So, I was finally at the point where I could build a complete install tree for Dave/Dina. The installer, though hackish beyond belief, was able to install all the necessary packages, keep the grub.conf sane for our purposes, and write inittab correctly.
I was finally ready to reinstall our Dave/Dina machine with the new installer and move over old configuration and files. So I did, installer finished fine, and I boot...
And no TV-OUT. Argh.
I think I spent a few hours hunting for kernel configs before I went back in there old-school - just compile kernels by hand, and tweaking settings until I realized what was going wrong. Seriously, the time difference between rebuilding a kernel after changing one option only and doing the same, but rebuilding the whole kernel rpm from scratch each time for three architectures, is huge. Which is logical. But I had gotten so used to the whole change - package cycle for other packages that I didn't even think about running around it for kernel rebuilds.
Anyway, at the end of the day, I had TV-OUT working again for the G400 card. Of course, we only have two working ones left, and we have two machines in use, with four more to be installed. So I have to get cracking on getting the G550 to work decently, probably with DirectFB and X on that. Hope I can get something done this weekend.
DAD
I had held off importing some albums containing accents, because I knew the upgrade to RH9 would buy me better UTF-8 support. Of course, nothing comes for free. So I had to learn stuff I didn't know about UTF-8, and how it's supported in Perl and MySQL. I now know UTF-8 is the answer to all current accent and language problems, and UTF-8's design is very clever in that it eases the transition between old 128-character ASCII and the full unicode range.
Anyway, due to two very sleepless nights (didn't feel sleepy before 4 AM), and after lots of test applications, and some code scrubbing, our digital audio database now manages to import and display albums with UTF-8 in the filenames properly. So I started importing Beyoncé and Björk albums :)
A week before I leave to Spain, stats are like this:
Statistics for dad songs : 16109 artists : 1884 albums : 1244
and for disk usage: [root@davedina root]# du --max-depth=0 /opt/davedina/audio/albums/ 85823596 /opt/davedina/audio/albums
I'm getting there ...
Of course, I still haven't gotten to writing a simple GStreamer-based player to replace XMMS. So, with XMMS being GTK 1, UTF-8 files don't display correctly. But due to the genius of UTF-8 (that IS the reason it works, right ?) it can play them properly anyway ...
Only one true problem left to solve in a clean way. I need to convince RH9's apache/php setup to treat .m3u files as php code, in such a way that just dropping a config file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ makes it happen.
If anyone has a good suggestion what the proper way to do this is, let me know (given the constraint that just dropping one config file in that directory should make it work...)