usr, var, home or something, you have a clue
> what it is used for.  Odds are, the one with the label home is the
> home partition.  Then again, someone could mix them up to purposefully
> confuse someone I guess.  :/  With UUIDs, who knows what is what
> there. 

That's also an advantage of labels. It's the same thing with domainnames
and IP addresses. For most people, words are easier to remember than 
numbers. Of course this depends on the words which are used. An URL like

http://www.vatnajokulsthjodgardur.is

is probably harder to remember than the belonging IP address. At least
for non Icelanders. :-)

--
Regards

Re: [gentoo-user] mpv upgrade warning

[wabenbau]

Neil Bothwick  wrote:

> On 19 September 2015 19:55:45 BST, waben...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Daniel Frey  wrote:
> > 
> > > I actually forgot I posted this, was rather sleepy. I also had to
> > > fight udev changing sda to sdf for no damn good reason, wound up
> > > having to use UUIDs (which I've never had to use before.)
> > 
> > Because I'm a lazy guy, I'm using labels instead of UUIDs. They have
> > the advantage that I don't have to change fstab when I must replace 
> > a disk. 
> > 
> > --
> > Regards
> > wabe
> 
> Strictly speaking, you don't have to do that with UUIDs as you can
> change it to match the old one.

THX for the hint. I didn't know this. But nevertheless it seems to be 
more work than using labels. :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] mpv upgrade warning

[wabenbau]

Daniel Frey  wrote:

> I actually forgot I posted this, was rather sleepy. I also had to
> fight udev changing sda to sdf for no damn good reason, wound up
> having to use UUIDs (which I've never had to use before.)

Because I'm a lazy guy, I'm using labels instead of UUIDs. They have
the advantage that I don't have to change fstab when I must replace 
a disk. 

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Quick check on net-print/hplip-3.14.10

[wabenbau]

Mick  wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I just noticed that the driver for my old printer no longer shows up
> in cups, on one of my PCs.  Comparison with other PCs shows that this
> one does *not* have the hpijs USE set.
> 
> Could someone who also does not have hpijs set in their hplip tell me
> if the HP DeskJet 930C selection is missing, when they load up the
> GUI via https://127.0.0.1:631 and then try to modify a printer?
> 
> Until this week there wasn't a problem with this PC so I am not sure
> what changed ...
> 
> I've set it up with DeskJet 932c for now without USE=hpijs and it
> seems to work, so I am in two minds if I need hpijs or if I need to
> use the 930c driver anyway.

I don't have USE flag hpijs set for hplip (3.14.10) and when I modify 
my printer, there are two lines for HP DeskJet 930C shown up:

HP Deskjet 930C Foomatic/cdj550 (en)
HP Deskjet 930c, hpcups 3.14.10 (en)

My USE flags for hplip are:

X doc hpcups libnotify qt4 scanner snmp -fax -hpijs -kde -libusb0 -minimal 
-parport -policykit -static-ppds

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Can't paste from selection in gtk-3 apps

[wabenbau]

Grant Edwards  wrote:

> In most X11 apps I can select some text and then paste it somewhere
> else with a middle-click, or dump it to stdout with the command 'xclip
> -o'.  That doesn't work for highligted text in gtk-3 apps (meld,
> evince, audacious, etc.).  After selecting text in a gtk-3 app, if I
> middle-click in a terminal window it does nothing and 'xclip -o' just
> hangs.  Selecting text elsewhere will deselect the text in the gtk-3
> app, so gtk-3 isn't _completely_ ignoring X11 clipboards/buffers.
> 
> Any ideas why gtk-3 copy/paste is broken and how to fix it?
> 

Right now I made a test with audacious. I selected some text in the 
"title info" window and then pasted the selected text with middle-click
into a text editor (geany). It worked without problems.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] portage directory ownerships?

[wabenbau]

james  wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> So looking at /etc/portage/repos.conf, it seems root.root owns these
> files; shouldn't it be portage.portage? and /usr/portage

On my system /etc/portage/repos.conf is also owned by root:root
 
> That got me thinking. Everywhere that portage operates or owns
> things, should the ownership not be portage.portage
> and what would the typical permissions be?
> 
> Is there a master list I can look at? Surely root not own all
> these dirs, like /usr/portage/* ? My /usr/portage is root.root
> and 755 on permissions, is that right?

