Simultaneously bumping server, desktop, media center, laptop to kernel 3.10.7 et al…

Stuff of note:

• For this one, I set up my main server to be a local source for portage rsync’ing. It was ridiculously easy and I’m embarrassed that I haven’t done this years ago.
• using old friends eix-sync, [emerge -DavuN –keep-going world], [–autounmask-write], [emerge @preserved-rebuild], [emerge –depclean], dispatch-conf, revdep-rebuild [-i]
• switching everything over to kernel 3.10.7. It has this tickless thingee that’s supposed to let my CPUs sleep better, like Zolpidem. Well, ok, cool. Lots more I’m sure, but let’s keep moving on.
• Totally dumped dirty-assed Oracle Java for icedtea everywhere but on my server. Man that feels good. Hope it works out.
• “media-video/avidemux-2.5.* has known security and other issues due to an affected bundled ffmpeg”, had to soft-unmask to upgrade
• hard-unmasked boost and boost-build to get release 1.54 (which gentoo has marked as “being tested”), which I’m developing with – get ready to help test it! 🙂
• Dealt with horrible horrible driver situation with broadcom wifi adapters stuffed in MacBook Pros. Too many options. Went with b43 open source in-kernel driver. This still requires extraction of a “cut” from the distribution of the proprietary driver. Gross stuff.

  When configuring the kernel I followed this. Everything seemed to be wanting to be installed as a module, which is fine – I won’t need everything I added, and I believe the tools like it better as a module. To find modules:

  find /lib/modules/3.10.7-gentoo/ -type f -iname '*.o' -or -name '*.ko'|less

  To load them, add name to /etc/conf.d/modules:

  modules_3_10="b43"

  Then I had to navigate all the silly userspace wifi options. By blind luck I stumbled into a working NetworkManager config, so I’m using that instead of OpenRC or wpa_supplicant. Added it to default run level and removed wpa_supplicant.

• typical multiple-python troubles, finally fixed by rerunning python-updater + [revdep-rebuild -i] over and over
• unmerged libreoffice-bin as it was hardcoded to depend on boost 1.49, wtf that’s no good
• unmerged google-chrome as the .deb file it was trying to pull gave a 404, wtf
• unmerged scala ’cause it’s a big fat pig that wanted me to go download 4 packages manually just to click thru EULAs – sorry Play!
• Updated mediawiki following the instructions on the wiki, wow that seems dangerous. But zero problems. 🙂 Well, that’s not true – I hadn’t unmerged old mediawiki installs in a while, causing massive texlive portage dependency issues. Had to uninstall all old mediawikis and all is well.
• installed ARDOUR on desktop AND laptop, let’s get our DAW on!
• added desktop/mediacenter/laptop support for exFAT, which is seeming to take over the thumb drive world

  cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig # etc... ensure that CONFIG_FUSE_FS is ON, see File Systems->FUSE
  emerge -DavuN fuse-exfat exfat-utils

  … and on wimpy, nautilus IMMEDIATELY started mounting up exFAT drives when plugged in, niiiice

• set up USB automount on laptop under xfce, took me forever to figure out that I needed to [emerge xfce4-mount-plugin thunar-volman] – NOT uam or pmount! and now both nautilus and thunar automount both NTFS and exFAT drives, AND let users in “plugdev” group unmount. YES.
• wireshark and aircrack-ng on laptop, had to remove gtk2 and qt4 from make.conf, moving onwards… still have gtk and qt of course… not sure if that was right, we’ll see…
• MCE remote in XBMC – needed to readd lirc, LIRC_DEVICES in make.conf, tick off some obscure kernel option to get “transmitting”:
  CONFIG_USB_EHCI_TT_NEWSCHED: Device Drivers->USB Support->Support for Host-side->Improved Transaction Translator scheduling

They say the N sa can rootkit any machine they want to. So I guess that makes me feel a little better to have a freshly updated system.

TODO

• full dune bump incl xbmc – autostart xbmc – install lirc and get remotes working – possibly zfs
• drop ssd in wimpy, use it with ardour AND protools+reaper (exFAT or NTFS? prolly exFAT but research!)
• work with cinelerra, blender, openshot on wimpy to import and edit home videos