Some crazy stuff going on here.

MonoDevelop 0.6 was just released. Check the release notes.

I followed this tutorial on how to enable shadows on windows in Gentoo Linux. It came out pretty nice :)

Emil and I spent the evening looking for a Gentoo installer to be used together with a more standardized way of creating our own Gentoo Desktop or Gentoo Server install CD. We found a nice Gentoo-installer shell script called Diagi. We gave it a try on an old laptop and it seems quite nice, but need some optimization. I think we'll use this as a startingpoint to create a preconfigured Gentoo Desktop LiveCD with a kernel precompiled by genkernel.

It's a fact that using Gentoo Linux normally result in using a lot of time just compiling code. I find myself compiling normal things like Gnome, Apache, MySQL, Emacs, Subversion, Mono, MonoDevelop etc over and over again for each machine I'm using Gentoo Linux on. I like the Gentoo-flexibility to be able to fully customize whatever I want, but often I just want normal applications up and running.

It's a solution to this using Portage Binary Package Support. There's no official binary package repository for Gentoo. Mostly you are left on your own to create your own repository of the packages you need in your environment.

It's a good idea to have the same CFLAGS and CHOST settings in /etc/make.conf. This default Gentoo distribution settings seems to work on a broad range of installations:

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="i386-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

You should also figure out a standard set of USE-flags that should be used.

After you have compiled the application with your binary compatibility settings above you can use the quickpkg command to package a binary package of an application.

In example I want to create a package of my current PHP 5.0.3 installation that I'm quite comfortable with:

To be able to distribute this package to another machine through the emerge-command you should put ut up on a web or a ftp server where you want to store your packages. Then add PORTAGE_BINHOST="http://hostname/packages" to your /etc/make.conf-file. Now you should be able to type:

to download and install the PHP 5.0.3 binary created above.

Actually there is a project called Project Chinstrap that aims to provide relatively new binary packages to Gentoo. These are all unofficial packages not supported by Gentoo Technologies and builded by a third party. I've installed a few packages from Chinstrap and the experience is very good.

References:

• Gentoo Handbook - Binary Package Support
• Project Chinstrap

If you are a web developer and is using Firefox you should have installed the Web Developer extension. If not, install it now.

My girlfriend and I moved to the other side of Oslo last weekend. Tonight I got my broadband connection up and running.