ubuntu

Exporting only the notes pages from an OpenOffice or LibreOffice presentation

2011-10-27T17:57:00.003-04:00

Previous: Installing Coffeescript on Ubuntu 11.04

Since switching to Ubuntu as my primary (and almost only) platform, I've sometimes had some challenges with presentations created with OpenOffice or LibreOffice Impress. One challenge is producing handouts based on the notes pages in a presentation. The export to PDF feature cannot, apparently, produce a PDF containing only the notes pages. It always exports the slides as well.

I was happy to find a handy script at http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=38797, contributed by user eponymous way back in 2006. The script reads the exported PDF file and writes two PDF files: One containing only the slide images and one containing only the notes pages. The script depends on pdftk (PDF Toolkit) from PDF Labs, available from http://www.pdflabs.com/. Pdftk can also be installed from an Ubuntu repository with

sudo apt-get install pdftk

Next: TBD

Installing Coffeescript on Ubuntu 11.04

2011-09-02T11:09:00.006-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 on Dell Vostro - FAIL

Installing Coffeescript turned out to be slightly different than documented on the Coffeescript site at http://opinionated-programmer.com/2010/12/installing-coffeescript-on-debian-or-ubuntu/. This is how I did it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gezakovacs/coffeescript
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install coffeescript

At this point, when I ran coffee it was unable to find nodejs. I searched for help and discovered this is a known bug as of the date of this post: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coffeescript/+bug/777554. The workaround is:

cd ~/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/node nodejs

With that, Coffeescript ran fine.

Next: Installing Coffeescript on Ubuntu 11.04

Ubuntu 11.04 on Dell Vostro 3550 - FAIL

2011-07-30T17:21:00.004-04:00

Previous: Getting Instiki wiki working on Ubuntu 11.04

I was thinking Natty and Wubi were having a spat. I couldn't get Ubuntu 11.04 running on a Dell Vostro 3550 using Wubi. After using it under VmWare for a while, I tried Wubi again and it worked. Things went very well for a week or so, and then one fine boot it blew chunks, just as it had done before. I could find no help online for the problem, but I did discover several postings that mentioned some kind of deep incompatibility between Ubuntu 11.04 and the Dell Vostro 3550, despite the fact some other Vostro models actually ship with Ubuntu pre-installed. So, the problem isn't an issue with Wubi after all, but an issue with this particular laptop model.

Next: Installing Coffeescript on Ubuntu 11.04

Getting Instiki wiki working on Ubuntu 11.04

2011-06-25T11:32:00.009-04:00

Previous: Installing rvm on Ubuntu 11.04

I started by copying my backup of the whole directory .wiki from an external drive to /home/.wiki.
Then I ran the following commands:

rvm gem install bundler
sudo apt-get install
    libxml2-dev
    libxslt1-dev
    sqlite3
    libsqlite3-dev
cd .wiki
bundle

Bundler installed other components Instiki uses, including nokogiri, rubyzip, and sqlite3-ruby.

Instiki did not start, and reported this error:

/home/dave/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib
    /ruby/1.9.1/psych.rb:148:in `parse': 
    couldn't parse YAML at line 18 column 14 (Psych::SyntaxError)

I found an explanation and workaround by vicvega on
Stack Overflow. I added the lines

require 'yaml'
YAML::ENGINE.yamler= 'syck'

at the top of Instiki's config/boot.rb file (just above the comment that reads, "Don't change this file!"), and Instiki started up clean. In a nutshell, the problem was that bundler uses psych as the default yaml parser, psych is not compatible with rails, and Instiki is a rails app.

In .bash_aliases I added a line to start the wiki conveniently:

alias wiki=~/.wiki/instiki

Next: Ubuntu 11.04 on Dell Vostro 3550 - FAIL

Installing rvm on Ubuntu 11.04

2011-06-25T10:50:00.003-04:00

Previous: GoogleEarth installation on Ubuntu 11.04

I started by referring both to the rvm installation guide and to the notes I had made when I installed rvm on 10.04: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Ruby Version Manager.