On my system /usr/portage/* is owned by portage:portage and permissions
for directories is drwxrwsr-x and for files -rw-rw-r--

In make.conf I have usersandbox and userpriv in my FEATURES list. 
Dunno, but maybe this has something to do with ownership/permissions.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] sys-fs/-MERGING-static-dev installed but unable to find it

[wabenbau]

 wrote:

> Dale  wrote:
> 
> > Howdy,
> > 
> > I ran eix-test-obsolete and in the output, I get the following:
> > 
> > 
> > The following installed packages are not in the database:
> > 
> > sys-fs/-MERGING-static-dev
> > --
> > 
> > Equery gives me this:
> > 
> > root@fireball / # equery list *static-dev*
> >  * Searching for *static-dev* ...
> > !!! No installed packages matching '*static-dev*'
> > root@fireball / # 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Other tools report this:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > root@fireball / # emerge -s static-dev
> >  
> > [ Results for search key : static-dev ]
> > Searching...
> > 
> > *  sys-fs/static-dev
> >   Latest version available: 0.1
> >   Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
> >   Size of files: 0 KiB
> >   Homepage:  https://bugs.gentoo.org/107875
> >   Description:   A skeleton, statically managed /dev
> >   License:   GPL-2
> > 
> > [ Applications found : 1 ]
> > 
> > root@fireball / # eix static-dev
> > * sys-fs/static-dev
> >  Available versions:  0.1
> >  Homepage:https://bugs.gentoo.org/107875
> >  Description: A skeleton, statically managed /dev
> > 
> > root@fireball / #
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > So, it's installed but I can't find it to remove it.  What the heck
> > is this about?  Anyone else ever run into this?  Is there a way to
> > "find" it??  Can I remove it somehow??
> > 
> > Thanks.
> > 
> > Dale
> > 
> > :-)  :-) 
> > 
> 
> It's also installed on my system and probably it's a forgotten relict
> from ancient times (my last gentoo installation on this machine was
> in 2007).
> 
> To be honest, I never ran eix-test-obsolete. My system is running
> fine and atm I don't have much time. So I will leave it as it is.
> 
> Maybe the static dev is useful in the case that udev refuses to work
> for any reason. :-)
> 
> --
> Regards
> wabe

Sorry, I forgot to mention that the package is shown up when I search
for it. I don't have any clue why this is not the case for your system.
 
$ eix static-dev
[I] sys-fs/static-dev
 Available versions:  0.1{tbz2}
 Installed versions:  0.1{tbz2}(01:46:27 08.03.2013)
 Homepage:https://bugs.gentoo.org/107875
 Description: A skeleton, statically managed /dev


$ equery list *static-dev*
 * Searching for *static-dev* ...
[IP-] [  ] sys-fs/static-dev-0.1:0


$ emerge -s static-dev
  
[ Results for search key : static-dev ]
Searching...

*  sys-fs/static-dev
  Latest version available: 0.1
  Latest version installed: 0.1
  Size of files: 0 KiB
  Homepage:  https://bugs.gentoo.org/107875
  Description:   A skeleton, statically managed /dev
  License:   GPL-2

[ Applications found : 1 ]


--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] sys-fs/-MERGING-static-dev installed but unable to find it

[wabenbau]

wraeth  wrote:

> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA256
> 
> On 14/09/15 13:46, Dale wrote:
> > So, it's installed but I can't find it to remove it.  What the heck
> > is this about?  Anyone else ever run into this?  Is there a way to
> > "find" it??  Can I remove it somehow??
> 
> I'm not certain, but I believe the -MERGING-* files are left over from
> an interrupted Install phase. Dr. Google suggests manually removing
> [1,2] and while I did come across this many moons ago, I can't recall
> how I dealt with it myself.
> 
> 1:
> http://negativesum.net/tech/linux/gentoo/log/fixing-portage-when-it-has-
> wedged-a-package-as-merging
> 2: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-882687.html

@Dale

Have you tried to install it again? If that works, you can maybe remove
it afterwards.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] sys-fs/-MERGING-static-dev installed but unable to find it

[wabenbau]

Dale  wrote:

