Back to relative stability with Funtoo

In my last post, I’d mentioned that I planned on reinstalling Gentoo to fix several dependency issues that had made upgrading packages an impossibility. I chose to use the Funtoo variant and have since become an expert with the install process.

My first attempt was an installation of Funtoo unstable, which included packages that are normally masked out for stability reasons. This particular installation went fine and worked properly, until the hard drive I’d installed it on decided that it had better things to do than spin up when booting the computer. The end result was a kernel panic on boot and inability to mount the drive. One thing that I did notice under GNOME 2.28 is that “alacarte”, the menu editor, is not installed as a default package or chained as a dependency. As a result, the “Edit Menus” option in GNOME merely displayed a list of installed applications, with no way to add new ones or edit the properties of existing ones.

The latest and most current version I’m running now is Funtoo stable. It’s a very snappy and responsive environment, and I haven’t yet run into package conflicts or dependency problems. Unfortunately, two of my most-used apps (Songbird and VLC) have problems running – VLC refuses to display a user interface (but runs in a terminal seemingly properly), and Songbird insists that my request to play a song should be met with a core media error. I may end up trying the mailing list or IRC channel to see what the level of support is for VLC at least, or the appropriate process for migrating a “stable” release to the “unstable” one.

Update: I’m apparently plagued with the “didn’t read the documentation” curse. Here’s what VLC says when I try to reinstall it:

 * Messages for package media-video/vlc-1.0.3:

 * You have disabled the qt4 useflag, vlc will not have any
 * graphical interface. Maybe that is not what you want...

I’m not sure if I really want to build it with QT support… but in the meantime, I’ve added “media-video/vlc qt4” to the /etc/portage/package.use file and it seems to work fine.