fidzu : gentoo

Today I went to update one of my Gentoo servers, and noticed that it wanted to pull in a bunch of xorg dependencies. This is a simple music server without any type of graphical environment, so I don't really want any xorg libraries or other GUI components installed. Looking through the full output, I couldn't see a direct reason that these components were now requirements.

To troubleshoot, I started adding packages to /etc/portage/package.mask, starting with cairo (which was the package directly requesting the 'X' USE flag be enabled). That didn't get me very far as it still just indicated that GTK+ needed to be installed. After following the dependency chain for a bit, I noticed that something was pulling in libcanberra and found that the default USE flags now include 'sound' and that vim now had it enabled. It looks like this USE flag was added between vim-8.1.1486 and vim-8.1.1846.

For my needs, the most straightforward solution was to just remove the 'sound' USE flag from vim by adding the following to /etc/portage/package.use:

# grep vim /etc/portage/package.use 
app-editors/vim -sound

13 Sep 2019 5:10pm GMT

Though many sites have abandoned Adobe Flash in favour of HTML5 these days, there are still some legacy applications (e.g. older versions of VMWare's vSphere web client) that depend on it. Recent versions of Firefox in Linux (68+) started failing to load Flash content for me, and it took some digging to find out why. First off, I noticed that the content wouldn't load even on Adobe's Flash test page. Second off, I found that the plugin wasn't listed in Firefox's about:plugins page.

So, I realised that the problem was due to the Adobe Flash plugin not integrating properly with Firefox. I use Gentoo Linux, so these instructions may not directly apply to other distributions, but I would imagine that the directory structures are at least similar. To start, I made sure that I had installed the www-plugins/adobe-flash ebuild with the 'npapi' USE flag enabled:

$ eix adobe-flash
[I] www-plugins/adobe-flash
     Available versions:  (22) 32.0.0.238^ms
       {+nsplugin +ppapi ABI_MIPS="n32 n64 o32" ABI_RISCV="lp64 lp64d" ABI_S390="32 64" ABI_X86="32 64 x32"}
     Installed versions:  32.0.0.238(22)^ms(03:13:05 22/08/19)(nsplugin -ppapi ABI_MIPS="-n32 -n64 -o32" ABI_RISCV="-lp64 -lp64d" ABI_S390="-32 -64" ABI_X86="64 -32 -x32")
     Homepage:            https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer.html https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player.html
     Description:         Adobe Flash Player

That ebuild installs the libflashplayer.so (shared object) in the /usr/lib64/nsbrowser/plugins/ directory by default.

However, through some digging, I found that Firefox 68+ was looking in another directory for the plugin (in my particular situation, that directory was /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/, which actually didn't exist on my system). Seeing as the target directory didn't exist, I had to firstly create it, and then I decided to symlink the shared object there so that future updates to the www-plugins/adobe-flash package would work without any further manual intervention:

mkdir -p /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/
cd $_
ln -s /usr/lib64/nsbrowser/plugins/libflashplayer.so .

After restarting Firefox, the Adobe Flash test page started working as did other sites that use Flash. So, though your particular Linux distribution, version of Firefox, and version of Adobe Flash may require the use of different directories than the ones I referenced above, I hope that these instructions can help you troubleshoot the problem with Adobe Flash not showing in the Firefox about:plugins page.

06 Sep 2019 7:17pm GMT

The ARM64 project is pleased to announce that all ARM64 profiles are now stable.

While our developers and users have contributed significantly in this accomplishment, we must also thank our Packet sponsor for their contribution. Providing the Gentoo developer community with access to bare metal hardware has accelerated progress in achieving the stabilization of the ARM64 profiles.

About Packet.com

This access has been kindly provided to Gentoo by bare metal cloud Packet via their Works on Arm project. Learn more about their commitment to supporting open source here.

About Gentoo

Gentoo Linux is a free, source-based, rolling release meta distribution that features a high degree of flexibility and high performance. It empowers you to make your computer work for you, and offers a variety of choices at all levels of system configuration.

As a community, Gentoo consists of approximately two hundred developers and over fifty thousand users globally.

11 Aug 2019 12:00am GMT