Week of May 27th, 2002

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Sunday, June 2, 2002

The perfect end of a long, but semi-perfect weekend... (semi, only because I didn't complete everything on my VERY long TO-DO list :-)

So here I sit, pecking on my notebook on the back deck. Temp's about 70 degrees, wind is soft, surveying the fruits of my labors du jour. The front yard is now presentable; we have some bedding plants in, the grass is cut, the driveway washed, the trees in bloom, and the garage sorted (well, mostly sored... )

Leah has a new hanging basket of petunias -- she's a happy camper (always a good thing from a man's perspective).

The backyard is "coming together", as it were. I've still got some earth to move from 'A' to 'B', but that's not a major deal.

We had a "neighbor appreciation" BBQ tonight. I can't tell you how nice it is to live in a neighborhood where we actually KNOW aw ll our neighbors. Our last place of residence we a very transient neighborhood. Lot's of renters and college kids. We knew a few people, but they changed on a monthly basis. We now live in a neighborhood where most everyone built their home here, and still live in it. They're also very gregarious. I haven't witnessed such a scenario since I grew up in Vancouver 30 years ago -- you know, where you actually knew the folks that lived next door...

Computing? Nothing new. This is the first I've been close to a computer since late Friday. And you know what? Feels good. I'm looking forward to the new week.

Be well. Be good. See ya' all Monday.

Thursday May 30, 2002

A picture perfect prairie evening... soft breeze, about 70 degrees, still a little deep purple colour left in the western sky...

Success on the Evolution front! After beating my head against the wall for way too long, I decided tonight to try something off the beaten path. For some unexplained reason, the Gentoo emerge of Evolution insists on having Mozilla as a dependency. And my success at installing what Gentoo lists as the RC3-R2 version of Moz has been... well.. less than successful. So I decided to start all over and veer right instead of left.

I "unmerged" all versions of Moz, every hint of Evolution, cleaned everything to with the aforementioned programs from /var/tmp, and rebooted to clear any remaining cobwebs.

Then I installed Netscape 7-PR.

Then I checked to ensure Netscape worked as advertised -- it did.

Then I tried to manually install Evolution using the Gentoo ebuild command, which goes something like this:

That completed with error or incident, but didn't physically install Evolution as it should have. So I put on my best Pooh imitation [tap, tap, tap the forehead; think, think, think...] and decided to try this:

Lo-n-behold the build completed without protest or error. Mmm. So I fired up Evolution, fully expecting it to crap out on me, and up it came as it should. All my settings were saved (I didn't delete the config files from /home/tom), every works, and the Contacts module no longer segfaults on me (the Linux rendition of "The program has performed an illegal operation, sir, and will now close discarding any changes make since the last save). Mmm. The next step is to do some more torture testing tomorrow morning, and if all is well, find out why (a) Moz is a dependency, and (b) why Netscape and Evolution work like a top under my existing configuration, while Moz insists on pissing in my Corn Flakes.

More as I learn more.

Thanks to Roland, Greg, and Brian for your insights. Nobody had the right answer, but you did inspire me to keep kicking over stones.

Now to see what I can do with my GNUCash problem child...

Wednesday May 29, 2002

Heh-heh... My Monday post was something akin to showing up for a fancy dinner, then falling asleep face-first in your soup. I worked in the garden all day Monday, plus watched Landon while Leah worked. I finally sat down on the couch about 9:30 PM, typed what you see below (I added the '...' just now - my post definitely came to a full stop Monday night), and the next thing I know it's 3 AM and I'm still sitting upright on the couch, notebook in hand...

Summer's come to Saskatoon! Last weekend temps hit the mid-eighties; today we had a scorcher in the low-nineties, complete with a wind/thunder storm just after dinner. Amazing place, Saskatchewan. One day Jack Frost is killing plants, five days later we have to water three times a day to keep the poor critters alive.

On the computing front, I finally got the two Gnome programs installed today that I've been fighting with for over a week : GNUCash and Evolution. Unfortunately, the wait was not worth it. Not one small iota worth of worth it.

