This HOWTO will show you how to upgrade from kde 4.3 to kde 4.4 (and possibly others) with as few problems as possible (It went through without errors for me). The whole process including merging will take 4 to 10 hours depending on your PC. Plan accordingly.

Before upgrading check if you use the latest packages. Additionally I will assume you have autounmask, eix and gentoolkit installed. Portage 2.2 might also come in handy because it can automatically resume builds of many packages (--keep-going) when only few of them fail.

emerge --sync
emerge -nva gentoolkit autounmask eix
eix-update

If you want to use your computer while updating KDE it is pretty neat to have an alternative login and windowmanager installed. I prefer gdm and enlightenment.

 emerge -nva eix gdm enlightenment

Preparing the upgrade

#create a working directory
mkdir /root/kde-upgrade
 
#save the list of your kde 4.3 packages
eix -I --slot 4.3 -C kde-base --only-names > /root/kde-upgrade/kde-old
#save the list of packages installed by which are also avalaible for kde 4.4
eix -I --slot 4.4 -C kde-base --only-names > /root/kde-upgrade/kde-new
#save the list of installed qt-packages
eix --slot 4 -C x11-libs --only-names -I qt > qt-packages
#KDE 4.4 needs QT-4.6 that is why we create a list of all qt-packages and keyword them for later use. Be sure to change ~amd64 to your architecture
eix --slot 4 -C x11-libs --only-names -I qt | while read line; do echo "$line ~amd64" >> /root/kde-upgrade/qt-keywords; done

Copy the qt-keywords to your package.keywords directory

cp /root/kde-upgrade/qt-keywords /etc/portage/package.keywords/

Download and install kde-4.4 keywords

cd /root/kde-upgrade
wget -O kde-4.4-keywords http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/kde.git;a=blob_plain;f=Documentation/package.keywords/kde-4.4.keywords;hb=HEAD
cp -p /root/kde-upgrade/kde-4.4-keywords /etc/portage/package.keywords/

Prepare your alternative Desktop environment

Now we are starting with the essential stuff. Log out from kde and shutdown kdm from one the Ctrl-ALT-Fx-Terminals and start your favorite alternative login manager.

/etc/init.d/xdm stop
#Start other login manager
gdm

After that you can login again on Ctrl-ALT-F7.

Upgrade QT and remove old KDE

Update your qt installation now because KDE 4.4 requires qt 4.6.

emerge -va `cat /root/kde-upgrade/qt-packages`

After that we are ready to remove the old KDE. Old KDE version's packages would be removed by an upgrade anyway. When we remove them before our installation we will save us a lot of hassle concerning package blocks etc.

I heard unmerging the old kde version is completely unnessessary now, as newer portage versions will handle softblocks by themselves. So it is completely ok to skip the unmerging.

emerge -C `cat /root/kde-upgrade/kde-old`

(While emerging qt) Check for keyworded packages

While QT ist emerging switch to another terminal and check if your following KDE merge has all its dependencies in place.

#try to
emerge -vau `cat /root/kde-upgrade/kde-new`

If you get an error about missing keywords on dependant packages, execute:

autounmask package_category/package_name-package_version

on the corresponding package (the package mentioned in "dependency required by"). Personally I had to autounmask phonon-kde, kopete, kdebase-runtime-meta, kaddressbook and libiodbc. Libiodbc-3.52.6 failed on ~amd64 so I installed the keyworded version which built normally.

(After emerging QT) Rebuild Qt dependant packages

Rebuild all qt-dependendant packages.

 emerge -1va sip PyQt4 qscintilla qscintilla-python

Apart from these packages you will have to rebuild all installed kde-themes in portage. After that remerge Phonon. I had to do this and for you it will not hurt ;-).

#emerge your new kde's phonon version
emerge -1va phonon

Emerge your new KDE

So sit back and relax. The biggest part of the work is done now. Emerging new KDE packages will take several hours depending on your CPU power. It is best to do this over night. If you peek at the following command you will see a --keep-going at the end. This tells Portage-2.2 to automatically resume the whole merge with packages not depending on the failed package when a package fails. If you use Portage-2.1 remove this option and beg that you will wake up with a fresh and shiny new version of KDE.

#DO!
emerge -va `cat /root/kde-upgrade/kde-new` --keep-going

Final work

After our work before kde should build without errors. At least it did for me... If there remain errors visit http://forums.gentoo.org in your spare desktop environment.

