Sooner or later almost any Linux admin feel the need for a history of configuration changes. May it the X server configuration which got corrupted while you experimented with the Composite extension and OpenGL or may it the apache configuration you jumbled while updating the popular web server.

Gentoo Linux brings some powerful tool's (dispatch-conf, etc-update) out of the box to manage and update those configuration files. dispatch-conf is even able to store older versions inside of /etc/config-archive with RCS, but dealing with this ancient VCS is't that much fun and self written config files are not included by default.

SVK is the answer.

For a half year I own a ThinkPad X60s, my fifth ThinkPad and my smallest but fastest laptop I ever had. The first time after installing Gentoo Linux on the new machine I was surprised that suspend to RAM was instantly working, I just had to stop my WIFI card (ipw3945) and woops, it went to sleep and it even resumed well. Using the hibernate-scripts a perfect setup inclusive locking of the KDE session was easy to configure (just uncommenting the right lines). In the need for more hard disk space (this digital SLR camera is by far a greater space killer than my (growing) ogg vorbis music collection) I bought a new 160 GB SATA hard disc. Migration was easy, I just connected the second disk with an external USB to SATA bridge and rsynced the partition content.

Today, a colleague of me tried to integrate JMatter into our Maven based buildsystem (which drives the Eclipse side too) for experimental purposes. As you will divine, this didn't went well and he finally ended with a ordinary, poor man's lib directory, which holds all the needed jars for JMatter of a size of almost 30 MB.

Stop! Why is it so hard to integrate foreign packages into Maven? I believe it is because Maven tries to address to many aspects of different domains. It tries to be a build system, a package management system, a dependency resolver and a package repository at the same time ... and it fails miserable.

On the other hand, other buildsystems like e.g. Ant ignore their dependencies completely. They simply assume those jars and classes are present somewhere somehow.

In my search for alternatives for Ant and Maven, Raven crossed my path. Here is a somewhat lenghty comment to Matthieu Riou's blog post Builds And Transitive Dependencies.

Transitive dependencies are an essential requirement dictated by the nature of software development. Each buildsystem which claims to be a real one (including package management), has to support transitive dependencies.

The question is, at what level this support goes and how clever these dependencies are handled. Working with Maven, I can say that dependency handling cannot going worse. Comming from the Linux distribution Gentoo I'm used to a package management system (portage) which is more clever than all tools I've found for the whole Java and scripting language world in terms of (transitive) dependency management.

Is it the latest kernel update I installed on my Gentoo Box (suspend2-sources-2.6.16-r8) or the newly updated xorg-server-1.1.0? Today I recognized while writing some text, that my power consumtion indicator of KThinkBat displays 14 W. And this battery powered and with lightest display backlight. Normaly, it needs arround 17/18 W.

This is great news - my ThinkPad lasts noticably longer on battery power than before.

So, finally, I got Xgl running on my IBM ThinkPad R50 as well. The R50 has a Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9) based on the R250 chip. Xgl is a nice toy, really usefull are the exposé like window switcher and the over all speed gain when switching windows and desktops. Another hot feature are the ongoing animations while switching apps, in semi-transparent exposé view or while rotating the Desktop cube. A great surpise was, that the GPU stays colder than when running glxgears on normal X. At least, the fan of my ThinkPad remains on slow (and therefore quiet) speed.
Sorry, but I'm to lazy to take screenshots, there can be found thousands of them already in the net.

I made an ebuild for Kerry, a KDE search interface for beagle (based on best). If installed, it appears as an icon in the systray. You can activate it via mouse, with F12 or (Ctrl-) Alt-Space.

The only sources I found for this program were on the opensuse servers so the ebuild downloads the source rpm form opensuse and converts it with rpm2targz, so app-arch/rpm2targz is a dependency of the kerry-0.07.ebuild.

If you install beagle for the first time to use it with KDE only, you don't need the gtk use flag which adds dependencies for a bunch of gnome stuff.
For more information about installing beagle on Gentoo read the Gentoo Installation article form the Beagle Wiki.

There are two new tools: emaskclean and eupdate-unstable. How to use them and more can be found on this page.

ChangeLog

2005-12-16 - gentoolkit-lefou-0.6

• eupdate-unstable has now an auto-unmask option to unmask packages automatically, if there is only one choice

2005-12-16 - gentoolkit-lefou-0.5.3

• added =eupdate-unstable= to semi-automatically add packages to =/etc/portage/package.keywords= if they are dependencies of another package (very untested atm).
  This tool makes installing masked meta-packages like kde-meta or xorg-x11 much less painfull.

2005-11-28 - gentoolkit-lefou-0.5.2

• emaskclean with less verbose output and better temp file handling