> Howdy,
> 
> I ran eix-test-obsolete and in the output, I get the following:
> 
> 
> The following installed packages are not in the database:
> 
> sys-fs/-MERGING-static-dev
> --
> 
> Equery gives me this:
> 
> root@fireball / # equery list *static-dev*
>  * Searching for *static-dev* ...
> !!! No installed packages matching '*static-dev*'
> root@fireball / # 
> 
> 
> 
> Other tools report this:
> 
> 
> 
> root@fireball / # emerge -s static-dev
>  
> [ Results for search key : static-dev ]
> Searching...
> 
> *  sys-fs/static-dev
>   Latest version available: 0.1
>   Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
>   Size of files: 0 KiB
>   Homepage:  https://bugs.gentoo.org/107875
>   Description:   A skeleton, statically managed /dev
>   License:   GPL-2
> 
> [ Applications found : 1 ]
> 
> root@fireball / # eix static-dev
> * sys-fs/static-dev
>  Available versions:  0.1
>  Homepage:https://bugs.gentoo.org/107875
>  Description: A skeleton, statically managed /dev
> 
> root@fireball / #
> 
> 
> 
> So, it's installed but I can't find it to remove it.  What the heck is
> this about?  Anyone else ever run into this?  Is there a way to "find"
> it??  Can I remove it somehow??
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 
> 

It's also installed on my system and probably it's a forgotten relict from 
ancient times (my last gentoo installation on this machine was in 2007).

To be honest, I never ran eix-test-obsolete. My system is running fine and
atm I don't have much time. So I will leave it as it is.

Maybe the static dev is useful in the case that udev refuses to work for 
any reason. :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] CMYK comparison to sRGB between platforms

[wabenbau]

Mick  wrote:

> On the same hardware I noticed that a CMYK photograph converted to
> sRGB looked mostly the same (indistinguishable) on Linux, but the
> sRGB colours were brighter on MSWindows.
> 
> I tried this by dual booting between MSWindows and Linux.
> 
> Then I tried it by running MSWindows within a VM on a Linux host and
> the MSWindows showed a clear difference in brightness between the two
> formats.
> 
> Finally, I checked on an AppleMac and the difference between the CMYK
> and sRGB photographs was even more prominent than MSWindows.
> 
> So, the Linux renedering seems to be misleading the user.  Have you
> noticed the same?
> 
> BTW, both Linux machines that I tried this on are running radeon
> drivers - are these to blame?  The AppleMac is running Intel graphics
> with its 'retina' monitor.  Is it a matter of somehow tuning the Xorg
> settings on my Linux PCs?

First I must say that even though I'm working as a photographer I'm not 
an expert on Color Models. The professional exposure and print service 
that I use only accepts RGB Color Models. They use laser projectors to
expose photographic papers. No conversion to CMYK is necessary. 
If I order fine art prints, they are doing the conversion by them self. 
All I have to do is softproofing my pictures in Lightroom using their 
different ICC profiles, to make sure that I don't deliver pictures that 
are out of the destination gamut.
So I don't have any practical experiences with CMYK pictures. I only 
have some incomplete theoretical knowledge about it.

CMYK is a subtractive color model and RGB is an additive color model,
they are working completely different. It is not possible to convert 
one in to the other by just simply adjust some gamma curves or using a 
LUT as it is done by color management systems like lcms. 

When you are watching a CMYK picture, your picture viewer has to convert
it to a RGB color space (sRGB or AdobeRGB or similar), because that is
what your monitor needs. And I think there are not much picture viewers
that are able to display a CMYK picture.

This conversion can not be done by the graphics driver, regardless what 
kind of OS you use. Indeed Linux drivers can only use 8 bits per color
channel (that's really poor IMHO) and Windows can use 10 bits per channel
(depends on the graphics card), but this can't make big differences in 
brightness or saturation. It only leads to smother color transitions in 
some pictures.
So I don't think that the drivers have anything to do with your problem.

Apart from the different color models (CMYK vs RGB) there exist different
color spaces (eg. AdobeRGB and sRGB). When you convert one color space in 
to an other, there are parameters like black point compensation and 
different rendering intents (perceptual and relative or absolute 
colorimetric), that can make a difference in the resulting picture.

You didn't told exactly what you have done. This makes it difficult to 
find a reason for the problem. But I can think of different reasons for 
the phenomenon you observed:

Different picture viewers and/or different color management systems and/or
different color spaces (including different rendering intents respectively 
black point compensations). :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone running a hardened profile?

