I recently upgraded to KDE 3.4. I had been waiting for the gentoo folks to unmask it (or rather, promote it from ~x86) but I got tired of waiting. I found a nice script called "gimme" here . This script will add a package to /etc/portage/package.keywords effectively marking that package as ~x86 (or whatever your arch is) so you can emerge "experimental" packages.

The sad thing about this script is that it does only the one package. I had been running the monolithic KDE ebuilds for 3.2 and wanted to switch to the separate ebuilds. There were about 202 dependencies that I'd then have to call gimme for. So like any good UNIX/Linux type, I scripted it. I extended the gimme script to recursively resolve dependencies until they have all been resolved. Here is the script for what it's worth. It's been functional for everything I've used it for but I can't guarantee it won't be flaky in certain circumstances. I hope you find it helpful.

Well, since things were already falling apart at the seams after my aborted upgrade, I decided to finish the job. As it turns out, it would seem the init scripts my hosting provider uses weren't quite killing tomcat. killall -9 took care of the zombie processes and the upgrade went mostly smooth after that. So at least I'm up and running now. I think I'll see to dinner with my wife and daughter. Enough for one day. (I hope.)

Well, I tried to upgrade to the new roller today. Initially i was getting an error about a JDBC driver of '' which of course nothing could work with. Once I resolved that (mainly by handwaving and gnashing of teeth) I finally got roller to start up with my old data. However, the admin pages all went schizo. I'd click a link on the admin pages and then header would show up in the upper right like it should. And then just below and to the right of that, another copy of the header. And then just below and to the right of that, another copy of the header. And then just below and to the right of that, another copy of the header. ...

So I restored the database from back up and rolled back to 1.0. And that's a shame because the one brief peek I got at the new admin stuff looked kinda nice. I'll have to test some and see just what the problem is. Maybe another day. On top of it all my RSS feed appears broken. Maybe I should quit for the day while i'm still (barely) ahead.