A colleague asked me to help analyze problems migrating a Gentoo guest VM from a Xen Server based host to a Proxmox (KVM based) host. The Gentoo VM would not boot beyond the initramfs - it just died saying that the root device could not be found.

Since the VM itself …

I use the SLF4J API as the default logging facade in all my projects. SLF4J’s simple logger comes in handy when you don’t need a fully fledged logging framework. The SimpleLogger is despite its name quite configurable - if you know where to find the documentation: it’s in …

I tried to install a python package with pip on my wife’s Macbook Air. There are tons of instructions out on the internet telling you how to install pip and friends on OSX. All of them start by stating that the default install of Python that comes with OSX …

On my Gentoo machine the “Show in System Explorer” menu item did not work on Eclipse. I kept getting this error message:

Execution of 'dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.FileManager1 /org/freedesktop/FileManager1 org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems array:string:"file:/tmp/HelloWorld.java" string:""' failed with return code: 1

A …

One thing that annoyed me while switching my blog to pelican was the lack of a good comment option. My motivation for self-hosting the blog is to have control over my data and that includes comments! The use of a cloud service like Disqus obviously defeats this purpose.

I sat …

At work we use Linux Mint for some virtual machines that need a desktop environment. Recently, the Linux Mint project released a fairly major update to 17.3. At fist, they did not offer an update for an existing system but promised to release that laster.

Now, a good while …

I’m planning to put my Raspberry Pi back to use. I have always disliked its dependency on SD memory cards so I’m planning to put the Pi’s root filesystem on NFS. The Pi side will be a topic for another blog post later, first I’ll have …

Gentoo’s portage keeps metadata about installed ebuilds in /var/cache/edb. Dependency info for all installed ebuilds is in a dep subdirectory which typically looks something like this:

.
├── usr
│   └── portage
│       ├── app-admin
│       │   ├── eselect-1.4.1
│       │   ├── eselect-lib-bin-symlink-0.1.1
│       │   ├── eselect-opengl-1.2.7
│       │   ├── gamin-0.1.10-r1
│       │   ├── logrotate-3.8.7
│       │   └── perl-cleaner-2.16
...

When …

My favourite music player app on Linux is Exaile. On Gentoo it’s available straight from portage but getting playback working for different audio formats its not quite straightforward.

Exaile depends on gstreamer - albeit not on the latest version but on the 0.10 version line. Since Gentoo supports slotted …

I recently had a look into JAAS for a customer project. The API is not 100% straightforward due to its design goal of hiding implementation specifics but I guess that’s the price you have to pay when specifying a generic API.

The JAAS guide talks about JAAS’s similarity …