[wabenbau]

Michael Orlitzky  wrote:

> On 09/06/2015 04:15 PM, walt wrote:
> > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hardened_Gentoo
> > 
> > That wiki page is very seductive.  It makes me want to drop
> > everything and select a hardened profile and re-emerge everything
> > from scratch.
> > 
> > But I have a feeling I'd soon be in big trouble if I did.  Is this
> > something that only gentoo devs should be messing with, or is this
> > a project that a typical gentoo end-user might hope to accomplish
> > without frequent suicidal thoughts?
> 
> It depends on how many hardening features you want to enable. It's a
> lot easier than it used to be because there's a kernel config thingy
> that lets you pick safe options without understanding all the
> details. You can get a lot of protection for very little risk by
> enabling pax/grsec and checking a few boxes in the hardened kernel
> config.
> 
> Just beware that there are kernel options that will clobber things
> like cpupower and others that will slow down specific programs like
> clamav with JIT. Anyway, we're all here because we like to tinker
> with things until they're broken, right? Give it a try and be sure to
> read the kernel help pages carefully and have fun. You can always
> switch back to a non-hardened kernel and everything will go back to
> normal.

I don't think so (but maybe I'm wrong). You have to compile your entire 
system with a hardened toolchain to get full hardened support (SSP and
maybe some other things). I think, to go back to a "normal state", you
have to recompile everything again with a non hardened toolchain.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone running a hardened profile?

[wabenbau]

walt  wrote:

> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hardened_Gentoo
> 
> That wiki page is very seductive.  It makes me want to drop everything
> and select a hardened profile and re-emerge everything from scratch.
> 
> But I have a feeling I'd soon be in big trouble if I did.  Is this
> something that only gentoo devs should be messing with, or is this
> a project that a typical gentoo end-user might hope to accomplish
> without frequent suicidal thoughts?

I'm using hardened-profile and hardened sources for many years on a
stable gentoo system. I don't have any binary packages installed.
Everything works fine. No headache and no suicidal tendencies so far.

There is a ML for gentoo-hardened (gentoo-harde...@lists.gentoo.org).
I think it would be a good idea to ask the guys there, because some 
of them have a very deep knowledge of the underlaying technique.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone running a hardened profile?

[wabenbau]

Fernando Rodriguez  wrote:

> On Sunday, September 06, 2015 1:15:17 PM walt wrote:
> > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hardened_Gentoo
> > 
> > That wiki page is very seductive.  It makes me want to drop
> > everything and select a hardened profile and re-emerge everything
> > from scratch.
> > 
> > But I have a feeling I'd soon be in big trouble if I did.  Is this
> > something that only gentoo devs should be messing with, or is this
> > a project that a typical gentoo end-user might hope to accomplish
> > without frequent suicidal thoughts?
> 
> There's different opinions on it, but mine is that while it adds some
> security it's so little that it's not worth it in most cases. It
> provides more security on a binary distro because everyone has the
> same binaries and an attacker don't need to guess where a specific
> piece of code may get loaded but by running a source distro your
> address space is already pretty unique. The only case where it
> provides some security is when an attacker is trying to guess an
> address for an exploit, making the wrong guess will likely crash the
> process and it will be reloaded on a new address. Do you have
> valuable enough data for an attacker to go through that hassle in
> order to get it? If you do then you should use a hardened profile,
> but physical security and disk encryption is more important because
> if it's worth that much it'll be easier to just rob you.

I'm not a security expert, so I'm maybe wrong here, But I think there
are more security functions on gentoo-hardened than just address space
randomization. There are also things like stack smash protection and 
some other restrictions that make it harder to exploit security holes.
 
> Be aware that there's no hardened desktop profile so that alone will
> make it somewhat harder if plan to use it on a desktop.

I never used a desktop profile. I just added the USE flags that I need.

> Another reason is if you want to use something like SELinux (which
> doesn't require a hardened profile) that gives you very fine grained
> control about access control but it's also very restrictive. I think
> it's only worth it for large networks with many users and different
> levels of access to sensitive data.

Yes, SELinux can be very painfull and I also don't use it.
 
> I needed some of SELinux features but settled for using AppArmor in
> an unusual way to accomplish them because SELinux is too much
> trouble. All AppArmor really does is provide process isolation or
> sandboxing. If an attacker gains access through an exploint he will
> only be able to access the files that the exploited service has
> access to. I use it with a catch all profile that prevents execution
> from all world writeable and home directories, and access to ssh/pgp
> keys, keyrings, etc. This works nice for servers and desktops and is
> not too restrictive. And if I need to execute code from my home dir
> for development I can launch an unrestricted shell via sudo. I can
> leave my laptop unlocked with the wallet open (I use the kwallet pam
> module) and it will be really hard for you to get anything like ssh
> keys or passwords (I also have patches for kwallet so it requires a
> password to show saved passwords), but the programs that need them
> have access to them.

