Tags: gentoo

A few days ago, polkit version 0.113 was marked stable on Gentoo amd64. Since the update, I could no longer suspend my system without entering the root password. Quite annoying, especially for a laptop. When canceling the polkit dialog, this appeared in the journal (yes, I am using systemd):

sep 10 05:22:52 sylvester.nomad.adlevio.net polkitd[18113]: Operator of unix-session:3 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for action org.freedesktop.login1.suspend for system-bus-name::1.96 [kded5 [kdeinit5]] (owned by unix-user:stijn)

As I already mentioned in my previous post about the XPS 13, I had issues with the touchpad: it freezes rather frequently, because it looses sync a lot. After losing sync for a few times, the psmouse driver issues a reconnect request. And when that happens, the touchpad freezes. It looks like this in the kernel log:

Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 4
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: issuing reconnect request

Many people I know use a laptop for almost anything, anywhere. When they arrive at the office, they hook it up to an external monitor, and use an external keyboard and mouse or trackpad. I prefer to have a proper workstation, with powerful CPU and GPU, lots of RAM and multiple large monitors. As it's rather difficult to take this setup with me to meetings, or when travelling, I still require a secondary device that I can take with me everywhere I go. Some people seem to be OK with a tablet for that purpose, but that just doesn't work for me.

After getting my oVirt setup up and running, I wanted an easy way to open a Spice console to a VM on my Gentoo workstation. There are several ways to do this, as explained here. The easiest way is via the browser plugin, but I couldn't get that to compile yet. The next best option is using ovirt-shell, from the ovirt-engine-cli tools.

Recently I came across this link in #xbmc-linux on Freenode: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html

Somewhere in June 2009, I became self-employed. Since it involves sending invoices, I decided to create a template with OpenOffice. After creating a new invoice, I export it as PDF and email it to the customer. Saves me paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, trips to the post office, fuel, ... You get the picture.

Unfortunately I still have to hand them in to my bookkeeping office on paper, so I still have to print them once. Which is what I've been doing since June 2009. Until I tried printing invoices from Q4 2009, somewhere in December. The printer refused to print anything.

I have always had a problem with Evolution being installed when emerging gnome on my Gentoo system. Even with "-evo -eds" use flags, it still wanted Evolution. Evolution is a BIG piece of CRAP, and I don't want it anywhere on my system

Some time ago I tried "emerge mysql-gui-tools" on my Gentoo x86_64 box. Unfortunately, the compilation process failed because of some errors (will include the error in this post when I find the time to reproduce it). Today, I'm preparing myself for MySQL DBA certification, and I really need the MySQL Administrator tool, so at first I downloaded the precompiled tar archive from the MySQL website, which worked without any problems.