Philipp Ludwig

My laptop is running an encrypted funtoo installation, which prompts me for the password of the root volume during boot. This works nice, but since I'm lazy I'd like to read the key from an USB drive. Using the commandline parameter root_key=keyfile.bin this works fine if I boot my custom kernel, where support for FAT fileystems is built into the kernel (not as a module). However, using the debian kernel this does not work, since the initramfs cannot mount the device - I guess because of missing support for the FAT fileysystem. I tried adding fat and vfat to /usr/share/genkernel/defaults in the line MODULES_FS, but without any luck. Is this even possible or do I need to use something like ext4 on the USB drive?

I've unmasked debian-sources 4.12.12 and emerging it right now on my SP4 to see if the keyboard works. I'll open a bug if it doesn't.

That would involve backporting these patches https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9439493/ to the "old" 4.8 debian-sources kernel; do you think it's worth it? Native support for this device was introduced in linux-4.12 or so.

I'll just add my 2 cents, since I've been using funtoo for some years now, and gentoo for some more. After the main installation, I install all applications which I can think of at the moment and add more as I use the system. During this "phase", I have to deal with USE flags a lot more that I like. On my desktop system, which is my main machine for experimenting/trying out stuff I reinstall every few months, since I a) like to test out other linux distributions to see what they offer and b) to match the current installations process with the installation guide in the wiki (and to update the guide, if needed). On my laptop, I need a stable system for working - like drobbins - so I have only installed funtoo there once. The debian-sources kernel works fine for the most part, however it doesn't support the keyboard of my Laptop (a Surface Pro 4), which is why I'm using the gentoo-sources kernel there. Also, on my desktop I sometimes experiment with kernels like pf-sources to see if I can get better performance in games, but that never happens ;) kernel optimization is a really time-consuming process.

When you say "trouble", what do you mean? From your post I guess that a few days ago you could print, but not anymore. This might be caused by an update; run qlop -l to see what packages have been emerged in the last days. Also, for the recommended driver for your printer, check: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openprinting/start Lastly, make sure that you are in the "lp" and "lp-admin" groups. That's all the general advice I can offer, since I don't own this printer myself.

I've created a wiki page on how to play encrypted Blu-rays using Funtoo: http://www.funtoo.org/Playing_Blu-ray At the moment, this page is not linked anywhere and I'd like to hear some feedback from you - or just edit the page and improve it yourself ;)

Happy new year, have success with your projects :)

The problem with the official realktek driver is that they rely on (non-free) firmware sometime. Because of this there are packages like sys-kernel/linux-firmware (which you might need) and all the stuff in sys-firmware/* . Regarding genkernel, I never had luck with that, it always just worked "kinda". Therefore I switchted to just compiling the whole thing manually, i.e. cd /usr/src/linux make menuconfig make make install make modules_install (... insert steps for building the ramdisk if you need it) To be honest, even after a few years of compiling kernels, I still have trouble configuring it on a new machine on my own and sometimes end up with a black X or similar. Therefore I always recommend to try out the debian-kernel package, which is kindly provided by funtoo and works just fine.

Not sure if this is a bug in gparted, we would need to try to exactly reproduce it. I'd just say be happy that everything works now :)

Just a shot in the dark here, but this sounds like some PHP process hanging somewhere when a visitor first enters the site. Does the php/httpd logfile does tell you anything?

You may also consider installing fail2ban, a small tool which blocks clients that supply failed login requests too often.

I'd just would like to add that this has been reported as a bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505160 Apparantly, you also have the option to upgrade to gentoolkit-9999 to fix these messages (didn't try it myself).

You're welcome, nice to hear that I could help solving your problem :)

Dear delgado, thanks for your information. Now I must admit that I'm not very familiar with Intel integrated graphic cards; did you try to enable the "xinerama" useflag globally and to a world update?

I actually had the same problem, but could not solve it. Poking around in the gdm mailing list it seems that this is the intended behaviour since some newer version. As a workaround I suggest switching to another display manager, e. g. lightdm or sddm.