Guy Rutenberg » Gentoo

Using MusicBrainz when Ripping CDs in KDE

Guy — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 08:37:29 +0000

I guess this tip is Gentoo specific. By default KDE uses FreeDB for getting CD info when ripping CDs. If you want to use MusicBrainz native service (not via their FreeDB proxy), there are several steps you’ll need to take.

First, you should compile kde-base/libkcddb with the musicbrainz use-flag turned on. Next you should go to System Settings->Advanced->CDDB Retrieval and check the “Enable MusicBrainz lookup” box. From my experience MusicBrainz is not a complete replacement for FreeDB as some CDs aren’t recognized by it (but recognized by FreeDB).

Upgrading All QT Modules in Gentoo

Guy — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:01:06 +0000

Upgrading minor versions QT seems to be a hassle, as each version blocks the previous and because of inter-dependencies, Gentoo can’t understand by itself how to solve them. The solution is to tell it to specifically upgrade all installed modules.

sudo emerge -avu1 $(qlist -IvC /qt- | grep 4. | sed s/-4.*//)

This will allow Gentoo to solve the dependencies by uninstalling the old versions, unlike if you only try to upgrade a single package like x11-libs/qt-core

Upgrading All KDE Related Packages in Gentoo

Guy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:24:01 +0000

Yesterday, Gentoo marked KDE 3.5.10 as stable on amd64. I looked for a way to upgrade all of the KDE related packages, without manually specifying each one of them. Normally one could do

emerge -avu world

but I encountered some nasty conflicts that I didn’t have time, nor will, to resolve at that time. So I’ve looked for a different solution. To my rescue came qlist for the great app-portage/portage-utils package. This package provides a set of very fast utilities to query portage. I’ve used qlist to list all of my installed packages, grep‘ed the list and piped the result as arguments to emerge using xargs.

 qlist -I --nocolor | grep kde | xargs emerge -pvu1

Take a look at the package list that will be merged. If everything looks fine, then do the actual merging.

 qlist -I --nocolor | grep kde | xargs sudo emerge -vu1

The --nocolor is important, or else emerge will complain about the benign looking atoms such as dev-util/kdevelop because there are invisible terminal formating characters around them.

phpMyAdmin + Lighttpd in Gentoo

Guy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:14:57 +0000

Usually installing software in Gentoo is a piece of cake. Just emerge what you want and (with the right USE flags) and everything will be ready for you. However, as today I’ve found out today, installing phpMyAdmin with Lighttpd isn’t trivial as it should be.

In this post I’ll try to walk you through the necessary steps to install phpMyAdmin with Lighttpd in Gentoo.

Installing Lighttpd and PHP

Before installing Lighttpd and PHP you’ll need to enable some USE flags. For Lighttpd you’ll need to at least enable the php and fastcgi USE flags. For PHP enable the cgi, crypt, ctype, pcre, session, unicode. The first one is required for working with Lighttpd, while the others are required for phpMyAdmin.

See the handbook for information about enabling USE flags.

Now install the packages

emerge -av lighttpd php

After installation is complete, start the Lighttpd process

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

and you should have a working Lighttpd server with PHP support.

Installing phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin depends on a package called webapp-config. While usually we let Portage take care of dependencies, this time we’ll have to install webapp-config manually before we install phpMyAdmin, so we can change its configuration for suit Lighttpd.

emerge -av --oneshot webapp-config

After installation is done edit using your favourite editor the /etc/vhosts/webapp-config and change the line:

vhost_server="apache"

vhost_server="lighttpd"

Now we are ready to install phpMyAdmin.

emerge -av phpmyadmin

After installation is complete, you’ll need to create a phpMyAdmin configuration file

cp /var/www/localhost/htdocs/phpmyadmin/config.sample.inc.php /var/www/localhost/htdocs/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

Now open the newly created configuration file and edit the line with the blowfish_secret (at the top of the file) as explained in it. An easy way to generate the password would be to use spass.

Now if you use the default Lighttpd configurations you’re done. You can access the phpMyAdmin via http://localhost/phpmyadmin. If however you’ve changed the document root, there is one more step for you. Enable the mod_alias module in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and append to the file

alias.url += ("/phpmyadmin" => "/var/www/localhost/htdocs/phpmyadmin")

and don’t forget to restart the Lighttpd server after making the changes.

You should have by now everything installed and configured to work. If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to comment.