They have simplified the installation process for rvm. You used to have to comment a line in .bashrc and then run a script and
then uncomment the line again. They've improved the process so that isn't necessary anymore. Makes the world a better place.

The rvm installation itself worked exactly as documented in the rvm installation guide, so I won't repeat the steps here.

Installed ruby 1.9.2 and 1.8.7 and set 1.9.2 as the default ruby version:

rvm install 1.9.2
rvm install 1.8.7
rvm --default use 1.9.2

This all worked fine and it was easy to switch between versions:


ruby -v (it reported 1.9.2)
rvm use 1.8.7 
ruby -v (it reported 1.8.7)
use default
ruby -v (it reported 1.9.2)

Next: Getting Instiki working on Ubuntu 11.04

GoogleEarth installation on Ubuntu 11.04

2011-06-25T09:20:00.003-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 on VmWare Player with Windows 7 host

The GoogleEarth installation on Ubuntu has changed since I last installed it. This time, the installation went this way:

(1) From the GoogleEarth download site at http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/agree.html download "64 bit .deb (For Debian/Ubuntu)".
(2) In a Terminal window, install the Microsoft TrueType basic font set:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

(3) In a Terminal window, install prerequisite packages to support GoogleEarth:

sudo apt-get install lsb-core

If Ubuntu complains about missing prerequisites for lsb-core, run:

sudo apt-get -f install

(4) In a terminal window, install the .deb package downloaded from the GoogleEarth site:

sudo dpkg -i google-blah-blah.deb

(5) Log out and back in again so that the fonts will be available to Google

Next: Installing rvm on Ubuntu 11.04

Ubuntu 11.04 on VmWare Player with Windows 7 host

2011-06-25T09:05:00.007-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 on Virtualbox with Windows 7 host - FAIL

Despite the issues with Virtualbox, I still felt the VM approach was the way to go to run Ubuntu 11.04 with Windows 7 on the Dell Vostro. It seemed as if there was no free virtualization proram available that would do the job, so I went to the VmWare site expecting to pay around $80, as in years past. I didn't like the idea of having to pay just to use my personal system when on the road, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that VmWare now offers a product called VmWare Player that is available free for personal use. I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on the Dell laptop using VmWare Player.

The installation went smoothly and it was easy to see what was going on at all times.

Just as with Virtualbox, VmWare Player "thought" the system lacked the hardware necessary to run Unity. I don't understand well enough how virtualization software works to have a guess as to why that might be. The "real" hardware is certainly adequate. Of course, for this limited purpose the classic Gnome desktop is perfectly adequate, too.

On edit: Found a solution from David Tam on his blog. It seems Unity depends on hardware 3D graphics acceleration, which is not supported in a guest VM. The solution is to switch to a 2D version of the Unity desktop:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-2d-team/unity-2d-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-2d-default-settings

then log out and in again. Voilá!

Network connectivity from the guest OS was seamless. I plugged a USB stick into a port, and VmWare Player connected it to the Ubuntu instance with no problem.

I shut down the Ubuntu guest from inside the guest, then double-clicked its entry in VmWare Player's list to restart it. All normal.

Good to go.

Next: GoogleEarth installation on Ubuntu 11.04

Ubuntu 11.04 on Virtualbox with Windows 7 host - FAIL

2011-06-25T09:01:00.004-04:00

Previous: Windows 7 boot menu issues

With Ubuntu 11.04 running as a VirtualBox VM on a Microsoft Windows 7 host system, USB devices are not visible to the guest Ubuntu instance. Community documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/USB says, "Add yourself to the user group vboxusers, then log out and back in." I found no group named vboxusers, so I created one and added my own account, logged out and back in. This had absolutely no effect.

Another source at http://www.ubuntugeek.com/running-ubuntu-11-04-natty-unity-3d-on-virtualbox-4-x.html suggested installing "Virtualbox guest additions," and said to "click on Devices->Install guest additions," which I could not find anywhere, in any menu of any application on either the host or guest systems.

