Installing kydpdict

Installing 3rd part software that isn’t in official repository/tree in linux distributions is often problematic. Here is the guide how to install dictionary frontend – Kydpdict in gentoo:

1. Log as root (su)
2. Create directory /usr/local/overlays/mysiar (*or other in /usr/local)
3. Download http://www.synowiec.org/mysiar-portage.sh (wget http://www.synowiec.org/mysiar-portage.sh)
4. Give it right to run and run it (chmod o+x mysiar-portage.sh && ./mysiar-portage.sh)
5. Add line PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/overlays/mysiar” to /etc/make.conf
6. Sync portage tree (emerge –sync)
7. Try emerge kydpdict
8. If it fail saying that Manifest point file that doesn’t exist, remove that entry from Manifest and try to emerge again
9. Copy dictionary files from your windows version and rename them to lowercast characters

I hope that this guide was helpful.

UPDATE:
Added step 5. (2006-09-16)

Gentoo installation

Last Saturday I finished installation and configuration of Gentoo distribution. My previous major operating system was also Linux flavour. It was OpenSUSE. Despite it worked well, there were several areas to improve:

• support of Geforce2 MX400 nvidia graphic card and HP 710C printer was problematic, it was definitely downgrade in compare to older releases of SUSE,
• package repositories miss a lot of applications that I use daily,
• installation of programs that are outside of repositories is weird,
• in general, doing things like downloading KDE 4 sources and building them require too much IMO manual work; Yast isn’t helpful in that case,

So why I choose to try Gentoo (not Debian for e.g.):

• it’s different; almost all Linux distributions are build around packaging, of course they have different formats or dependencies system, but the philosophy is the same: “pack it”; while Gentoo provide recipes how to build it,
• it has well-written documentation,
• I’m on a holiday so compile time doesn’t really matter;
• it is the most popular OS among finalists of Polish Olympics in Informatics,

Thoughts after installation

I’m satisfied with gentoo distribution. Portage (gentoo “package” system) works well. It extremely easy to install an older version of a program or an unstable one. Moreover, the configuration took as much time as in SUSE. SUSE GUIs are nice, but they don’t speed up your work.

Hassles:

• during the installation you’re encouraged to use tool mirrorselect; It use “space” to select and enter to “end” program. However It doesn’t metion anything about using “space” and doesn’t prompt if you doesn’t select anything. A typical user (not *NIX) might be confused.
• two hassles with portage, while I try install nvidia-driver opengl was required to one of the packet and installation stop; another was audacity which require wxGTK 2.4.x but not 2.6.x which is default, error messages was unhelpful;
• searching packages information takes too much time(“emerge -s” and “emerge –searchdesc”), it should use suffix trees as indexes;
• There is no one package in portage tree that I use frequently – kydpdict.

OpenSUSE 10.0

Yesterday, I upgraded my Operating System. My previous OS – SUSE 9.2 was working well, but it was rather old and unsupported (there wasn’t new rpms for it). As I always associate SUSE distro with good hardware recognition, I hoped that I will install it without hassles. But there were 3 problems, 3 more then in 9.2:

• shape of display on my monitor (CRT – Philips 107T5) was a bit strange. I can’t it change using hardware buttons, because i linux share it will windows. So I have to do it in software layer. It took me some time to work it out, but the workaraund is simply. I just set in SaX2 standard Vesa monitor…
• Nvidia driver didn’t work out of box. Moreover, after I installed it, X didn’t boot. Solution: log as root, in console write: “init 3; switch2nv; tiny-nvidia-installer –uninstall; init 5″, then upgrade system using YOU, again as a root: “init 3; /usr/share/doc/nvidia/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7676-pkg1.run ” (numbers could be different) “switch2nvidia; init 5″. Now you could enjoy 3D acceleration using ut2004-demo
• printer Deskjet 710C doesn’t work, despite it’s recognized. Solution: On OpenSUSE website.

One more tip: consider permission, ownership and groups when you are doing backup -> restore. After I done that I have problems with Opera Mail and KMail. In KMail it was a bit funny, because I could see a list of messages, but after selecting any e-mail subject turned into “No Subject” and sender into “Unknown” and there wasn’t any text inside. Fortunately, giving write access (chmod -R u+w ~/Mail and chmod -R u+w ~/.opera/mail) helped.