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…

I finally moved into the 1990’s and set up DHCP on my LAN.  I’ve been happy with static IP addresses on all my LAN machines, but the little netflix-streaming Roku I bought for the better half requires DHCP before it will even say hello to you.  So now my little network has IP’s and network settings automatically handed out by MAC address, just like the big boys.  No more having to constantly reset my Macbook Pro network settings when I come home (why does every corporate OS stupidly expect one set of network settings to work for all wireless network connections!??  FSCK!!).  And the Roku is rockin…

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.

I have used adhoc scripts that do nightly backups of my important files. I zip up critical directories into huge tarballs – not too pretty but gets the job done.
I wanted to back up an entire linux system so it could be easily recreated, and decided it was time to get a little more sophisticated. Enter [rdiff-backup]. I’m emerging it now, but it’s requiring several updates. For one, it’s new kernel time, and there are a few new options to choose when using [make oldconfig]. I went with defaults, as usual, for every option that provided one. I had to pick these though:

Kernel compression mode: 1. Gzip
RCU Subsystem: 1. Classic RCU

Then I had to add FUSE to the kernel and emerge [ntfs-3g], so I could mount my external drive and back up to it.

[make menuconfig]: File systems->[x] FUSE (and rebuild and install kernel of course)
emerge -Davu sys-fs/fuse ntfs-3g

Then I emerged rdiff-backup, and ran the following:

rdiff-backup --exclude-other-filesystems --exclude-special-files -v5 --exclude /home/me/backup / /mnt/external_drive/backup/machinename

And away we go!