As a last resort, I looked at the Virtualbox user manual. On this page http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11234128 it suggested the following procedure to install Virtualbox guest additions for Ubuntu:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install dkms

and then...oops...point to the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere at all. Searching further, I found a thread on Ubuntu Forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=584763 where people were looking for this file. This thread also recommends opening the "Devices" drop-down menu in Virtualbox, but there is no such menu item. A thread on the Virtualbox forums at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7007 also recommends using this drop-down menu, which does not exist.

Finally, I found an answer at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=38548. The Virtualbox menu bar in the guest window does not appear when running in "scale" mode. Used host-C to get out of "scale" mode, and the menu appeared. (I had switched to scale mode early on, since the Ubuntu screen image does not fit inside its Windows window, and resizing the Windows window had no effect on the size or aspect ratio of the Ubuntu screen.) The option to install the virtual guest additions resulted in an iso file appearing as an external CD-ROM drive in the guest Ubuntu instance.

At that point, I ran the update and upgrade and installed dkms. Upgrade did quite a lot and took several minutes to run.

After following the instructions at http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11234128, the guest OS still did not see the USB drive. Virtualbox reported the error, "USB device ' ' with UUID {blah} is busy with a previous request. Please try again later," and under Details it gave the result code E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057) for component HostUSBDevice and interface IHostUSBDevice.

Next: Ubuntu 11.04 on VmWare Player with Windows 7 host

Windows 7 boot menu issues

2011-06-25T08:58:00.005-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 on Wubi with Windows 7 - FAIL

After I removed the Wubi-installed copy of Ubuntu from the Dell laptop, there was just the one OS on the system. Yet, the boot menu continued to appear on startup, showing the now-defunct entry for Ubuntu. I discovered that Microsoft had made Windows a bit harder to use since Vista, in that there was no easy way to remove this entry from the boot menu. Msconfig was mentioned on several forums, but it doesn't appear to include a boot menu editor.

I took a chance on a downloaded product from NeoSmart Technologies called EasyBCD. It was intuitive to remove the entry from the boot menu and did no collateral damage. However, on restart the system still displayed the boot menu, now showing only one entry. When there is only one OS installed, there is no need to display the boot menu. It's just a waste of time. Haven't found a fix yet.

Next: Ubuntu 11.04 on Virtualbox with Windows 7 host - FAIL

Ubuntu 11.04 on Wubi with Windows 7 - FAIL

2011-06-25T07:50:00.003-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 11.04 installation

Recently I joined a company as a consultant, and the job requires frequent travel. The company laptop runs Microsoft Windows 7, and some of the company's software tools require Windows. I wanted to have some personal computer time while on the road but I didn't want to have to take two laptops with me, so I decided to install Ubuntu 11.04 under Wubi on that machine. This is a Dell Vostro laptop.

I was never able to get 11.04 to run properly after a Wubi install. There seemed to be some problem related to the video driver. Unfortunately, I could not get to a command line prompt at all. Once the machine reached a certain point in the installation, the display just displayed multicolored garbage or part of a memory dump, and did not respond to the keyboard or mouse.

I did not want to mess with the partitions on that machine, since Windows tends to be very sensitive to that sort of thing (see [blog post link]. Instead, I downloaded VirtualBox and installed 11.04 in a VM. It's functional, but doesn't take good advantage of the host system's video adapter. It won't even run Unity, thinking the "hardware" isn't up to the challenge.

One strange thing...after installing and creating a user account and so forth, when I restarted the guest OS it always wanted to install Ubuntu from scratch. I never found a good reason for it, but when I deleted all the Virtualbox log files (but not the log directory), the problem went away and the guest OS came up normally. After Virtualbox wrote to its log files again, the problem reappeared. Therefore, there did not seem to be any way to establish a reusable Linux instance. Every time I started the virtual machine I had to install Linux again. This is not especially useful.

Due to the issues with a Wubi install of 11.04, I decided not to upgrade the Acer Netbook. It happily runs 10.10.

