Present Perfect

Powershot

I finally caved in to my desires. I still had lots of gift coupons from work, and for the last two weeks I was thinking of bying a digital camera with it. After some research I went ahead and bought a Canon G2 Powershot. It's a great little camera, it takes pictures at 4 megapixels, and it can even record video. I went to a concert yesterday and had hoped to use it but of course I had to charge the battery first. Dumb me.

Spent some time downloading sources for gphoto2, gtkam and others. After trying that and being glad I could easily get at pictures, I decided on getting rpms for Red Hat 7.2. Dependencies went up all the way to Xconfigurator, so I then gave up and decided it was high time to install Red Hat 7.3 on the laptop.

Red Hat 7.3

Over the past year I have done something new when installing new machines. I now always create TWO partitions that can be used as root, and call them alpha and omega. I usually copy over the one to the other when I'm satisfied with the installation. The idea is that I can easily install a new distribution on the other partition without screwing up my working setup. So that's what I did. My Toshiba Tecra 8200 didn't boot from the RH72 cd, and it still doesn't boot with RH73. It's not the disc, they boot fine on other machines, and it's not the CD-rom, it can boot from other OS CD's just fine.

apt-get

After doing this, I tweaked some small stuff, installed apt from freshrpms and changed the sources.list file to point to my local mirror of both Red Hat and Ximian stuff. It felt really perverse doing apt-get install red-carpet. That worked. Jumped into red-carpet just to see what sort of stuff I should be getting. Yikes, 180 MB ! Dropped out of red-carpet and decided to be brave by doing apt-get dist-upgrade. After installing over 150 RPM's, it was done. Pretty amazing. Had lots of errors from scrollkeeper though, but I ignore them since I use Garnome Gnome 2.0 anyway.

As a side note, am busy setting up apt repositories for GStreamer too. I hope to get it into Red Carpet really soon as well but I wish the Ximian guys would get back to us on it. I suppose they must be really busy, which I can imagine.

Camera

Tried to get GnoCam to work, but couldn't manage it. It had a few issues all around and am feeling to lazy to work on it much. For one thing, it insisted on linking to unexisting .la files in /usr/lib - libesd.la, libaudiofile.la, and so on.

I know that libtool .la archives are a big discussion point in the Gnome community, but I don't really understand what the problem is or what the best fix is. I tried linking manually by taking out libtool out of the compile lines, and even though that works, I couldn't seem to get the resulting binaries to work. I probably shouldn't even be getting binaries ;)

Powershot I finally caved in to my desires. I still had lots of gift coupons from work, and for the last two weeks I was thinking of bying a digital...