April 15, 2010

Updating x11-base/xorg-server to 1.7.6

To ensure that the update to x11-base/xorg-server-1.7.6 is problem-free and doesn't result in say, broken drivers, just run this one-liner:

emerge -1av $(eix --only-names -I xf86- -C x11-drivers)


In case you've seen my previous post about rebuilding Qt, you probably recognize the pattern.

April 14, 2010

HTML5 videos should now work everywhere using www-client/chromium

It's amazing how fast things can happen. I wrote two days ago that we are looking for good bug reports about HTML5 video support in Chromium/Gentoo. Soon after that, we got bug #314977, and after comparing a working and non-working configuration, and some testing, the fix was made available in the portage tree.

Today, after even more encouraging reports in the forums, I applied the fix to all www-client/chromium ebuilds in the tree.

The one thing I'd like to say now is... thank you, Gentoo community!

April 12, 2010

Fixing www-client/chromium bugs

I recently fixed some Chromium bugs on Gentoo, and at the time of this post we are down to just three of them: http://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=chromium.

If you have any problems with this great browser on Gentoo, please file a bug. My point is that Gentoo Bugzilla is the place developers look at most frequently (at least I do). We also have forums, and I try to also help there if I can, but things are less organized there. It's frequent that many people comment about unrelated issues, we don't get enough details, and it's sometimes hard to tell whether an issue is really resolved.

I'm sometimes seeing complaints about HTML 5 video not working on Gentoo, and other similar issues. I would be very interested both in bug reports, and also working configurations. Hopefully some pattern will emerge, making it possible to fix the issue. Here's the minimal needed info:

  • emerge --info
  • version and USE flags of www-client/chromium (for example emerge -1pv www-client/chromium)
  • similarly for ffmpeg
  • steps to reproduce (the web site address - URL - would be great)
  • a screenshot also helps, to tell whether it's a crash, or the playback UI doesn't load, or some other issue

April 6, 2010

Solving Qt blocker issues

I encountered some Qt blocker problems on a system I rarely update (once per three months maybe). I asked Ben de Groot (yngwin) about that, and there's a nice one-liner that worked for me and may be useful for you:

emerge -1av $(eix --only-names -I qt- -C x11-libs)


It seems that all of Qt packages must be at the same version, and for some reason portage only wanted to update some of them when I ran emerge -uDNa world.


Of course before running that command make sure that eix database is up to date with eix-update.