Next: Windows 7 boot menu issues

Ubuntu 11.04 installation

2011-06-25T07:44:00.005-04:00

Previous: Installing Android SDK and Eclipse ADT plug-in

I managed to corrupt the root partition on my main personal system, a Toshiba Satellite P500. Since I had to re-install Ubuntu anyway, I took the opportunity to move on to 11.04.

I wanted to keep the same partition structure as I had before on the Toshiba, with a 30GB partition mounted at /, an 8GB swap partition, and the rest of the disk as a single partition mounted at /home. The installation went smoothly. Just remember to connect your machine to the internet by wire for purposes of the installation. It won't find your wireless adapter during the installation process.

Default settings in .bashrc are a little different in 11.04 than they were in 10.04.
It ships with popular ls aliases and with .bash_aliases already sourced.
I made no changes to .bashrc this time.

Next: Ubuntu 11.04 on Wubi with Windows 7 host - FAIL

Installing Android SDK and Eclipse ADT Plug-In

2011-03-12T10:48:00.006-05:00

Previous: Ripping CDs on Ubuntu 10.04

My interest in Android development was rekindled when I got a new Android phone last month. After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, I had not reinstalled the Android development tools, so I installed them fresh.

Prerequisites

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Get the Android development kit

The Android development kit contains tools for building and testing Android apps. There are some very good tutorials on developer.android.com/resources/ that will help you get started.

1. Create home directory for android development tools. I chose ~/.android.

2. Download sdk from developer.android.com/sdk. At the time I did this, it was release 10. Note that the file name contains the releacd tse number. Place the downloaded file in the android development home directory.

3. In a command line window, change to the android development home directory.

4. Unpack the distribution.

gunzip -c android-sdk_r10-linux_x86.tgz | tar xopf -

You will end up with ~/.android/android-sdk_r10-linux_x86/. (The directory name contains the release number.)

Get Android platform development tools

The basic Android SDK contains only the core development tools. From the readme:

"In order to start developing applications, you must install the Platform-tools
and at least one version of the Android platform, using the SDK Manager.

"Platform-tools contains build tools that are periodically updated to support new
features in the Android platform (which is why they are separate from basic
SDK tools), including adb, dexdump, and others."

1. Change to the Android development home directory and start the SDK Manager:

tools/android

From the selections on the left side of the window, choose Available packages, then expand Android Repository. Tick the checkboxes next to the items you want to install. I chose Android SDK Platform-tools, revision 3, Documentation for Android SDK, API 11, revision 1, SDK Platform Android 3.0, API 11, revision1, SDK Platform Android 2.3.3, API 10, revision 1, Samples for SDK API 10, revision 1, and Samples for SDK API 11, revision 1. I got 3.0 because it was the latest version at the time, and 2.3.3 because it was the version that came with my shiny new Android phone.

After making your selections, click the button labeled Install Selected, in the lower right-hand corner of the window. It will display a list of components and licenses. You must choose Accept for each component or Accept All before the download will proceed. After accepting the licenses you want, click the Install button. It will display download progress.

If you don't have ADB running (and you won't at this point, if this is a fresh install, because ADB is not part of the base distribution), you may see the message "'adb kill-server' failed -- run manually if necessary." The installer attempts to kill the server because the server must be down for the install. This does not stop the installer.

If you get the message, "A package that depends on ADB has been updated. Do you want to restart ADB now?" choose Yes.

When the installation is complete, click Close to close the progress dialog box. Now if you choose Installed packages from the left-hand menu, you will see a list of the components you just installed.

Get the Eclipse IDE

It is not necessary to use Eclipse for Android development. You can use any IDE or other development tools you prefer. The course of least resistance is to use Eclipse, since that is what the Android team uses and all the tutorials and documentation assume you are using it, too. You can do everthing from the command line; there are no hard dependencies on Eclipse.

1. Download the appropriate Eclipse distribution from www.eclipse.org.

Eclipse is available preconfigured to support several common types of development. For Android development, you need only the most basic packaging of Eclipse. At the time I did this, it was called "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers."