#revdep-rebuild to rebuild packages like e.g. digikam or similar
revdep-rebuild
#update your config files
etc-update
#read announcements generated during upgrade
eread

If all is done, you can log-out from your temporary desktop environment, kill your other login manager and start kdm again. Then log-in to your new shiny kde version and enjoy.

If you have suggestions or improvements let me know.
Hope this helps,
Phillip

The last weeks I investigated server side optimization (not application optimization) issues further because our Joomla based web portal scales quite poorly. The server is still sufficient for our current load but I want to have some more resources for usage peaks and future development. I thought it would be nice to share my thoughts and experiences as appropriate tutorials are scattered all over the web. I will describe the main steps in brief and will link to further documentation at the web if possible and needed.

So far so good. Currently our application uses the following server software:

• Joomla 1.5 as web application
• PHP 5.2 with ZendOptimizer 3.3 as our only must have PHP extension
• Apache httpd 2.2 as web server
• Varnish 2 as reverse caching proxy for Java and PHP apps.
• MySQL 5.0 as database management system
• Gentoo Linux as server OS

Our website makes intensive use of Joomla extensions. Some of them were developed by our own IT department. The start page is news oriented and contains several extensions and also many images. Apart from that we have quite a few registered users which use interactive parts of the site like forums or lotteries. Additionally some content of the site is only available to privileged users.

With this information you should have a rough overview of our web site and the application comprehending my optimization efforts. The next part of the series will contain information about bringing MySQL to speed.

Comments are as always welcome
Phillip

Ah. Silly me. I experimented with the drupal caching options just before installing the WYSIWYG module and wondered why the editor was not showing up.

The solution was as obvious as simple: I had to disable or clear Drupal's JavaScript and CSS cache after installing the WYSIWYG plugin.

Hopefully you read this before long searching. Additional clues can be found in this drupal forum post ( http://drupal.org/node/426398 ).

I am very happy to announce that my enhancements to the Grails Spring Security Plug-in (Acegi Security Plug-in http://grails.org/plugin/acegi) based on Stephan February's work were integrated into the main Plug-in source tree. Burt Beckwith, the Plug-In maintainer, did the integration including further features (e.g. annotation based configuration) and polishing.

The official announcement including an example application can be found on his blog (http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=287).

Thank you for your great work Burt!

I recently stumbled upon a problem of a big evolutionary grown qmail/vpopmail installation when we moved the installation to a new server.

Virtual accounts created years ago were created with a different vpopmail installation located in a different filesystem path. For this reason accounts had different paths set up in the /var/vpopmail/domains/domain.tld/vpasswd.cdb file. Regrettably there is (at least afaik) no possibility to change these paths with vpopmail commands like vmoduser or similar.

To avoid always creating symbolic links from the old directories to the new account directories I found a way to modify/update these paths. Normally values in the plain text vpasswd (not the .cdb one mentioned before) file get overwritten every time you update/delete or create accounts with the values from the vpasswd.cdb file. However if only the vpasswd file and not its .cdb counterpart is present the vpasswd.cdb file will be regenerated with the values from the vpasswd file.

So if you want to change paths, do the following:

#copy old vpasswd to a new location
cp vpasswd vpasswd.new
# edit vpasswd.new to suit your needs
vim vpasswd.new
# shutdown your mailserver services for some seconds to prevent regeneration of the vpasswd.cdb file before you are ready (check if you may do this before!)
/etc/init.d/svscan stop
cp vpasswd.new vpasswd
#remove cdb file
rm vpasswd.cdb
# create a testuser for the appropriate domain, to regenerate cdb file
vadduser testuser[the at char]domain[the dot char]tld
# delete testuser
vdeluser testuser[the at char]domain[the dot char]tld
# start mailserver services again
/etc/init.d/svscan start

Normally a shutdown time of a few seconds should not be critical for a mailserver, because sending servers normally have queue lifetimes much longer than this and sending users can wait a few seconds anyway, eh ;-)?

You should however check this first!

If you put the lines above in a appropriately changed script downtime can be less than 5 seconds.