I will give AppArmor a try when I have more spare time.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] slot conflict - xfce-base/libxfce4util

[wabenbau]

Alan McKinnon  wrote:

> Hmmm. libxfcegui4 is old compat code for legacy shit from 3 versions
> back. I doubt you need it, and if you do, I suggest getting rid of the

That's right. libxfcegui4 is not needed by XFCE any longer.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] black screen on boot when udevevents are processed

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

>  writes:
> 
> > lee  wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> I'm getting a black screen during booting, with the last message I
> >> can see being that udevevents are being processed.
> >> 
> >> This happens with an NVIDIA GTX770 connected to a 4k display via a
> >> display port cable, and only when the monitor is configured to use
> >> display port 1.2 rather than 1.1.  With 1.1, I can get only 30Hz
> >> refresh rate, so I want to use 1.2, which should allow 60.
> >> 
> >> Installed are nvidia-drivers 343.36.
> >> 
> >> Do I need a very special display port cable for this, or what might
> >> the issue?  Both the graphics card and the monitor should be able
> >> to do the full resolution at 60Hz just fine.
> >
> > You need a DP cable that is able to handle a resolution of 4k@60Hz.
> > Not all DP cables can do this.
> 
> Hm, I bought this cable today, so I'd think it should be ok --- but I
> didn't explicitly specify that it must be one that does 4k@60.  I
> didn't know I might have to.
> 
> Is there any way to tell?  The sticker on the package only says DP/DP
> 2.0m.

It should be certified to DP 1.1a at least.

Excerpt from

https://web.archive.org/web/20140327103747/http://www.displayport.org/faq/



Q: Where can I buy a DP 1.2 cable? Most of the cables are certified to DP 1.1a.

A: The DisplayPort version 1.2 standard was designed to utilize the Standard 
Display cable. We did this intentionally to avoid customer confusion. A 
DisplayPort cable is a DisplayPort cable; EXCEPT if it a “reduced bit rate” (or 
RBR) cable, which is typically a 15m cable designed for projector applications, 
and they only support up to 1080P; OR if it is an active cable, which will not 
support the new HBR2 rate introduced in the DP 1.2 standard.

So a cable that was tested to meet the DP 1.1a requirments also meets the DP 
1.2 requirements.



But this is theory. I've made the experience that some cables doesn't 
work with 4k@60Hz although they are so-called 1.1a/1.2 certified. I've 
bought four faulty cables before I found the two that I'm using now. 
One of the faulty cables doesn't work at all at full resolution, the 
others are working but the picture had a lot of errors and was sometimes
black for some seconds.

The two cables which I'm using now are a CROMO 41532 (2m length) and a 
CROMO 41533 (3m length).

Do you have the opportunity to test the cable with some other system,
e.g. some live system (knoppix?) or some windows system? I would do this
first before buying a new cable. 

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Portage is proposing an ncurses update and I don't understand what it means

[wabenbau]

walt  wrote:

> This is on my one amd64 (stable) machine, so the following proposed
> update should be safe and Just Work(TM), right?
> 
> Maybe it will, but there is no way I'm going to let this upgrade
> happen tonight when I'm tired from fighting all day with the
> so-called 'stable' computers at work:
> 
> Calculating dependencies... done!
> [ebuild U  ] sys-libs/ncurses-5.9-r5 [5.9-r3]
> [ebuild  NS] sys-libs/ncurses-5.9-r99 [5.9-r3] USE="cxx gpm
> unicode -ada -static-libs -tinfo" ABI_X86="32 (64) (-x32)" 
> 
> Is this going to install two different (slotted) versions of
> ncurses-5.9 on my stable machine?
> 
> If not, then this proposed update must be an experiment or a hack or a
> workaround of some kind.  On my *stable* machine!
> 
> Can you tell I'm in a bad mood and a bit paranoid at the moment?  I'm
> going to bed and will update the stable machine again in the morning.
> Hrmph!

I'm also not sure about this. I will do a full backup before I try to
update my system tomorrow.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] black screen on boot when udevevents are processed

[wabenbau]

lee  wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm getting a black screen during booting, with the last message I can
> see being that udevevents are being processed.
> 
> This happens with an NVIDIA GTX770 connected to a 4k display via a
> display port cable, and only when the monitor is configured to use
> display port 1.2 rather than 1.1.  With 1.1, I can get only 30Hz
> refresh rate, so I want to use 1.2, which should allow 60.
> 
> Installed are nvidia-drivers 343.36.
> 
> Do I need a very special display port cable for this, or what might
> the issue?  Both the graphics card and the monitor should be able to
> do the full resolution at 60Hz just fine.

