Gentoo Linux

A friend of mine looked for a little program or more generally an automated way to generate the world file of a Gentoo system, meaning that only packages that no other packages depend on shall be in /var/lib/portage/world. So I wrote a little shell script that does this job:

$ cat world_gen.sh
#!/bin/sh

for i in $(cat /var/lib/portage/world); do
        if [ “`equery depends $i | tail -n +2 | tr -d ‘\n’`” = “” ]; then
                echo $i
        fi
done

You must have app-portage/gentoolkit installed for this script to work.

Download

Update:

Somehow I wrote down an older version of the script above which had an error. Corrected that.

I searched for a long time for a convenient way to minimize Thundirbird into the tray under Gnome. Thunderbird itself does not offer this option.

The first try was to use the extension moztraybiff. moztraybiff utilizes the standard systray as specified by freedesktop.org thus supporting Gnome, KDE and IceWM. moztriffbay shows additionally to the “normal” Thunderbird window a systray icon that is also able to indicate new mails. The problem I had was that the Thunderbird was still in the taskbar and the window list when switching windows via Alt-Tab.

So I looked for another approach and found kdocker. kdocker is able to minimize any application to the systray of Gnome, KDE, XFce, fluxbox, ... . Unfortunately it depends on qt, so you might not like it when pou have to pull in qt just to use kdocker. To use kdocker with Gentoo Linux and then Gnome (my personal favorites), this is the way:
Download the ebuild for kdocker and place it in your portage overlay. For a detailled manual how to do this see this article in the Gentoo Wiki. There is only one pitfall you have to take care of: The ebuild was saved with windows newlines that at least cause errors with recent testing portage versions. So just run this command first before starting with the above howto:

Then the ebuild will be ready. After you installed kdocker, you can add the command kdocker -e -b -l thundirbird to your Startup Programs in Preferences - Sessions. This will automatically launch thunderbird at gnome startup. From now on, thundirbird lives in your systray as desired.

The disadvantage of this solution is, that there is no notification of new mails and that you cannot use the close button of the Thunderbird window to minimize it to the systray (as you might be used to in other applications) since this closes Thunderbird and kdocker. Just use the minimize button instead.

I had a problem for a long time that prevented me from watching any videos or DVDs under Linux on my laptop. Now I found a solution and I want to share it. The videos that I played with MPlayer were distorted in a strange way that was obviously caused by my weird resolution of 1280x800 pixels which is a ratio of 16:10. The solution for mplayer is as simple as efficient: Just add this line to your ~/.mplayer/config:

Now everything should work as you expect it.

Frisch eingetroffen:

*proll*

Gerade beim Compilieren vom aktuellen GIMP gesehen:

Schnuckelig, oder? Also, am besten heute noch wechseln

Since a couple of weeks I have this problem with my Mozilla Thunderbird: I have subscribed to several RSS feeds, e. g. of my favorite blogs. But every time I “Get All New Messages” old, already dowloaded messages are downloaded twice, ... . Searching for this problem for example in the MozillaZine Forums revealed that many users have this problem - and no solution. Sad enough that it is not yet adressed by Mozilla.

So I found this two workarounds for me:

1. The Dublicate Message Remover-Extension deletes duplicate messages in folders. Simply select “Delete Duplicate Messages” from the context menu of the folder. All duplicates are moved to Trash. Disadvantage: You have to invoke it every time duplicates appaer.
2. Liferea, the Linux Feed Reader is a nice looking, gtk-based feedreader that I am using now to read my feeds. Disadvantages: Another program to use. Old messages lost.