2. Create home directory for Android-specific instance of Eclipse

I prefer to have Eclipse configured separately for each project rather than to have a single instance loaded with every imaginable plug-in.g I created a directory named ~/.eclipse-android for this instance.

3. Unpack the Eclipse distribution in its home directory.

gunzip -c eclipse-java-helios-SR2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz | tar xopf -

This resulted in ~/.eclipse-android/eclipse/

Install the Eclipse ADT plug-in

The documentation at developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html#installing is very clear and helpful.

I started the new instance of Eclipse and created a workspace called android-sandbox to play in. I installed the ADT following the instructions at developer.android.com. This is a conventional Eclipse plug-in install, so I am not going to repeat all the steps here. One thing to note is that some of the content is unsigned, and you may see a warning message about that.

Configure the Eclipse ADT plug-in

For convenience, I created a symlink for to the Android development home directory in .profile:

ln -s ~/.android/android-sdk-linux_x86 ~/.android-sdk

. This matches the default configuration of the ADT plug-in. To change it, in Eclipse go to Windows > Preferences, choose Android, and set the value of SDK Location.

Create an Android Virtual Device

After installing the Eclipse ADT plug-in, you can run the Android SDK and AVD Manager from inside Eclipse. The plug-in adds a menu item to Eclipse's Window menu titled Android SDK and AVD Manager.

Start the Manager. If this is a fresh installation, you will see the message "No AVD available." Click New to get the "Create New Android Virtual Device (AVD)" dialog. Enter anything you please as the Name (it doesn't like spaces in the name).

The Target drop-down will contain a list of the Android platforms you installed. Pick the one you want for the new AVD.

Click Create AVD.

Verify the installation

The simplest way to verify the installation is to create an Android project and see if you can build a simple app and run it on your AVD.

The first indication of success is that the ADT options appear in Eclipse menus. Try File > New > Project and see if the Android entry appears in the list of project types.

When you create an Android project in Eclipse, ADT gives you a skeletal Java file to start you off. This isn't runnable as is. I suggest following the "Hello World" tutorial at developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html.

Once you've got the Hello World code in place, you can run the app in the emulator from inside Eclipse by right-clicking the project entry in Package Explorer and choosing Run As > Android Application.

A word of warning. The first time I ran my Hello World app from inside Eclipse, the emulator seemed to hang at a point before it loaded the app. Eventually it timed out, and complained that it could not load the app. However, the emulator itself finally started up. I could then run the app with no problems. If you see this behavior, it doesn't mean your app is configured wrong. The emulator just takes a long time to initialize itself. A long time. Several minutes.

If you eventually see the words "o;Hello, Android" appear on the emulator screen, then your installation was successful. Good luck and have fun.

Next: Ubuntu 11.04 installation

Ripping CDs on Ubuntu 10.04

2010-11-14T18:59:00.002-05:00

Previous: Candy OM for MongoDB and Ruby - FAIL

So, using RhythmBox to rip CDs seems to work (mostly), although it's excruciatingly slow. There's an additional annoyance, too, in that it gets confused after you've processed a few CDs (people have reported the problem after ripping between 2 and 6 CDs) and you have to restart it to get it working again. It turns out, as well, that just closing the application window doesn't really kill the darned thing. You have to go into System Monitor and shoot the background process in its sleep.

I checked the Ubuntu community docs and found a fair amount of information about CD ripping.

Though there's a warning about a bug in LAME that causes problems for Sound Juicer, I gave Sound Juicer a try because there seem to be a lot of positive comments about it online. After installing the gstreamer libs needed for mp3 support, Sound Juicer consistently and silently died the instant I clicked the button to start the rip. Since this behavior does not result in any mp3 files, it doesn't quite meet my needs. I found a posting on a 2008 discussion list in which someone described exactly the same problem. No one had replied with a solution.

Next up was RipperX, which managed to generate a few corrupted files before collapsing to the floor in a useless heap of bits.

