Wednesday, May 2, 2007

What I did with my extra long weekend

Other than the usual weekend games session (which was quite fun, although I did horribly in the Big Cheese, and got left in awful position in US Patent No 1), and watching the world cup final, I mainly upgraded tron to debian etch.

Why did this take so long?

Well, the downloading everything over dialup part played a role. Convincing the lirc modules to compile was also a bit of a pain (a combination of out of date docs, and not wanting to dial up during the day on Monday meaning I solved the problem in a rather convoluted way). Migrating the settings from freevo-1.5 to freevo-1.7 was fairly painless, but what took the most time was my very clever idea to replace the awkward custom scripts fro running freevo with gdm & autologin. This worked fine, but I spent several iterations getting the session configured so that freevo would start by default. All is now solved, and tron is up and running better than ever. My local tweaks, based off patches in the freevo bug tracking system, are now unnessecary. Of course, I completed everything just in time to notice that freevo-1.7.1 had been released, so I'll have to update to that soon as well, but that should be a fairly minor issue, especially as I've setup freevo in a dedicated directory under /opt

One advantage of the newer combination of kernel and lirc modules, is that all my remote buttons are now recognised correctly, which has simplified my .lircrc configuration for freevo, so I feel the effort has not been wasted.

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