Pan Mass Challenge

Next weekend, August 4th and 5th, I’m going to be riding in a charity bike ride called the Pan Mass Challenge. This is a 192 mile bike ride to raise money for cancer research. Unlike so many other charity runs and rides, this event is extremely efficient and 99 cents out of every dollar donated goes directly to research. This year they are targeting at raising 27 Million Dollars and I’ve committed to helping raise $3,600 of that.

Having had two people in my family been diagnosed with cancer and surviving it thanks to the break through’s we’ve already made in this area means a lot to me. And this is something we need to continue. So if its possible, please click on this and help Support me in my ride against cancer! (the whole process will take less than 5 minutes)

More info is also available here.

When life’s got you down…

… Find the nearest tower and CoNTeMPlaTe!

Life’s crazy, dreams are wild, traveling too much to write about, wondering what’s coming next, moving on.

Finding out people that don’t hang out read this? Weird. But it reminds me that this is here. So thats good.

I miss the west coast and the family I have there. I’m excited for Thanksgiving, and I’ll have a lot the be thankfull for. I need to see my parents more. I’m going to call my sister.

Hopefully I’ll write up about Paris and London soon, but its unlikely.

I haven’t rambled enough lately, but this will do for now.

Trouble with installing packages in Gentoo due to XML::Parser errors

I’ve seen this once before and couldn’t remember the exact package I needed to update, so I figured I’d make a post about it so I could find it easily if I came across this again.

Sometimes when emergeing new packages you will get an error like the following:

checking for perl… /usr/bin/perl
checking for XML::Parser… configure: error: XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool
!!! Please attach the following file when filing a report to bugs.gentoo.org:
!!! /var/tmp/portage/x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1/work/xkeyboard-config-0.8/config.log
!!! ERROR: x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1 failed.
Call stack:
ebuild.sh, line 1621: Called dyn_compile
ebuild.sh, line 973: Called qa_call ‘src_compile’
ebuild.sh, line 44: Called src_compile
xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1.ebuild, line 49: Called econf ‘–with-xkb-base=/usr/share/X11/xkb’ ‘–enable-compat-rules’ ‘–disable-xkbcomp-symlink’ ‘–with-xkb-rules-symlink=xorg’
ebuild.sh, line 578: Called die
!!! econf failed
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
!!! A complete build log is located at ‘/var/tmp/portage/x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-0.8-r1/temp/build.log’.

Thanks to this post on karakas-online.de, we can see that this probably really means that perl is unable to load the XML::Parser. You can run the following command at the command line to see exactly why that’s happening:

# /usr/bin/perl -e “require XML::Parser”

In my case this resulted in:

Can’t load ‘/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/auto/XML/Parser/Expat/Expat.so’ for module XML::Parser::Expat: libexpat.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i686-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 14
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 14.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 18.
Compilation failed in require at -e line 1.

And so, even though this package was already installed, I just remerged it, replacing what was there before like so:

emerge -av XML-Parser

After doing this, you should be able to continue your original emerge. I’m not sure what is happening to this package that requires you to do this, but it seems to fix the problem. *shrug*