RubyRipper sounded promising, so I tried it. Despite notes to the contrary online, I was unable to find any way to tell RubyRipper that I wanted mp3 output instead of ogg output. It did a good job producing ogg files, though. For all I know, it can do mp3 too, in some mysterious way.

Next I tried Asunder, another program listed on the Ubuntu site. This was simple to install, and didn't require any additional dependencies from off-the-beaten-path repositories or other tweaks:

sudo apt-get install asunder

It has a simple UI that offers a short list of popular audio formats, including mp3. It can also go out to CDDB and look up album information. I found it easy to use, much faster than RhythmBox, and it generated playable mp3 files. A winner.

Asunder has characteristics I appreciate in software: (1) It does just one job and does it well; (2) installation and use are intuitive enough that no user manual is needed; (3) it's packaged and distributed in a way that takes the technical burden off the end user.

Next: Installing Android SDK and Eclipse ADT on Ubuntu 10.04

Candy OM for MongoDB and ruby - FAIL

2010-11-11T19:59:00.002-05:00

Previous: Success with rvm and ruby 1.9.2

Installing Candy and incorporating it with my experimental Sinatra project consisted of doing an rvm install:

rvm gem install candy

and updating the Gemfile with

gem "candy", :require => "candy"

Easy and clean.

Unfortunately, I had no luck at all trying to run the basic Person class example given in the readme, or the Zagnut example, or indeed any other variations I attempted, whether standalone or integrated with the sinatra app. After about four hours of trying, I posted some encouragement on the candy discussion forum and expressed the hope that it will become functional soon. I plan to check back in a couple of months to see if it's working yet. I hope the author will continue working on it, because it's a good concept. (To be fair, he does warn that candy is in an alpha-alpha state.)

Candy has, at least, provided the inspiration I needed to work through the difficulties I was having with installing rvm and ruby 1.9.2. Those bits are now installed and working well. For the moment, I think I'll try to keep going without an object mapper and see how tedious that proves to be. That's probably better for the purpose of learning MongoDB well, anyway. MongoDB has a pretty straightforward API, and it may be sufficient just to wrap persistence logic in a helper class. That way, if I decide to move to an object mapper it should be possible to replace the persistence logic without affecting the rest of the code.

Next: Ripping CDs on Ubuntu 10.04

Success with rvm and ruby 1.9.2

2010-11-11T16:50:00.003-05:00

Previous: Ruby 1.9.2, rvm, and Sinatra follies

So, I've spent a couple of evenings playing with Sinatra and MongoDB under ruby 1.8.7. I've learned a bit and made progress in getting Sinatra apps to run on localhost. When I reached the point that I needed an object mapper, I read the descriptions of the ones listed on the MongoDB site. MongoMapper looks really good; very well thought-out, very competently designed, very clean code. But another one, Candy, stood out for me because instead of mimicking the approach of ActiveRecord, it explicitly and unapologetically takes advantage of the unique, very non-relational characteristics of MongoDB.

Candy is relatively new code, and it requires ruby 1.9 as a baseline. That meant I had reached an appropriate point to re-try rvm and ruby 1.9.2.

Having installed rvm three times previously, making plenty of educational mistakes each time, I found the installation procedure easy and quick this time around. I left the system install of 1.8.7 in place, used rvm to install 1.9.2, and set 1.9.2 as the rvm default.

Next step was to ensure existing ruby apps would work under 1.9.2. I started my local Instiki instance and got this message:

Bundler couldn't find some gems.Did you run 'bundle install'?

I tried running 'bundle install' and got

'report-activate-error': Could not find RubyGem bundler

So, I tried 'rvm gem install bundler' and it worked. The 'bundle install' command then worked, too.

At that point Instiki started up normally. So far, so good! (I use Instiki for general notes and record-keeping, so it's in the nature of a "production" system for me. Getting it up and running is always the first order of business when I upgrade ruby.)