Hope this helps,
Regards,
Phillip

Wegen eines unfallbedingten Schadens musste ich mein Notebook am 12.11.2009 zum Lenovo Support/Geodis Gmbh in Heppenheim einschicken. Da der Schaden unfallbedingt war, fiel er nicht unter die Garantie. Auf Nachfrage nannte mir der Lenovo Mitarbeiter eine ungefähre Bearbeitungsdauer von 4-7 Werktagen.
Leider kam das Notebook erst am 1.12.2009 wieder bei mir an, was einer Bearbeitungsdauer (bei Eingang am 13.11. und Ausgang am 30.11.) von 12 Werktagen entspricht. Also fast doppelt so viel wie angekündigt.
Bisher war mir der Support auch aus eigener Erfahrung nur als tadellos bekannt. Ich hoffe mal, dass sich Derartiges nicht wiederholt. Als Informatiker in seinem Studium auf sein Notebook verzichten zu müssen, macht einen nämlich nicht unbedingt produktiver :-).

Grüße
Phillip

A few days before I stumbled upon a problem with our OpenSSH (net-misc/openssh-5.2_p1-r3) based SFTP solution. Although passwords were not changed SFTP logins did not work any longer whereas normal SSH logins with the same accounts continued working.

The concerning - now working - SSHD config looks like this (except AllowUsers):

Port 22
Protocol 2
LogLevel INFO
SyslogFacility AUTH
LoginGraceTime 60
PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication yes
KeepAlive yes
# this must be set to no and PasswordAuthentication to yes. Otherwise SFTP will not work!!!!
UsePAM no
PrintMotd no
PrintLastLog no
ClientAliveInterval 30
ClientAliveCountMax 10
Subsystem       sftp    internal-sftp
Match Group sftponly
    ChrootDirectory /home/%u
    ForceCommand internal-sftp
    X11Forwarding no
    AllowTcpForwarding no

After more than one hour of trial and error I found out, that UsePAM must be set to no and PasswordAuthentication must be set to yes. All other combinations of these two options kill sftp authentication (sys-auth/pambase-20090620.1-r1 with ssh USE flag enabled).

As I am not using pam's advanced authentication functions this deactivation is not a problem to me.
So, finally, if you encounter strange authentication issues with sftp try to disable pam auth and see if sftp authentication is working again afterwards.

Regards,
Phillip

PS If you know another solution to this problem or if I somehow messed up my config please let me know.

Recently I created a gentoo ebuild for the 0.4 version of the KDE 4.3 service menu manager (http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Service+Menu+Manager?content=94996):

# Copyright 1999-2008 Gentoo Foundation
# Author Phillip Merensky
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
 
EAPI="2"
 
inherit kde4-base
 
DESCRIPTION="This app is a System Settings module to manage service menus."
HOME_PAGE="http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Service+Menu+Manager?content=94996"
KEYWORDS="amd64 x86"
IUSE=""
SRC_URI="http://linux.wuertz.org/dists/sid/main/source/kcm-servicemenus_${PV}.tar.gz"
SLOT="4.3"
 
DEPEND="kde-base/kdelibs:${SLOT}"
 
S="${WORKDIR}/kcm-servicemenu"
 
src_unpack() {
    unpack ${A}
    cd "${S}_build"
}
 
src_compile() {
    S="${WORKDIR}/kcm-servicemenu_build"
    cd "$S"
    emake || die "Make failed!"
}

Save it as service-menu-manager-0.4.ebuild in your favorite category (I prefer kde-misc) in your custom overlay, execute

ebuild service-menu-manager-0.4.ebuild digest

While customizing this homepage I came across the following problem: I wanted to rewrite every request which accesses the root of this page to access the subfolder "drupal". This way t is possible to use "www.phillme.de" to see the blog and additionally allow subfolders on the same level as the "drupal" directory.

My first guess was to use the following in a .htaccess-file in the document root:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule	^/$	/drupal/

Sadly enough it did not work although the url rewriting guide of apache at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/rewrite_guide.html exactly mentions the same solution for a moved document root.

The solution described there is the following, which is very similar to my initial yet not working attempt:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   ^/$  /about/  [R]

Of course I also tried the "[R]" for redirect with the same problem. The redirect was not triggered. Fortunately I found another site with "very common mistakes" about rewrite rules (http://rewriterule.alantait.com/4/). It mentions that the RewriteRule does NOT have the beginning "/" which transforms my initial solution to

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule	^$	/drupal/

I am wondering if this is an error in the apache documentation or if I just got something wrong. Maybe someone can brighten the for me. All others may consider the solution above ;-).

Hello folks.

Finally I found the time to start my own blog/website. I will blog about technical problems and other things that keep me busy hoping to help other people with similar problems.

So stay tuned

Regards,
phillme