UPDATE: I’ve needed this exact version of jpeg on other machines as well.  Looks like emacs is requiring an older package (v6) that gets removed when the newer package (v8) is installed.  Follow the instructions below to get the old version, which fixes emacs et al.

Somehow all of a sudden I’m missing the 64-bit libjpeg.so.62 library. Had to emerge this:

emerge =media-libs/jpeg-6b-r9 -av

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild  NS   ] media-libs/jpeg-6b-r9 [7] 4 kB

Without it, emacs was unhappy, and broken emacs was causing a ton of other emerges to fail, for example git, with this error:

 * Compiling GNU Emacs Elisp files ...
/usr/bin/emacs: error while loading shared libraries: libjpeg.so.62: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A nasty old kernel setting has been creeping along in my .config file for a while now, and finally exploded on me, trashing tons of files on my carefully maintained media file server. I’m not quite so cocky about my raid setup now that the flaky filesystem flew right under its radar and kicked my ass. gentoo once again proves it is the powertool with which you can really hurt yourself. Wahoo!

And to hammer that home, a recent iptables update cleared out my saved rules. I had cycled the cable modem before I realized the problem, and had to propogate new DNS records to get back up and running. I hate dynamic IP’s. 😛

iTunes sucks.  I have much higher ambitions for my own software, but alas I haven’t hit the lottery quite yet.  😛  Anyway, the latest chapter of suckitude is iTunes’ pee-poor handling of remote files on a media file server.  What a $(*#@ basic need.  I can set up a samba share and see all the media files just fine from my MBP laptop.  Then I “Add to library…”, being careful not to copy the GB’s of music down to the laptop by unchecking the iTunes->Preferences->Advanced->[Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library] checkbox.  It takes over an hour to scan the directory (what the HELL), and then iTunes proceeds to lock up my machine, perpetually, trying to perform [Gapless playback detection], even though I have crossfading turned off.  I get to repeat this process every time I add ONE file to my music collection.  Or rather, I don’t, as I refuse to go through ANY of this bullshit ritual.

There was a slight reprieve in the suckitude when I discovered mt-daapd (aka Firefly?), which serves up all your media from a linux fileserver over DAAP, Apple’s sharing protocol.  Wahoo, I’m back to loving you, Apple!  My media server scans regularly, serving up the files with the greatest of ease, and  iTunes is showing all my files under the SHARED tab.  Happy happy joy joy!  Until I try to drag a file to my iPhone.  Strange, it won’t work.  Well, not really strange.  Kind of predictable.  Welcome to the thin Aqua-colored veneer over Apple’s standard corporate behavior.  Puke.

I’m mostly bitter because I certainly should have developed a better way by now.  Shutting up and dusting off the old drawing board…

Bumped everything in an attempt to find a working daap server to serve my music to stupid performance-and-playlist-challenged iTunes.

• on the server, udev kindly requested that I remove crufty old CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED && _V2 – in menuconfig, uncheck General->remove blahblahblah.
• silly apache [/etc/conf.d/apache2] conf file update, make sure you don’t lose PHP and PERL support
• ridiculous KDE 3.5 errors keep coming, and KDE 4 having all kinds of blocks – I say just keep [–unmerge]’ing ’til it works!
• I used [emerge –skipfirst –resume] to get past nepomuk failure cruft.  Googled some, looks like a crappy old java config file is still pointing to a crappy old java JDK.  MAN I hate the lies that are Java…  [rm /etc/env.d/20java && emerge –oneshot -av soprano && emerge -Davu world].  Whatevah…

Next I compiled some new kernels.  To get OpenGL working on the ATI-driven  media center so MythTV is all purdy…

• bump kernel and reboot
• emerge -av ati-drivers
• [eselect opengl set ati]
• [aticonfig –ovt opengl]

Still need to fix the lousy alsa sound mixing for my hirez mkv files, I’m getting mixer channel errors in the MythTV log…

And xbmc is still segmentation faulting on startup…

What a silly situation this is. Here’s the fix for konqueror after you update KDE:

emerge -Davu kde-base/dolphin

Also had trouble with ogg, had to do this:

emerge -av media-libs/libogg
emerge -Davu dev-util/lafilefixer
lafilefixer --justfixit

…which did some scary stuff with my lib symlink files.

Life goes on. At least Firefox 3.5 is coming through now without a fuss.