Ditz is an issue tracking system for command line junkies. For those of us who live on the command line already, using vim, psql or mysql, svn, bzr or git, this makes us feel right at home tracking our issues. And I love it.

Ditz creates a directory within your project (or anywhere else you want it) and a config file in the project directory. Each issue then becomes a file in this directory. A powerful command line interface allows you to setup releases and components, and assign those to issues, as well as edit, complete and comment on issues. It even provides the ability to generate HTML files of issues.

The only thing Ditz doesn’t allow you to do is have your information stored in a remote location, which pretty much kills effective project collaboration as one would have to commit their Ditz directory ASAP, and other developers would have to update their working copy before managing issues.

But for solo projects, it’s perfect for command line junkies to track bugs, tasks and features for their project.

Today I embarked on an epic struggle with the Portage package manager attempting to update the packages on my system. After I ran into what can only be described as a phantom package.

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I just came across an alternative to the http://gentoo-portage.com and http://packages.gentoo.org sites: http://znurt.org/

Nice, clean, beautiful and full of information.

Gentoo, ffs, get PHP 5.3.1 in Portage ASAP. PHP 5.3 isn’t even in there, yet. What’s the use of your package manager if I just have to manually install stuff?

/rant

A new version of PostgreSQL, 8.4.2-r1, is available in Gentoo Portage, but be careful. It appears the server is compiled with HAVE_INT64_TIMESTAMP by default, something not true with previous versions. Because of this, after updating, you might get an error about the data cluster being incompatibile with the server when you restart, unless you were using the pg-intdatetime use flag in previous versions (which has been removed in the newest version).

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Sometimes when working on projects in both Linux and Windows, a file will end up with Windows newline characters, which show up as ^M in Vim. Annoying as this is, there’s a quick fix to remove them in Vim using a regular expression replace:

:%s/<control-v><control-m>//g

Magically, all the ugly Windows newline characters are gone.

I’m not afraid to admit it: I’m a fan of Gnome. I think KDE looks to cartoonish. I actually prefer using OpenBox with a slew of lightweight apps for window manager addons, but that because too much to maintain, and I have better things to do with my time.

It’s hard to find a nice, clean set of decorations for Gnome that mesh well together. GDM theme, icons, wallpapers, GTK themes, etc that all blend well together to create a complete, polished look.

Recently I found the “Colors” theme set on Gnome Look.

GDM and Wallpapers: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Arc-Colors+GDM-Walls?content=88305
GTK: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Shiki-Colors?content=86717
Icons: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/GNOME-colors?content=82562

Nice and simple.

The other day I upgraded my Gentoo kernel (after realizing I was about 7 kernel updates old). After compiling and setting up Grub, I rebooted and received this error:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
RAMDISK: ran out of compressed data
invalid compressed format (err=1)
UDF-fs: No VRS found
List of all partitions:
…
No file system could mount root, tried: …
Kernel panic – not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0)

After painful research, I finally discovered the problem: I ran out of space on my boot partition.

Apparently genkernel does not complain when it runs out of space to compile the kernel. It just stops and outputs the same message it would it if succeeded.

A “quick” use of parted to allocate more space to the boot partition, and re-compiling the kernel solved the problem. It’s just sad that genkernel doesn’t bother reporting the fact that it ran out of space.

PostgreSQL 8.3 in Gentoo now creates the socket in /var/run/postgresql with stricter permissions, meaning that regular users cannot connect to the PostgreSQL server via command line. Emerging this package outputs a message about this that I initially missed when installing:

Please note that the standard location of the socket has changed from /tmp to /var/run/postgresql and you have to be in the ‘postgres’ group to access the socket.

This means that regular users who need access to the PostgreSQL server need to be added to the postgres group:

gpasswd -a user postgres

Gentoo has taken a long time to unmask PostgreSQL 8.3 in Portage. Currently, the best version you can get is. 8.0.5, which, if you can tell, is pretty far away from 8.3.

This masking is largely due to the painful process of upgrading PostgreSQL (which usually involves dumping all your databases and restoring them afterwards). Here’s what I did to get 8.3 up and running.

First, make sure you backup all your databases:

pg_dumpall > postgres-backup.dump

Run the following commands as root. This will add entries to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file:

echo "dev-db/postgresql-base ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo "dev-db/postgresql-server ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo "virtual/postgresql-server ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo "virtual/postgresql-base ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

Make sure to replace amd64 with your actual architecture.

Now, we’re going to unemerge PostgreSQL so we can emerge the new version:

emerge --unmerge dev-db/postgresql dev-db/libpq

Emerge the new version, configure it, start it, and add it to startup:

emerge virtual/postgresql-base virtual/postgresql-server
emerge --config =dev-db/postgresql-server-8.3.5
/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 start
rc-update add postgresql-8.3 default

Make sure to replace the version above with the one you actually installed. Now restore your databases:

psql -U postgres -f postgres-backup.dump template1

And you should be all set.

Helpful Links:

PostgreSQL: Backup and Restore