Spotify is a great way to listen to music. Unfortunately the official client only runs on Windows and Mac machines. There is an experimental unsupported client for linux, however it’s provided as a DEB (ubuntu/debian) package.

Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.

I’m running an OpenVPN server, configured in bridging mode.

I had quite a bit of trouble getting OpenVPN to start after networking is up, but before the the bridge is setup so that the tap0 device, which is created by OpenVPN can be added to the bridge.

The solution is simpler : let the tap0 be automatically created and added to the bridge by Gentoo Linux, then start OpenVPN with a config file instructing to use the already created tap0 device.

This post shows the configuration snippets to get things started in the right order on Gentoo.

If there’s a file installed on your disk for which you’d like to know what package provided it, you can use the equery command like below :

You need to have read/write permissions to /dev/dri/cardX to benefit from 3D hardware acceleration in Xorg X Server. On a Gentoo linux machine, this file has the following permissions set by default :

ls -l /dev/dri/card0 
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 2009-10-14 16:12 /dev/dri/card0

If you use Gentoo and tried to install Cacti with Lighttpd instead of Apache, chances are that you ran into this error message :

/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/WebappConfig/content.py:27: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  import md5, re, os, os.path
* Fatal error: Your configuration file sets the server type "Apache"
* Fatal error: but the corresponding package does not seem to be installed!
* Fatal error: Please "emerge >=www-servers/apache-1.3" or correct your settings.
* Fatal error(s) - aborting

In this post I’ll cover the basics one needs to know to install, upgrade and remove packages on a Gentoo linux system.

I’ve recently switched to the Gentoo Linux distribution (mostly to experiment with this Linux distro) and I don’t regret it so far. This post is about my first impressions about Gentoo.