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LibraryThing
StumbleuponThat “dash of Linux talk” in the sub-heading? After a long hiatus, here it is.
I recently attempted upgrading to the latest GIMP and xsane on my Sabayon desktop machine. In the process, I temporarily lost my HP 6210 scanner/printer functionality and could not install either GIMP 2.4.0 or 2.4.1. After much swearing and searching, I figured out how to upgrade GIMP and xsane and recover my scanner.
After many upgrade failures, I finally broke down and installed the latest version of Sabayon, 3.4f. To fix my problems after a fresh install (and it should work for a not-so-fresh install), I did the following:
Made sure the following flags existed in in /etc/portage/package.use
media-gfx/xsane tiff gimp jpeg png [the gimp flag isn’t necessary for xsane, but xsane makes for a nice GIMP scanning plugin]
media-gfx/gimp mng wmf jpeg png
app-text/poppler-bindings gtk qt3
Create a symlink from libexif.so.10 to libexif.so.12. Something’s been messed up with libexif in Gentoo for a long time, so it’s pretty much a given to check this when anything link GIMP, ghpoto, or f-spot is involved.
ln -s /usr/lib/libexif.so.12 /usr/lib/libexif.so.10
And the symlink is safe according to the compilation errors I received:
* Note, it is actually safe to create a symlink from libexif.so.10 to
- libexif.so.12 if you need to during the update.
So symlink away!
Check for broken packages.
revdep-rebuild
evince gave me problems on the rebuild, so I unmerged it and then emerged the most recent version. GIMP and xsane rebuilt OK after that.
Install the latest versions of GIMP and xsane.
After all of that, GIMP worked great, but xsane still couldn’t find the scanner. An older 1.6.something version of hplip was istalled, and the most current version was masked. Some more searching revealed that the various versions of hplip-1.7.4 and hplip-2.7.7 worked well with the HP 6210 printer/scanner. I chose the older package.
emerge <del>vp '=hplip</del>1.7.4a-r1'
After install, do a quick restart of the hplip daemon.
/etc/init.d/hplip restart
And that’s what it took for me to get everything working. But, mine was much more halting and involved a lot of swearing. I hope this helps out someone with the same problems.
After it’s all done and resolved, I’m left wondering about the Sabayon/Gentoo profiles. Why the hell didn’t GIMP already have the jpeg and png flags enabled since that’s most of what it handles in practice? Why didn’t poppler-bindings have any of the desktop flags enabled since it’s made specifically for the freaking desktops? And, unrelated to the above problems but still a profile irritation, why doesn’t gftp automatically have the gtk flag enabled? Are there really people out there who see the OpenSSH tools already available at the command line and think, “Gee, if only I could wait 15 minutes to compile this other program for FTP rather than use what’s already here”?
I love Sabayon and Gentoo, but sometimes I simply don’t understand parts of them.
