Today I had a rather frustrating issue, as svn would not allow me to permanently accept an SSL Cert under Gentoo, rather just offering me the option to reject or accept temporarily.

Error validating server certificate for \'xxxxxxxx\':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
 - The certificate has an unknown error.
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: xxxxxxxx
 - Valid: from xxxxxxxx until xxxxxxxx
 - Issuer: xxxxxxxx
 - Fingerprint: xxxxxxxx
(R)eject or accept (t)emporarily?

After some Googling, I found Bug 295617: subversion won’t save bad certificates permanently with Neon 0.29. By this point Neon 0.28 had left the portage tree, so downgrading was not an easy option. However, a comment on Bug 238529 hinted at a workaround: build Neon without GnuTLS.

To fix this issue, the easy fix is:

echo \'net-libs/neon -gnutls\' >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -DN subversion

Neon should rebuild and all will be well!

Error validating server certificate for \'xxxxxxxx\':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
 - The certificate has an unknown error.
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: xxxxxxxx
 - Valid: from xxxxxxxx until xxxxxxxx
 - Issuer: xxxxxxxx
 - Fingerprint: xxxxxxxx
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?

Some non-Linux-dork posts are in the pipe, but today I had issues getting VirtualBox up and running on Gentoo. Here’s some proper install instructions to work around Bug 283617. I’ll get to fixing the ebuild later this weekend.

emerge virtualbox-bin
chmod 4750 /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxNetAdpCtl
chmod 4510 /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxSDL /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox
gpasswd -a youruser vboxusers

After a logout/login, VirtualBox should appear in your Applications menu, and can be run from the command line with VirtualBox.

I’ve been migrating over to Gentoo from Ubuntu (more on this later) and today had the lovely experience of installing a printer. Since at least 2 other computers will be needing these instructions, here we are:

ATi has gotten much better Linux support, but there is still much to be desired. Kernel upgrades pushed through the update manager tend to destroy the ATI kernel module. I’ve found the quickest, most painless way is to simply uninstall and then reinstall the drivers:

sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

Download the latest drivers from the ATI site: 32-bit and 64-bit <http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx>.

Open a terminal in the directory with the downloaded file (note: your exact file name may be different):

sudo chmod +x ati-driver-installer-10-2-x86.x86_64.run
sudo ./ati-driver-installer-10-2-x86.x86_64.run

Install the drivers, restart the computer and type the following into a terminal:

sudo aticonfig -f --initial

Then restart X (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace) or restart the computer and all will be well!

Update: If you experience black or grey screen artifacts in Firefox/Thunderbird using Catalyst 10.6 or higher, it may be due to the new 2D rendering system. To force use of the old XAA system run the following command after the initial aticonfig setup:

sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-str=DDX,ForceXAA,TRUE

Restart X, and all should be well!