[Linux] Journal.

exiftran is a command line utility to transform jpeg images. It can rotate images automatically by checking the exif orientation tag. In Gentoo it is part of the fbi package.

$ emerge fbi
$ exiftran -ai *.jpg
# -ai for automatic in-place transformation

Here’s a good guide on setting up bootsplash in gentoo.

I tried vesafb-tng but it didn’t work for me, radeondb works really well though. My grub config looks like:

# this is the default 1400×1050 resolution of my thinkpad T41
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda2 video=radeonfb splash=verbose,theme:gentoo quiet CONSOLE=/dev/tty1
initrd /boot/fbsplash-gentoo-1400×1050

# this works for a lower resolution
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda2 video=radeonfb:1024×768-32@60 splash=silent,theme:TuxInfo [...]

Here’s a nice guide on configuring USE flag for mplayer, I enabled the following in global:

USE=”xinerama mmx sse sse2 cdr dvd dvdread divx4linux vcd xvid win32codecs flac”

and mplayer specific:

media-libs/win32codecs real quicktime
media-video/mplayer mmx2 dts -real

vlc advices to always use the unstable version, and to compile with the following USE flags:

media-video/vlc ffmpeg wxwindows aac dts a52 theora [...]

Install ccache to enable compiler cache and reduce compilation time:

$ emerge ccache

Enable it in make.conf

FEATURES=”ccache”
CCACHE_SIZE=”2G”

Check stats with:

ccache -s

For some reason $CCACHE_DIR variable is set differently for portage and users, so I wasn’t getting anything when I checked stats as root. After I export CCACHE_DIR=/var/tmp/ccache it worked.

Allow portage to install a particular masked testing branch by adding the package in package.keywords, i.e.,

net-misc/xsupplicant ~x86

Global USE flags:

USE=”-kde -qt xinerama acpi mmx sse sse2 wifi cdr dvd dvdread divx4linux vcd xvid apache2 bash-completion”
# optionally include cjk for asian fonts support, but would want to installs arphicfonts

Package USE flags:

media-libs/win32codecs quicktime
media-video/mplayer mmx2 dts real

Afterwards rebuild the system with new flags:

$ emerge –newuse -uDav world

remove obsolete packages:

$ emerge -av –depclean # double, triple [...]