Been a long night

Whilist updating my laptops software, I finally finished and found a number of irksome errors about gdkpixbuf and loading XPMs. Couldn’t turn up any useful information, so I asked around in #gnome; ended up recompiling gtk20 against the installed libraries. All in all, portupgrade is nice FWIW, but really it’s not one of my favorites. I usually get my best results doing things by hand, maybe I should give portmaster a go. Since I also had to recompile Pidgin to fix it, I decided on a whim to try compiling GFire (which I have not tried in a _long_ time). Much to my surprise and enjoyment, it went well — now I can connect to XFire off my laptop. Much nicer then redirecting people to use my other IM-details, lol. Also started work on a FreeBSD port for it, mostly just an issue of figuring out the PLIST files and testing out the port files.

Compiling things from source is the only assurable way of getting good results when updating software, a lot of people (that wouldn’t know a library from a linker) don’t get it; for the rest of us, it’s called think before you smash. With my modest hardware, I usually use pre-compiled binary packages whenever possible, but they are not always suitable. One of the things I like about source-based Operating Systems — you can actually fix shit when it blows up.

Oh crap, GDM, GKrellm, GVim, Emacs, and Pidgin are not working well after upgrade. Recompile the offending thing(s) that popped their cork…. and it magically works perfectly >_>. No horrors, no fighting, just flick the switch and take nap lol.