Happy new year 2009

I’m sure there’s already a million “Happy New Year” type posts up but I figured I’d throw in my two cents as well (since I’m actually here for this New Year’s Day).

While I’m at it I’ll pass along some things I managed to accomplish over the past week:

• Have some troubleshooting that you need to do that requires you to have a small partition? (In my case, troubleshooting for bug 118594). You don’t need to re-format your hard drive. Instead (at least on Linux) just create a partition on a file:
  1. Create a small-ish file (for instance, using dd if=/dev/zero of=<i>file-name-here</i> bs=1M count=<i>size-in-megabytes</i>).
  2. From there, you need to create a filesystem on it. I used plain ext2. If you’re not running as root you may need to manually run /sbin/mke2fs <i>file-name-here</i>. (since /sbin is normally only in the PATH for root). mke2fs should complain about the file not being a special block device but you can tell it to proceed. Please note that mke2fs is a horribly horribly destructive thing to do on a live filesystem. Make sure to take the extra second to get the filename right, and don’t run mke2fs as root.
  3. From there you can mount the file using the loop device. I had to do the following: mkdir <i>test-dir</i> # Create directory to mount filesystem to<br />sudo mount -o loop ./<i>file-name-here</i> ./test-dir/.
     On my system root permission is required to run mount even for a single-user mount like this, it may be different on yours.
  4. Now use your new filesystem normally. Any changes that you make to the test-dir/ folder actually affect the file you created for that purpose. This is handy for testing out-of-disk-space problems in your app.
• If you use Gentoo you will want to start shifting over to split ebuilds if you haven’t already. Their KDE-style modules were stopped (for the most part) at KDE 3.5.9, which was fine with me until every emerge world I tried to run started complaining about blocked packages at the various kdelibs requirements started to get inconsistent. I’ve decided to take this opportunity to simply get rid of the majority of the system KDE 3 and upgrade to KDE 4.1.3 instead. So far my wife hasn’t complained about it at all (and she really likes KSudoku as well) so as soon as I’m convinced I haven’t forgotten to install a KDE 4 program I’ll need I’m going to uninstall KDE 3 with the exception of the libraries and a few apps.
• World of Goo is definitely worthy of play. A Linux version is in beta but the Windows demo ran fine for me in WINE. Well, it crashed WINE on shutdown before the video mode had been restored but I suppose that’s good enough nowadays. :)