Gnome and Totem … previews and codecs
So I just installed Gentoo again because I miss being in linux. I am running amd64, so the first problem I had with totem is that it wouldn't create thumbnails or play certian video files due to missing codecs. Some of codecs I was missing was MPEG-4 and some of the WMV codecs. If you've ever used the x86 branch, you know that by enabling win32codecs, you can get all of the neccisary codecs installed. Of course, this doesn't work in the amd64 branch, but after a bit of googling, I tried installing gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg. Once I got that installed, thumbnails started showing up and videos started playing just fine. If you don't really like totem, I can't say I blame you, there's also VLC which with the proper use flags works fine as well for watching videos.
Another issue I came across was when I was browsing around some files and realized that Nautalis wasn't displaying thumbnails for .flv files. I remember coming across this a long time ago and never finding a solution for the problem, but today things have changed. One thing you will need is gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg installed. From what I understand here, thumbnails don't show up due to Totem not getting the right mime type for FLV files. The comments mention that this is fixed in Totem 2.23.4, but amd64 only has 2.22.2. You've probably already noticed the XML file on the link, but I couldn't make it work in its current format. So, I recreated the file using a format that worked fine for me. To load the file into your configuration just run the command `gconftool-2 --load flv_thumbnailerschema.xml`. Once I ran that command, I refreshed a directory with .flv files and saw thumbnails. YAY!
Here's the download link for the XML file: flv_thumbnailerschema.xml
Anyway, I hope all of this has helped someone out.
Totem and GStreamer properties
Recently I was trying to watch a DVD on my laptop. I'm running compiz-fusion with my ati-drivers, and had a problem with the video showing up. I kept getting a blank screen with a few frames showing up once in a while. I fixed this issue in vlc by setting my video output to x11. I use Gnome for my desktop, and by default, it uses totem as its media player. I tried everything I could think of to find a way to change the backend settings for totem which uses gstreamer.
Finally, after some google searching, I found the solution. gstreamer comes with a configuration tool to change the audio and video settings. It's called gstreamer-properties who would have thought? After running this I changed the video settings to use X11 for gstreamer as well, opened up totem and the DVD played fine! Just thought I'd share this little tidbit.
VMWare Player Issues
Recently I just converted my desktop back to linux, and of course, I'm using Gentoo. I've still got Windows so I can dual boot, but there's just times when it isn't practical to dual boot... so I've come up with another solution. I've installed VMWare Player and created a virtual machine to install Windows XP onto.
Once I got VMWare Player installed, I ran into a few issues. My first issue was that it was unable to find a specific symbol... this was in relation to recompiling dev-cpp/gtkmm with the use flag "accessibility". Once that is rebuilt you also need to rebuild x11-libs/libsexy, dev-cpp/libsexymm and x11-libs/libview. Once those are rebuilt, the error about the missing symbol went away, then it was on to a whole new error message.
The next error message seems to come only when dbus is enabled
process 29624: Attempt to remove filter function 0x7f481078f444 user data 0x7a5490, but no such filter has been added
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
Now I searched far and wide for this, and the only solution I found for a while was just to disable dbus completely. I didn't want to do this because I've got a few programs that are using dbus. After searching more, I found something else. Finally, a Gentoo Bug that tells me what's wrong! It appears by the bug report that if you have dbus running, you must also have hald running. Once I started up hald, vmplayer has worked perfectly.
Hopefully this will help someone and save them from pulling their hair out unlike I did. 
Gentoo stage1 install & ccache
Today I was trying to get Gentoo installed on my desktop from a stage1. I wanted the ccache feature enabled, but kept getting errors like the compiler couldn't create executables and such. I went and did a little digging in the Gentoo forums but ended up finding nothing. It then dawned on me what was wrong after retrying without ccache.
When you first emerge ccache, it automatically creates symlinks to itself for your CHOST setting. That means that in /usr/lib/ccache/bin I had i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc symlinks to ccache. That's why compiles were failing, the compiler didn't exist on my system, but ccache was trying to use it like it did. The simple solution was to run:
ccache-config --remove-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
After using this, things were compiling again using ccache. I do want to note that after sys-devel/gcc emerges during bootstrapping, you'll loose ccache because it will now use the new i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc compiler instead of ccache. All I did to fix this was pause my bootstrap using Ctrl+Z, then type the command
ccache-config --install-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
and then typed in %1 to resume the boostrap job I just paused. I can't prove that this made it use ccache again, but it eased my mind.
So, to sum it up, if you want ccache when compiling from a stage one, you must use
ccache-config --remove-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
first, then
ccache-config --install-links i686-pc-linux-gnu
after sys-devel/gcc has emerged to make sure ccache works with your new compiler. Hope that helps someone out there!
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