You need a DP cable that is able to handle a resolution of 4k@60Hz. Not
all DP cables can do this. But if you use the cable that is delivered
with your monitor, it should work for all resolutions/refresh rates as 
long as it is not broken.

Sorry, but I can't say anything about the rest of your questions.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] CD ripper that generates song titles?

[wabenbau]

Joerg Schilling joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:

 Heiko Baums li...@baums-on-web.de wrote:
 
  All of them have freedb support and use cdparanoia as back-end.
 
 Cdparanoia is not a good choice, it has many flaws:
 
 
 - It is based on a 1997 cdda2wav and was never updated
 
 - It does not create the track based files at the right
 locations as it does not honor the standard that describes where the
 next track starts.
 
 - Even the paranoia code is unmaintained since 2002 and has
 many unfixed problems.
 
 Cdda2wav does not have these problems and enhanced the quality of the
 paranoia code.
 
 Jörg
 

That's good to know. THX for the info.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off?

[wabenbau]

Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote:

 I do not use a xorg.conf file with the Kaveri APU.  It just works
 with the following:

I deleted my xorg.conf and X is still working without any problems.

 In /etc/portage/make.conf:
 
 VIDEO_CARDS=radeon radeonsi

ditto.

 FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=/lib/firmware
 
I don't have such an entry. But nevertheless my firmware is installed 
there.
 
 In kernel (Linux 4.0.5-gentoo AMD A10-7850K Radeon R7, 12 Compute
 Cores 4C+8G) I have built:

Linux 4.1.6-hardened SMP PREEMPT AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor AuthenticAMD

 CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD=y

# CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD is not set

 CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL=y

ditto.

 CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE=radeon/kaveri_ce.bin radeon/kaveri_me.bin 
 radeon/kaveri_mec2.bin radeon/kaveri_mec.bin radeon/kaveri_pfp.bin 
 radeon/kaveri_rlc.bin radeon/kaveri_sdma.bin radeon/BONAIRE_uvd.bin 
 radeon/BONAIRE_vce.bin

As I have a different GPU:

CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE=radeon/verde_ce.bin radeon/verde_mc.bin 
radeon/verde_me.bin radeon/verde_pfp.bin radeon/verde_rlc.bin 
radeon/verde_smc.bin radeon/TAHITI_uvd.bin amd-ucode/microcode_amd.bin

 CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR=/lib/firmware/
 
 CONFIG_FIRMWARE_MEMMAP=y

ditto.

 CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=y

ditto. 

I have also configured:

CONFIG_DRM_RADEON_USERPTR=y
 
IIRC this option is only available in newer kernels.

 Packages:
 
 x11-base/xorg-server
  Installed versions:  1.16.4(23:51:45 19/02/15)(glamor ipv6 nptl
 suid udev xorg -dmx -doc -kdrive -minimal -selinux -static-libs
 -systemd -tslib -unwind -wayland -xnest -xvfb)

ditto.
 
 media-libs/mesa
  Installed versions:  10.3.7-r1(18:24:07 20/02/15)(bindist
 classic dri3 egl gallium gbm gles2 llvm nptl opencl
 r600-llvm-compiler udev vdpau -debug - gles1 -openmax -openvg -osmesa
 -pax_kernel -pic -selinux -wayland -xa -xvmc ABI_MIPS=-n32 -n64
 -o32 ABI_PPC=-32 -64 ABI_S390=-32 -64 ABI_X86=64 -32 -x32
 KERNEL=linux -FreeBSD VIDEO_CARDS=radeon radeonsi -freedreno -i915
 - i965 -ilo -intel -nouveau -r100 -r200 -r300 -r600 -vmware)

ditto, but these USE flags are different on my system:

openmax openvg osmesa pax_kernel pic xa xvmc 
-bindist -gles2 

The r600-llvm-compiler USE-flag isn't available on my system.
 
 x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati
  Installed versions:  7.5.0(23:52:11 19/02/15)(glamor udev)

ditto.

 sys-kernel/linux-firmware
  Installed versions:  20150206(08:18:46 28/03/15)(-savedconfig)

I haven't installed sys-kernel/linux-firmware but 
x11-drivers/radeon-ucode instead.

