First, I should mention that with the liberation of my Internet connection, I’ve taken a renewed liking to torrent clients, adding rtorrent and Deluge to my short stack of Crux adaptations. I won’t post the Pkgfiles since my versions are really just updated versions of other people’s work, but I will mention that Deluge needed librsvg and pyxdg, which were omitted from the version I found … somewhere. Thanks again to the kind people who manage Arch Linux for giving me a clue as to why it wouldn’t compile as I got it.

rtorrent was, of course, an amazingly easy package to put together (or I guess I should say, troubleshoot) since it has only one dependency, libtorrent, which in turn needed only libsigc++, which came from contrib. Everything should be that easy.

Also on the list, I’ve found that my few discrepancies with Firefox 3 were, of course, the fault of the sketchy compilation flags I had used. FF3 would run for me but wouldn’t install extensions, and I couldn’t submit forms on some pages. Rebuilding xulrunner and firefox with the safe CFLAGS made everything happy again.

Also strange though, I had a working port for recorder, which I posted here, but for some reason it sputters and dies when I try to update to 1.3.3. I’ll keep working on that. It will compile and it will install, but pkgmk spits out tar errors when I try to build it as a package, which is probably because of my shoddy packaging skills. Oh well, I have to learn somehow.

I’ve also re-enabled support for the backlight in the kernels that I build. That point makes perfect sense when you realize that I have to recompile some of this stuff overnight (xulrunner in particular). I noticed that the screen was blanking but not powering down — a fact that is rather obvious when turning off the lights in the room where the laptops are. So I took 30 minutes to rebuild 2.6.25.9, and let the kernel turn off the panel on all these laptops. Saves wear and tear, you know.

And probably last, but definitely not least, I am both thrilled and horrified to report that my newest addiction, Gridwars 2, works perfectly under Crux, with the exception of sound. In fact, you don’t even have to compile it — just unzip and execute.

But I need to track down the sound library it wants and install it, but otherwise it works great. Frame rates are much better than they were with Gnome, too (but they usually are improved with Crux, even over Arch).

So if I could paint a picture of my free time right now, I would be experimenting with torrent traffic on one machine while watching the ‘net on another, and zapping geometric hordes on a third. Yup, that’s about the size of it. 🙄