You should have no problem migrating to the new monolithic poppler, as portage should be able to solve the blockers automatically. As a second step we will adjust the dependencies in packages that need poppler, to no longer depend on the virtual ebuilds, but on app-text/poppler directly, with the correct useflag dependencies. This work will be done gradually over the coming days.

Version 0.12.3 is also our stable candidate, and a stable request will be filed soon. Then all old versions of poppler and the split packages, as well as the virtuals, will be removed for security reasons. Feel free to come by #gentoo-kde on Freenode if you have any questions.

The current version, lxde-meta-0.4.2 and its dependencies, is considered our stable candidate, so we’d like to straighten out any issues there may exist. Also, some documentation would be welcome. So if you want to contribute a “How to configure and use LXDE on Gentoo” guide, we’d be very thankful. Or if you want to help maintaining LXDE in portage, we could always use more people. So contact me if you’re interested in a herd tester or developer position.

We also have an overlay with live ebuilds, but it is basically unmaintained. So I cannot recommend you use it, unless you want to test and update the ebuilds. If you’re on bitbucket, send me a pull request. We used to have several user contributors, but I guess they are too busy with other things now — as am I. Currently my focus for LXDE (whenever I have time for it) is to get the packages up-to-date with the latest released versions and get what we have now tested and marked stable.

So have you tried LXDE yet? What are your thoughts? And are you willing to contribute?

Fortunately, this is a setting that you can change. Here’s how:

1. Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar.
2. In the Filter search field type backspace — this should bring up the browser.backspace_action preference.
3. Right-click on the value (defaults to 2) and select Modify.
4. In the pop-up window change the value to 0 (that’s zero) and accept.
5. Enjoy your backspace key to go back a page in history again.

For more information see the mozillazine knowledge base page on about:config.

This has been said before (multiple times) but you don’t rescue your business model by “protecting” against what people want to do. You don’t rescue your business model by wasting resources trying to hold back what people want to do. You rescue your business by providing more value and figuring out a way to monetize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only hastens failure.

I’ve been saying that all along, but the old media don’t get it. If they refuse to evolve, they will go extinct, like dinosaurs.

The Redmond giant that we all love to hate has surprised many Free Software enthusiasts by releasing “20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers. Microsoft says its first open source Linux code contribution is designed to speed the performance of the operating system when it’s run in a Hyper-V virtual machine.” (source: DesktopLinux.com) See also the article by our resident kernel developer GregKH.

So much for the “cancerous” license… Anyway, I’m happy they are starting to see the light.

We also have removed the need for the libX11 dependency in qt-core and a couple of other non-gui modules. So you can now for example have a server-only install of quassel with minimal dependencies. The libX11 dependency is now only pulled by packages that really need it.

Another thing that changed is that we dropped the custom-cxxflags useflag. After a long period of testing we haven’t come across any problems with “advanced” cxxflags in Qt 4.5, so now we always let the Qt modules be built with the user-specified flags. As this is an eclass level change, this means also users of the stable branch will see this change. An emerge --newuse world will trigger a recompile of Qt, but this means you will get better optimizations.

As the CIA.vc stats show, Gentoo is far from dead, whatever anyone else may claim. I’ll admit it wasn’t a typical day, but last month’s number of 10k commits speaks for itself.

At the last project meeting we decided to introduce a kde useflag to force selecting media-sound/phonon instead of qt-phonon for KDE users. Now that both Qt 4.5.1 and phonon-4.3.1 are stable, or soon to be stabilized (depending on how quick or slow the arch testers are for the architecture that you’re using), enabling the kde useflag (if you want to use KDE4) should give you a smooth upgrade path, without any qt-phonon related blocks. If you don’t have nor want kdelibs on your system, you should disable the kde useflag, and you will get qt-phonon, which is preferred by Qt.

And if you want to prevent media-sound/phonon from pulling in gstreamer, then disable its gstreamer useflag, and make sure to also disable the phonon useflag for x11-libs/qt-qt3support. This will then disable the phonon options in qtconfig, but you can still configure phonon in KDE’s systemsettings.

If you still have any issues, please comment on the bug.

In other news, I have now made a definite decision to go to China. As preparation I plan to do a government accredited certification course in August and then start teaching English from September. Of course I’m pretty excited about these prospects, as it means I’m opening a new, exciting chapter in my life. It also means I will have less time to spend on Gentoo development. But hopefully there will be people to pick up where I leave off.

I don’t really feel like delving deeper into the problem, or downgrading and staying on an old version. Instead I am thinking of migrating back to WordPress, as in certain ways it is easier. That is, from a blogger’s, not a coder’s, point of view. So please a bit of patience when I migrate again (story of my life…).