I've downloaded the microcode for my AMD CPU direct from AMD homepage.

 When you install your kernel do not forget to run make
 firmware_install.

As I haven't configured CONFIG_PREVENT_FIRMWARE_BUILD, I never done this. 

 I am not sure if I have omitted anything of importance.  Please ask
 if you need additional information.

THX a lot for your information. There are some differences between our
configurations. I'm very busy atm but when I have more time I will check
it out.

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] CD ripper that generates song titles?

[wabenbau]

Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote:

   I went to the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) yesterday and
 indulged in a buying spree of 18 CD sets of my fave music (basically
 anything pop/rock/country pre-Beatles).  I now have over 20 CDs that I
 want to rip to flac eventually.  I dread the gruntwork in renaming
 tracks like track01.cdda.wav, etc.  What Gentoo ebuilds are there for
 stuff that'll get ahold of track titles?  Is it in the form of
 metadata on the CD?

There are for example mp3c, grip, ripperx and probably also some other 
programs that can do this job.

There is no metadata for the songtitles on the CD but AFAIK every CD 
has an unique ID. The CD ripper programs are searching online for this
ID in the so called cddb (CD DataBase) and if someone has insert the
songtitles of the according CD to this database before, the ripped 
CD tracks are automatically renamed to the respective title. 
If nobody has added your CDs to the database, you can do this by 
yourself with the ripper software which can also transfer these
information to the cddb. 

Sorry for my probably unintelligible sentences, but I'm not a native
speaker. :-)

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off?

[wabenbau]

walt w41...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 21:10:28 +0200
 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
 
   Kernel driver in use: radeon
 
 gigabytes snipped for readability
 
 Hi wabe.  This whole radeon thing is so confusing I thought I'd
 mention one more very confusing detail that I had to fix before I got
 the open- source ati/radeon driver to work correctly:
 
 First I tried starting my X session with no xorg.conf file at all.
 That didn't work but of course I can't remember now what went wrong.
 (That was already more than 24 hours ago :)

It's good to know that I'm not the only one with a week memory. Every 
day I thank God for these little yellow post-it stickers. :-)

 Then I generated an xorg.conf in the old way using 'Xorg -configure'.
 That file didn't work right either.
 
 Then I finally realized that the generated xorg.conf had, in the
 Section Device section, this line:
 
 Driverradeon
 
 But that's not what we want.  To use the open-source ati driver I
 changed that line to read:
 
 Driverati
 
 And that's when everything finally started to work perfectly.

That's strange. What kind of GPU do you have? With my R7 250E I must 
use radeon as driver in xorg.conf. IIRC I also used the same config
for my old GPU (Radeon HD4550).

 One more thing that confused me:  the xf86-video-ati package doesn't
 install any kernel modules.  It installs only these two files:
 
 /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
 /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so

That's ok. It's the same on my system. 

BTW: I don't use any kernel modules at all.
 
 but to use those files you need that Driver ati line in xorg.conf.
 sigh

Below you find my complete xorg.conf. Actually I don't know if my X 
would also work without the device section. What I remember is that 
I had trouble to get my keyboard working without the InputDevice 
section. But this is some years ago. Meanwhile I have a new keyboard 
and maybe I don't need a xorg.conf anymore.

I will test this soon, if I don't forget it. :-)


Section InputDevice
  Driverkbd
  IdentifierKeyboard[0]
  OptionAutoRepeat500 2
  OptionProtocol  Standard
  OptionXkbModel  pc105
  OptionXkbLayout de
  OptionXkbVariantnodeadkeys
EndSection

Section Device
  IdentifierATI-Card
  Driverradeon
EndSection


--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on a Lenovo X1 Carbon (3rd gen)

[wabenbau]

Ralf ralf+gen...@ramses-pyramidenbau.de wrote:

 Hi folks,
 
 i just got my brand new Lenovo X1 Carbon and trying to get Gentoo
 running on it.
 
 Beside some really big issues (HiDPI display, 2048x1152 resolution on
 a 14 display really sucks on linux, xrandr scaling is horrible, no
 scaling is damn too small to read, missing touch support in most

I also have some HiDPI display (140 DPI) but text and icon rendering is
perfect with XFCE. It's even much better than with my windows 7 machine.
Your display has a higher resolution (168 DPI) but I don't think that 
this makes a big difference. Maybe there is a way to tweak your Desktop
settings for a better rendering/scaling?

