Overlay Update - XBMC Beta Testers needed!

Perhaps it's a little odd to be writing an overlay update without ever having written about it before, but that's where we are today. In any event, I've just updated the list of packages in my overlay, and thought that it's about time to write about it and to make a call for testers.

My Gentoo Overlay is unimaginatively entitled 'jamesbroadhead', is hosted on overlays.gentoo.org and is accessible through layman (or paludis, if that's your kind of thing). I set it up as a holding ground for ebuilds that weren't quite ready for the sunrise commit process, or which were versions of packages in portage, and so ineligible for Sunrise. I've had mixed success pushing packages to the main tree - my ebuilds for Descent (the awesome '90s game) have been gathering dust for quite a while.

Obligatory Descent screenshot

The contents of the overlay, and a bug tracker for the ebuilds in it are available on my google code page, and gitweb for the overlay is here.

So why would you add the overlay? Well, the main package I regularly bump in sunrise is media-sound/gogglesmm - a very lightweight music player. It does two things rather well - play music, and start-up incredibly fast. If you want the latest version of that, or if you are having problems with the in-sunrise version, give that a try. I've had to patch the ebuilds for the fox toolkit to push for the unmasking of the x11-libs/fox:1.7 SLOT, including getting the SLOTting to work properly, so the version in Sunrise is a little out of date until those changes go live. Please test my overlay version!

gogglesmm-0.12.6 playing CC music from thisisopenmusic.com

Another (recent) reason would be to try out the latest version of xbmc - the 11-series betas have been around for a month now, and I have a working ebuild which I'm using here, but could do with more use-cases. If you try it, please post on the Gentoo Bugzilla with your experiences. If you haven't tried xbmc before, I find it a nice package for my home media center.

Oh, and I also bumped dev-python/selenium, so if you're into web-dev testing, that might be nice. I'll push it to sunrise ... some time soon.

Converting Nokia Ovi Suite Contacts for Android - 2012 Update

Seeing as my original post on converting Nokia OVI Suite contacts continues to get loads of hits, and I had to go through the process again for a friend's phone, I thought that I'd do a quick 2012 update. This will be a summary; if you're having trouble following it, take a look at the original post, which goes into more detail.

First off - things are a little easier these days! Gmail / Google Contacts now accepts multi-VCard .vcf files. Sadly, they still don't allow multi-file import, so the many output .vcf files must still be merged.

As a result, all you need to do is perform a full backup in OVI Suite, extract all the VCards from the the .nbu with NBUExplorer, and merge the VCards into a single file. Then, upload the resultant file to Gmail.

To merge the files, here's a quick snippet which I used in Cygwin:

 $ cat *.vcf >> merged.vcf 

According to Wiki, this is the DOS equivalent (but I don't even have dosbox installed right now to test it):

 $ copy /a a.vcf + b.vcf merged.vcf 

(Yes, that's a '+'; I'm not going to read up on DOS loops for you - just use cygwin).