I ran my typical system update this morning, an emerge --sync followed by emerge -DuvaN world. Upon entering the second command, it wanted to downgrade Portage from 2.2_rc20 to the 2.1.x line.
Further investigation showed that all sys-apps/portage-2.2_rc* ebuilds have been hard masked! Lately I’ve been syncing my machine every day or two, so this is a very recent thing.
Remembering that I needed the 2.2 line in order to use KDE package sets, I decided I’d rather continue using that, if possible, than to let Portage be downgraded and to suffer whatever consequences I would suffer with my system no longer supporting package sets.
To unmask Portage, I entered the following into /etc/portage/package.keywords/portage-2.2:
=sys-apps/portage-2.2_rc25
All is well now. 
curtisdf Gentoo Linux KDE 4, Portage
Lately I’ve been seeing a high number of users registering for this website. However, many of them have been with very suspicious usernames and email addresses (many of them ending in “@mail.ru”) which make me think they were added by Spam bots. What’s more strange is that no comments have been posted by any of these accounts. Maybe that’s a good thing…
I decided to delete ALL accounts and to apply the WP-reCaptcha plugin, to make it much more difficult for Spam bots even to register an account at this website.
If you are a real human and your account got deleted with all of the Spam accounts, I am deeply sorry. Please feel free to re-register. (And please leave a comment or two, so I know you’re real!)
curtisdf Misc
I’ve had a little more shakedown time with KDE 4.2 now. This morning I decided to tackle a problem I was encountering every time I logged in, involving Akonadi and MySQL. Here’s what the error window looked like: Read more…
curtisdf Gentoo Linux, Office Productivity Akonadi, MySQL
I upgraded to KDE 4.2 this evening. It’s definitely an improvement over 4.1.4. The default backgrounds for KDM and new user accounts are spruced up, and the panel has a nice translucency to it. No graphics rendering artifacts either, so far. Read more…
curtisdf Gentoo Linux KDE 4
One hiccup I encountered when installing KDE 4 on my Gentoo laptop was that several applications would crash when started. When this happened, the KDE Crash Handler would pop up a window that said: Read more…
curtisdf Gentoo Linux Bash Scripting, KDE 4
I was typing up a document today in OpenOffice Writer, version 3, and noticed there were no little red squiggly spellcheck lines beneath random words, as it was in the past. Weird… I had thought this was working. I then intentionally misspelled some words to see if it would catch them. Nope. Read more…
curtisdf Office Productivity OpenOffice, spellcheck
Ever since the first public beta releases of KDE 4.0, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the day that KDE 4 would be marked Stable in Gentoo Portage, so I could start using it. That day still hasn’t come yet, but my curiosity got to me, so I decided to give the Testing version a try. It happened to be KDE 4.1.4. Read more…
curtisdf Gentoo Linux KDE 4
After several years of dormancy, www.curtisfarnham.com is back. Since my wife and I are doing a blog together, I have decided to devote this domain to technical tips and other geeky things. (Have you heard? “Geek” is cool.)
curtisdf Misc geek
[This post is taken from the previous version of my website.]
WOW, it’s been a long time since I updated this website. The latest? Besides the fact that Janine and I are sooooooooooooo happy together, I am in the process of rearranging website hosts and starting some new domains. Check out Farnhams.net for a sort of “landing page” for my extended family. Also, check out the newly moved and spruced-up Curtis and Janine’s Journey! (Our blog, recently moved from Blogger.)
curtisdf Misc