This image is just here to test the shadow effect I mentioned in this post, just so I don’t forget how to do it.

I just added the facility to my weblog software to edit previous posts, due to a rather nasty ambiguity in the last post (which is now edited!).

This post is to test that I didn’t break the page to add a new post, whilst adding in the edit page.

Writing this post is also shown in the current screenshot, so you can see what I use to edit my weblog. Why you would want to know, I’m unsure, but a couple of people have asked in the past.

After my worry about sound, it appears that downloading and compiling a sound app via emerge, sound was there all along (or was sorted by a dependency that was downloaded along with the sound app). I’m currently trying out a program called Rhythmbox which so far seems quite powerful, but rather crash prone. It will play quite happily, but if you do something weird, it will just die. However, it is in active development so I hope it will stablise once all the features are there.

Time for media players. I now have Totem (a gtk2 frontend for xine) and mplayer installed. I like the dvdnav of Totem and the speed of mplayer. If I could have mplayer core, dvdnav and Totem UI, I’d be one pleased delusional. However, at the moment that is not to be right now.

Gentoo uses emerge as its package manager. This in turn uses ebuild files as its package format. mplayer was the first ebuild file I’ve had to hack. The font file was not downloading, so I removed that download instruction from the ebuild file and wget’d the file myself and put it in the emerge working directory. Re-ran emerge mplayer and all seems to be fine now =)

I’ve been installing Gentoo over the last day or so. Even though it takes a long time (I started from a stage two, which compiles basically everything), it seems to be worth it. Maybe it is just my imagination, but things do seem faster. I could also be because Mandrake started a lot of applications at startup and my current system isn’t. We shall see once I start adding the apps I use regularly.