neatx and chromium in portage status updates

Yesterday, I finally found the bug which prevented neatx from working on my system (thanks upstream for the debugging), so in your next portage sync, you’ll find net-misc/neatx-0.3.1_p43 ready for your testing! If you don’t need vnc/sound/printer tunneling or load-balancing, neatx is easier to set up than freenx and works great out-of-the-box. Thanks again to Mike Auty (ikelos) for his work on the ebuild.

Another work-in-progress for me these days is a source ebuild for chromium (open-source version of Google Chrome). A binary version (chromium-bin) has been available in portage for some time now (with amd64 support added recently), but source version ebuild had some problems. Now my current version (available in my overlay for the curious) has fixed most of them, including use of system libraries, makefiles use instead of scons, –as-needed support, … So why is it not yet in portage? Well, for now the tarballs from upstream are not yet available, so you won’t go past the fetch phase 😉 These should be available soon, once available you can expect chromium to quickly land in a portage tree near you.

By the way, if chromium crashes at startup for you (either binary or source version), they finally found the cause: you are probably using nvidia-drivers and nvidia opengl (via eselect opengl). However the libGL.so from nvidia overrides dlsym/dlopen (dynamic linker functions) with broken replacements, breaking applications relying on these functions! Chromium devs implemented a workaround, available for -bin in versions >=4.0.208.0_p25708, but expect some breakage in time-related functions. All the gory details are here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16800

And now to change a bit from technical talks, I wanted to say a big “thank you” to all of you Gentoo users who spend time filing bugreports, fixing, writing or rewriting ebuilds, debugging and finding the cause for all sorts of bugs (finding that some dynamic linkers break with specific video cards for example…), in short to all of you who work to make your distro a better one! And recently, a special thanks to Bernd Lommerzheim, who helps me a lot in proftpd maintenance, up to providing an entirely new ebuild for latest version, with lots of fixes and new features.

8 thoughts on “neatx and chromium in portage status updates”

  1. Hi
    I am glad to hear that there is a working ebuild for neatx. I want to ask if shadow sessions are supported – if i remmember somebody asked this a few days ago in some issue on the project site and the answer was NO at the moment.

  2. thanks for 4 working on chromium and for the hint, tried using nouveau and it work great^W. for me it was bug #19995, which was difficult to associate to 16800.

  3. Will the Chromium build need 10 Gig of disk space like the full source version?

  4. Right now the full /var/tmp/portage weighs 897MB after compile and install phase (and the bz2 tarball I’m playing with for tests is around 117MB)

    So it’s still big, but already much better than compilation from full svn checkout!

  5. Hope, it does html5 video and audio.
    (if gstreamer is used, then hope it does not pull the gconf gnome stuff)

  6. Where can I find any version >=4.0.208.0_p25708 in the official tree, your overlay or bugzilla. Where can I find such an ebuild? Or should I just copy and rename an existing ebuild?

    thx

  7. For video/audio tags, it uses ffmpeg (and luckily for us it has a build flag to use system one!)

    glurps, you’re talking about chromium-bin? Just rename the ebuild changing the _p number to get a newer version (25902 right now). If a big bug got fixed since 25708, please tell me and I’ll update it in portage

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