First shots of the not-yet-completed case are here. I still have a lot to do, but part of the grunt work is done. It's fun to do something real, and not just code. I'm not too good at the coding part, so it's nice to see at least something work out. Tonight I'll see if I get the TV tuner to fit in with the back panel too.
Unfortunately it does seem that the drivers for the Mini-ITX board for Linux are crap. It seems that VIA has created (or maybe just link to some contrib drivers) drivers for the Trident graphics chip, but the drivers are seriously out of date. Of course they can now say "hell, we've supported Linux, so shut the fuck up". Sure, you've "supported" and ancient version of XFree86 that would give me enormous amounts of problems to try to track down. For crying out loud, there is probably not much more to do for VIA than recompile the driver for newer versions (not plural) of XFree86 and run the normal tests to check that it works. Of course they provide drivers for every single version of Windows, with great support. I feel so betrayed by VIA, but I have only myself to blame. I shouldn't have trusted VIA's marketing and should have thoroughly checked and validated every single claim they made about Linux drivers.
Now I'm in a bad mood. So let's continue with the next rant.
Debian apt repositories
How damn hard is it really to creat a little custom repository with a few packages in it? I've spent a few hours now tweaking my repository, and it just won't work. I've followed the APT-HOWTO, and it has a nice step-by-step guide for how to create a repository, but it just won't work. apt-get update gives me a weird (undocumented, of course) error when I try to fetch the package listing. From the error it seems there is no error. I've tried all kinds of permutations on the directories in both the sources.list entry and in Packages.gz, but nothing works. I get:
Err http://civil.sf.net ./ Packages 302 Found Ign http://civil.sf.net ./ Release Failed to fetch http://civil.sf.net/download/debian/./Packages 302 Found Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done W: Couldn't stat source package list http://civil.sf.net ./ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/civil.sf.net_download_debian_._Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
And other similar. Seems the error 302 Found means that there is no error, as it has found something? A slightly more verbose error message could maybe be nice? The other errors below that one are probably because apt-get couldn't find the package listing, and the local listing update fails?
I don't know, I'm just so disappointed. I wanted to make something that makes it easy for our Debian users to keep their game up to date, I don't even want to make something that would work for official Debian. I must be a moronic idiot when I can't get this to work.
See above. No repository yet. :)
Update! gilbertt: yes, that works just fine. Why doesn't apt do it? As I understand it the server says that "the site is somewhere else, here's an URL, go get it". I think apt should be able to use that redirect, or at least print a sane message. I had no idea I should even be looking at HTTP response codes. :(
Advogato
Seems that doing two entries on the same day just silently nukes the old entry without any warning? Evil. I normally don't go to the recent log page to read my own entry, but this time I did, and I noticed that my 3hrs older entry was obiliterated. Some Back clicks later I got to see the old text, so maybe I can salvage it. I put so much love into my rants, I don't want to lose them...