This all started when Leah started discussing the viability of Linux as a replacement for Windoz. She uses Quicken to track the household finances and expressed an interest in spending some time with GNUCash to get a feel for whether or not it could function as a replacement. GNUCash is a Gnome app -- meaning it will run under KDE as long as all the requisite Gnome support libraries are installed. I'd been meaning to have a look-see at the progress of Gnome 2, so decided to install this instead of 1.4. Bad move. I spent a week trying to get Gnome 2 to emerge cleanly. Part of the problem was my own ignorance (I was copying profiles/portage.mask out so I didn't have to edit it with each and every emerge rsync, but doing so left portage.mask out of "sync" with the rsync), part was some genuinely flakey Gnome code, and part of it was a VERY dynamically evolving Gnome2 portage branch. Live-n-learn.

So this weekend, after a long chat with the good Mr. Bilbrey, I decide to unmerge (that's uninstall in layman's terms ;-) out everything Gnome 2 related, simply emerge Evolution and GNUCash, the let the programs bring in any required dependencies. I emerged, and I unemerged. Packages wouldn't compile. Things blew up 3 1/2 hours into a 4 hour build process. It was a hair-pulling experience, and given my lack of hair, that's saying something. I persisted however, and today finally got everything to emerge and compile without error. Happy camper. Well, happy until I started poking and proding around Evolution.

The last time I had a good hard look at Evolution was at least six months ago, and it definitely wasn't ready for prime-time. I'd heard good things of late, though, and while I love Mulberry as an IMAP client, I've found myself lately needing a calendar and somewhere to save contact info (which could come from any number of sources, including vCard). The bottom was I installed Evolution primarily to test out the products contact capabilities.

First go-around, I couldn't even access the module. I finally figured it out -- I had an 'ldap' option listed on my /etc/make.conf USE line, so Evolution built itself to use an LDAP backend for storing contact info. Fair enough. Smart program. So I exported USE="-ldap" and recompiled. This time around I could access the Contacts and Calendar modules. Joy. Under the program segfaulted on me. I can make it segfault on a routine basis simply by mucking about in the... ready?... yep... the contacts module. Sigh.

The next thing I learned is that Evolution and Netscape 7 cannot coexist on the same installation. Well, that's no entirely accurate. Netscape 7 and Mozilla cannot coexist on the same installation. And one of the dependencies for Evolution is Mozilla. Beats me why. Make no sense to me whatsoever. What really pisses me off is installing Mozilla borks my Netscape 7 install, and I happen to like Netscape 7. It "feels" zippier than Moz, and I like some of the features. Whatever. The problem is: installing Moz borks Netscape 7; reinstalling Netscape 7 doesn't bork Moz, but Evolution won't start. HOWEVER, even if I use the Moz-Evolution combo, Evolution borks whenever I'm mucking about in the contacts module. Grand Bother? Not yet. I just fired up GNUCash to take it for a spin. Here's what I got:

Now THAT's a GRAND Bother.

Some days it just don't pay to get out of bed...

Monday May 27, 2002

Ohhhh deaarrrrr. Nope, I'm definitely not 20 any more. I just spent two days trying to get a leg-up on the yard work around here, and I feel like I've been hit by a truck. I can hardly walk (I kinda hobble sideways down stairs), my hands are so dry just looking at them produces cracks), and my feet appear to have a permanent black tint to them. What truly amazes me is gardening looks so easy when the neighbor's doing it...

I've been trying to install Gnome2 for almost a week now, and frankly, it's giving me nothing but a bad case of heartburn. Gnome itself is not a -need- for me, as I'm content with KDE3, but I'd like to install a few programs that are based on the Gnome architecture/libraries. For example, GNUCash and Evolution. So I decided if I had to have Gnome on my system, I may as well have a look at the progress of Gnome2. Frankly, I'm not sure if my problems lie in Gnome2 itself, or another area, but every time I try to build anything to do with Gnome I get unresolved dependencies (Gad, there's that Linus archilles heel again; and I thought Gentoo would eliminate this problem... ). GNUCash requires libghtml something or another; the package is installed on my system, but it's the wrong version. Bleh. Gnome won't complete building, because it falls down on a library that doesn't exist on my system -- and I have no idea where to find it, as it's not part of my Portage tree. You what's REALLY annoying about all this? I know lots of people on the Gentoo mailing list who installed and are running Gnome2 without incident. Another one of those not holding my mouth the right way I suppose...

I installed Netscape 7-preview Saturday and I've been...

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