Due to circumstances I had to look for a new way to backup my home directory. I was using rdiff-backup(1) before, but I wasn't completely satisfied with it. The overhead of incremental data was quite large, especially if you moved files around. But overall it does its job quite well.

However, since a year or so I'm quite charmed of Git, the stupid file content tracker. It's a great tool for software development, but due to its advantages over other VCSs it's also suitable for backing up structures like a user's home directory.

APE files are, besides lossless audio files, also quite annoying; they're barely supported on non-Windows platforms. There's a way to convert them to FLAC. It took me some time because I had to combine several pieces from the internet in order to convert a single *.ape file to multiple per-track *.flac files.

There are tools for Linux to encode and decode *.ape files. On the internet it is referred as mac-port, but everyone links to a SourceForge page which is dead by now. But I found a tarball from the Slackware servers which does its job. The tarball is also included with this article.

As a KDE user I got pretty tired of the ugly default looks of GTK applications (and also WX applications in Linux, they have the same looks). They looked cool in 1997, but these times are over now. And all the time I was too lazy to find out how I could theme GTK, but I didn't realize it was really simple. These are the steps on a Gentoo machine:

1. First a new GTK theme is installed. This is a special one, because it uses Qt for all drawing operations.
   
   emerge -av x11-themes/gtk-engines-qt

I noticed that my cron jobs were not being run since I upgraded from FCron 3.0.3 to 3.0.4. Running

confirmed this: some (daily) jobs were scheduled for next month. Some jobs even had their next execution time in the past. Something got hosed.

Fortunately, it's not hard to fix this. For every user run as root:

to reschedule all your jobs. It's weird, this shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Unfortunately, X.org does not work out of the box when installing it inside VirtualBox on a Gentoo guest machine.

The VESA driver didn't really work when starting X, it spitted out the following line:

Well, maybe the VirtualBox Guest Additions will help out. They installed without a glitch on the Gentoo guest, but when starting X I got a similar error as above, only VESA replaced with some VirtualBox stuff.

When having more than one Gentoo installation at the same location, you should seriously consider sharing the Portage tree to avoid a lot of unnecessary downloads. This can be done by having the tree on only one machine and share it with NFS, the Network File System.

Server (Gentoo Linux)
First, we're going to configure the server, having the Portage tree installed in /usr/portage. I suggest following the first half of my previous article on setting up a NFS connection between Gentoo and FreeBSD.

It's been a real pain to enable graphics hardware acceleration on my 3.5 year old IBM Thinkpad T42, containing an ATI Radeon 9600 (Mobility). The binary drivers by ATI are just plain crap, causing insane instability to the system (kernel panics everywhere). I called it a day and continued working without acceleration. But applications like Google Earth are a real pain to use like this, so something inside me shouted to get this right.

According to one bug wrangler on Gentoo Bugzilla, you're a stupid person if you don't read the messages spitted out by ebuilds and run into failures because of that. Of course, no sane person watches the complete compilations of application on the lookout for warnings or other informative messages. But it would be nice if you get a nice summary of all messages in your mailbox after an emerge command.

This application is not a breeze to get running on Gentoo. After emerging it, and executing the script /opt/vmware/player/bin/vmware-config.pl, it still complained with the following error when running vmplayer:

I think it won't ever happen to me that NFS will 'just work'. During the process of getting server and client work together, you'll almost always encounter at least one permission denied, go to hell.