--
Regards
wabe

Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off?

[wabenbau]

Mick michaelkintz...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Saturday 22 Aug 2015 03:08:41 waben...@gmail.com wrote:
  walt w41...@gmail.com wrote:
   I'm seeing horrible performance from the xfce window manager
   (xfwm4) on my main, everyday machine, but not on an older backup
   machine or on any of the linux virtual machines I run on
   virtualbox.
   
   The symptoms:  moving a window with the mouse is so slow as to be
   painful, and the CPU usage (on one of four CPUs) jumps to 100%
   almost immediately (xfwm4 is the culprit, see below).
  
  I'm using XFCE as DE and xfwm4 as WM. Since I bought a new GPU
  (Radeon R7 250), I don't use compositing any more because it causes
  tearing when I watch videos in fullscreen with 3840x2160. With this
  GPU I also had some random freezes when compositing was enabled.
  
  Beside this, performance is very good, regardless compositing is
  enabled or disabled. Scrolling text or moving windows around is a
  bit faster and smoother with compositing enabled, especially when
  other windows are in the foreground.
  
  With my old GPU (Radeon HD4550) I always had compositing enabled.
  Everything was smoother and I saw absolutely no glitches, but
  performance was also good with compositing disabled, just not quite
  as smooth as with compositing enabled.
  
   If I open an xterm and run (for example) /usr/bin/marco
   --replace, this sluggish behavior returns to normal immediately.
   
   After wasting hours on google I finally noticed that I had
   compiled x11-wm/xfwm4 with the xcomposite useflag disabled, so I
   enabled it and re-emerged xfwm4.
   
   Now I can get decent performance from xfwm4, but only if first I
   turn on compositing by running xfwm4-tweaks-settings.  (No, not
   by running the puny and feeble xfwm4-settings app:  I need to
   invoke a tweak to make xfce4 an acceptable Desktop Environment
   on my main desktop machine.
  
  As long as I use XFCE (many years) xfwm4-tweaks-settings is the
  program to toggle compositing. It's just a name, what is the
  problem? :-) Or do you mean, that you must enable compositing every
  time you start XFCE?
  
   official rant mode
   I remember going through this same frustration with gnome3, which
   was (and is) unusable without installing the gnome-tweak-tool
   package and using it to customize settings that I still don't
   understand.
   
   (That's why I finally gave up on gnome3, and I may yet give up on
   xfce4 and go back to mate.)
   
   Note that I'm not turning off official rant mode yet, but I
   should mention that this machine is ~amd64 with ati-drivers-15.7
   and vanilla kernel 3.14.51.  (Same problem with
   gentoo-sources-3.18.19, BTW.)
  
  I'm using stable xf86-video-ati and stable hardened-sources. I
  never used ati-drivers because I don't like to have proprietary
  software on my gentoo box. For me xf86-video-ati works well and has
  a sufficient 2D and 3D performance.
  
  --
  Regards
  wabe
 
 Hmm ... interesting.  I have a PC with the Kaveri APU, which also
 uses the R7 graphics engine, but compositing has no problems for
 general desktop usage (with two monitors).
 
 00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
 [AMD/ATI] Kaveri [Radeon R7 Graphics] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
   Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Kaveri [Radeon R7 Graphics]
   Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 25
   Memory at e000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
   Memory at f000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=8M]
   I/O ports at f000 [size=256]
   Memory at feb0 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
   Expansion ROM at feb4 [disabled] [size=128K]
   Capabilities: [48] Vendor Specific Information: Len=08 ?
   Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
   Capabilities: [58] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint,
 MSI 00 Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
   Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001
 Rev=1 Len=010 ? Capabilities: [270] #19
   Capabilities: [2b0] Address Translation Service (ATS)
   Capabilities: [2c0] #13
   Capabilities: [2d0] #1b
   Kernel driver in use: radeon
 
 I don't know if your card is significantly different, but can share
 settings if you are interested.

Hi Mick,

it seems that there are some differences (see below) but I'm interested 
in your settings anyway. Maybe they help me to make compositing usable
on my system, but actually I don't have much hope that this will be
the case.

Without composite, my system is rock stable and video playback is smooth.
First I missed the fancy window/menu shadows and the semi-transparency 
when moving/resizing windows, but now I'm also happy without these eye 
candies. The only thing that I'm still missing is the smooth scrolling
of window content. This is indeed a bit better with compositing enabled.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape 
Verde PRO [Radeon HD 7750 / R7