Lo, I return in (mostly) triumph
It took me a while to get to it, between one thing and another, what with a few little side quests along the way like writing a new music jukebox application (which I still haven't uploaded a formal release of; I need to do that) to replace the de-facto-dead DigitalDJ. But I've spent more or less the last week or week and a half completely reinstalling babylon5, my main workstation, with a clean-sheet install of Gentoo 10.0 on new hardware-mirrored SATA boot disks. There's been some unpleasant surprises and renewed dislikes along the way. I've rediscovered that XFree/X.org's rendering of TrueType and PostScript fonts, compared to AccelX, is terrible at small point sizes. In particular, X.org's rendering of CG Omega, my favorite typeface, at text sizes (in the 10-14 point range) is awful, so bad it's unusable. I'd welcome any suggestions for improving X.org font rendering.
(Side note: I'm not entirely done with hardware changes, on the subject of display quality; my video card is a Matrox G400 with dual VGA out, but my monitor is a Hanns.G HG281 flat panel, so when I can find one at a good price I intend to replace the video card with one that does DVI digital output. It won't need to be bleeding-edge; even a Matrox G550 will probably do the job just fine - I'm not looking to play Crysis on it.)
I've also been reminded anew of how greatly I detest ALSA. At least it works now, but in terms of usability and flexibility it seems to just now be getting more or less to where commercial OSS was ten years ago before everyone decided that OSS was Old and Had To Go because ALSA was New And Shiny. Currently I'm trying to figure out how to make ALSA and madplay play nicely together on babylon5's CM8738 sound hardware, which apparently doesn't support hardware mixing. I've had to temporarily revert to using mpg123 as a CLI mp3-playback tool (which is bad because mpg123 not only doesn't sound as good as madplay, it falls over and starts stuttering under high system loads or network congestion, which doesn't occur with madplay because it prebuffers), because I can't find any stable solution to making madplay share the CM8738 with anything else. The closest I got was ALSA + esound + dmix, but esound shat itself every 20-30 minutes or so. I'm seriously wondering whether the easiest answer here is hardware again - add an inexpensive PCI soundcard that properly supports hardware mixing. What I don't appear to be able to get at all with ALSA is the ability to have multiple virtual sound devices with independently-set volume.
(Another side note: The Thinkpad 600E has a reputation for being difficult to get Linux sound working on. I've read articles estimating that only about one person out of four running Linux on a Thinkpad 600E ever gets sound working on it. Across two different logic boards and multiple OS installs, I got OSS working on cymrullewes' Thinkpad about three times out of four before it finally died for good, and the one time I couldn't get it working at all I have a suspicion the sound hardware had failed. But I never even once got ALSA to work on it.)
Right now I'm mostly just doing final cleanup and tying up loose ends, such as replacing the default mail-mta/ssmtp with Postfix. Then when that's all done, I get to do one more rsync of my old Slackware install to the archival partition I created for it, power down, pull out the old IDE disk that I'd temporarily relocated the Slackware install to, put the LTO2 drive back in, and configure Bacula, Postfix, and CUPS. I may be finding loose ends for a while, but all the major stuff is done.
(I do need to find out what Gentoo's apparent objection to setuid Perl scripts is, though.)
Update:
Postfix configured, and mail is all working. I don't have to ssh to babylon4 to read mail any more.
The setuid Perl problem was simply that I'd missed a USE flag, because 'equery uses dev-lang/perl' only actually displays about half of the available USE flags. This is less of an issue than it was because with the newer kernel, I only actually have one Perl script that needs to be setuid any more, since getpics no longer needs to load and unload the usb-storage modules. Perl is rebuilding right now.
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