I just finished listening to my Einlive Partyservice recording from last Saturday and I think, there is a little bit of hope. Not for the Partyservice itself, but for the style of music, which is usually played in the Partyservice. According to the words of Piet during the show, he will enjoy the break from doing radio and do some things, which the regular radio show kept him from doing. But judging from the very last words at the end of the show, he will return sometime in the beginning of 2005. So, let’s hope the best.

The last edition of the Einslive Partyservice just went on air starting off with Robert Miles’ “Children”, which opened the first broadcast about 9 years ago. Judging by the comments, which were made by other listeners on the Einslive website, there are many people, that are unhappy, that the partyservice isn’t continued. There is an interview with Piet Blank, where you can indeed get the impression, that it’s more or less a decision by Piet to not continue and the 9 years are possibly enough for him and that he wants to move on. We’ll see, what will come in it’s place. I doubt, that it will bind me as the partyservice did. If Piet really wanted to stop, there could possibly have been another DJ to take over. I’ll hope they find another slot in their program scene to play this kind of music.

When I switched to Linux 2.6 I also moved from devfs to udev, since udev is the thing for the future. Atleast I though, that I made the move. I followed all the instructions on the Gentoo website, read the Udev Primer and acted accordingly. It is only now after a couple of month, that I discover, that I actually still use devfs.

It completely escaped my attentions, that the devfsd daemon was still running, together with the udev daemon. After digging deeper into the matter, the main problem is, that the initrd, which is generated by the genkernel utility is actually not udev aware. And the initrd and the Gentoo startup scripts react to different kernel command line arguments. According to documentation a gentoo=nodevfs is required to deactivate devfs and activate udev. However the initrd requires a simple nodevfs to disable the start of the devfs daemon. The startup scripts understand the simple nodevfs as well.

Now, the next problem arose. Once the kernel command line was correctly configured, the initrd wouldn’t mount the actual root filesystem, because the device nodes are not available, which previously had been provided by the devfs.

In the end I’ve got everything working with these steps:

• Use nodevfs as the kernel command line argument.
• Edit /usr/share/genkernel/gen_initrd.sh and add

         MAKEDEV hda
         MAKEDEV hdb
         MAKEDEV hdc
         MAKEDEV hdd

  after MAKEDEV std and MAKEDEV console. This creates the required devices in the initrd. For SCSI devices something similiar would need to be done.
• Edit /usr/share/genkernel/generic/linuxrc and change at line 370

  if [ "${USE_DEVFS_NORMAL}" -eq '1' -a "${CDROOT}" -eq '0' ]
  then

  to

  if [ "${USE_DEVFS_NORMAL}" -eq '0' -a "${CDROOT}" -eq '0' ]
  then
          umount /tmp/.initrd/proc || \
            echo '*: Failed to unmount the initrd /proc!
  '
  elif [ "${USE_DEVFS_NORMAL}" -eq '1' -a "${CDROOT}" -eq '0' ]
  then

  This umounts the /proc filesystem from the initrd.
• The generate a new initrd with something like this:

  genkernel --install --no-clean --no-mrproper   initrd

• Reboot with the new initrd.

I guess with these changes it is advisable to protect the directory /usr/share/genkernel with the CONFIG_PROTECT variable in /etc/make.conf to keep the changes if a new genkernel version is installed.

CONFIG_PROTECT="${CONFIG_PROTECT} /usr/share/genkernel"

Jara und Steffen sind dann heute um ca. 17:00 Uhr müde aber doch glücklich wie ich glaube, von ihrem Trip nach Lindow zu “Judo & More” zurückgekehrt.

I’m currently listening to the einlive partyservice with Piet Blank at the turntables. Judging from the small talk between Piet Blank and Mike Lid before Piet started his set at 22:00, then this will be the second last partyservice transmission, the last being next Saturday. Unfortunately there are not yet any details on the einslive webpage.

The einslive partyservice was my main source for trance and house music for more than the last 1 1/2 years. I think, I did miss at best between 5 and 10 Saturdays during this period. So, I’m quite unhappy, that the partyservice closes down.

Allthough I must admit, that for the last couple of months I’ve been slowly drifting to melomania de luxe with Pedro Del Mar and DJ Shah, which is broadcasted every Monday on sunshine live between 20:00 and 24:00. And I’ve been drifting to “A State of Trance” with Armin van Buuren broadcasted on the Internet radio station ETS Global.

Since I already moved to the Xorg X-server on my Gentoo compile host in my company, I decided to move to Xorg on my home system as well.

The move was simple enough: removed the xfs and xdm startup scripts from the default runlevel, emerge -C xfree to remove XFree, emerge -k xorg to install the binary Xorg package, which I carried home from my company Gentoo system, copied XF86config to xorg.conf and edited some font paths (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts to /usr/share/fonts) and I was up and running again after restarting the xdm init script.

The Xorg installation also included a new xterm version and compared to the previous version, this xterm now draws line graphics characters, even when the currently used fonts does not supply them. I prefer the antialiased Andale font as my standard font and programs like mc or alsamixer didn’t look too good with the previous xterm version. This is much better now.

There were two issues however, which needed a little bit fiddling. I don’t remember for how long, but I’ve alway had pc104 configured for XkbModel in /etc/X11/XF86config in the keyboard “InputDevice” section. This worked with XFree86 with my old 102 keys keyboard and my current 105 keys ergonomic keyboard. With Xorg however, the “<>|” key in the german layout wouldn’t work. To get this key correctly working, I needed to set XkbModel to the correct value of pc105.

And XEmacs with some fonts caused a bit of a problem. I’ve modified XEmacs usage of fonts through the ~/.Xdefaults file. For instance

Emacs*popup*Font: -*-comic sans ms-medium-r-*-*-*-80-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15

to change the fonts for the popup menus. This looked totally ugly after the move to Xorg. To fix this, I had to start xfs (add it to the default runlevel) with all the correct font paths and include

FontPath  "unix/:-1"

in the xorg.conf “Files” section. After this XEmacs fonts looked ok again.