I changed to the directory where I've been playing with Sinatra and tried to start my test app. I have a Gemfile there, and when I ran 'bundle install' it appeared to download and install all the necessary gems under rvm.

When running cukes, specs, and the app itself I got a number of errors pertaining to files not found on 'require'. All these errors were due to require 'foo' instead of require './foo'. I expected this, since ruby 1.9.2 does not include the current directory in the ruby load path by default. Once I fixed that on a single line in a single file, everything that had been working before was working again under ruby 1.9.2. Nice!

I have some old side projects in rails that probably will not start. I'll get around to fixing them later. For now, I'm pleased to be up and running at last with rvm and ruby 1.9.2.

Next: Candy OM for MongoDB and ruby - FAIL

Ruby 1.9.2, rvm, and Sinatra follies

2010-11-10T17:43:00.008-05:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade: Summary

I recently reported success with installing Ruby Version Manager (rvm). It appeared to install and function correctly; or at least it didn't report any errors. I was able to get my local Instiki up and running with no difficulty.

I didn't do much with ruby since then, up until three days ago. I spent the next two evenings struggling to get things to work. Online resources are plentiful but unhelpful. It seems no one else has experienced the same issues as I have. That in itself suggests pibcak. I readily admit to noob status, but unfortuantely that's not enough information to get things working again.

In hindsight I would say I asked for trouble by trying to use three unfamiliar technologies at the same time: Ruby 1.9.2, rvm, and Sinatra. I saw several bewildering behaviors whose root causes I was unable to pin down:

require was sometimes able to locate gems and sometimes not; GEM_PATH was correct; I realized the current directory was no longer included in the ruby load path by default, and changed code accordingly; no luck.
It seemed as if public methods inherited by a subclass were treated as private methods at runtime.
In theory, you can write a Sinatra app file as a plain script and it will inherit from Sinatra::Application silently; alternatively, you can write the file as a ruby class that extends Sinatra::Base, and it will work the same. I found that with the former method, Sinatra recognized its routes and functioned as expected; when the main Sinatra app file was a ruby class, no routes were ever recognized. By the same token, cucumber and rspec only worked against a class file, and not against the plain script version of the same Sinatra file. So, I had a choice between being able to run cukes and specs, or being able to run the app.

I lacked the experience with these technologies to understand what was happening, or where the problem(s) were coming from.

I decided to eliminate the suspects one by one. I removed rvm and all traces of ruby from my system and installed ruby 1.8.7 the old-fashioned way, and got my little side projects up and running in that environment (as they had worked before). That gave me a baseline for exploring the new items, which I still want to learn about and use.

I began my investigation with Sinatra, running it under the (to me) more-familiar ruby 1.8.7. I observed the same odd behavior regarding the main app file, and it became obvious at that point that the public/private issue had to do with Sinatra and not with ruby 1.9.2. It seems to have something to do with the way Sinatra inserts its magical code under the covers.

I found a gem called cucumber-sinatra that generates a skeleton directory structure and an env.rb file tailored to work with Sinatra. Rather than trying to write my own env.rb from scratch, as I had been doing, I let cucumber-sinatra do its thing. Still no luck: It was either run the app or run the cukes, but not both.

The env.rb file generated by cucumber-sinatra looked like this:

# Generated by cucumber-sinatra. (Wed Nov 10 16:38:55 -0500 2010)
ENV['RACK_ENV'] = 'test'

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', '..', 'lib/my_app.rb')
require 'capybara'
require 'capybara/cucumber'
require 'rspec'

Capybara.app = MyApp

class MyAppWorld
  include Capybara
  include RSpec::Expectations
  include RSpec::Matchers
end

World do
  MyAppWorld.new
end

This still had the same odd behavior regarding inherited public methods. I was getting better at using Gemfile and bundle, but was no closer to having a usable environment. I found a github page by Aslak Hellesoy that had a slightly different sample env.rb file for cucumber-sinatra. It looked like this:

app_file = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), *%w[.. .. app.rb])
require app_file
# Force the application name because polyglot breaks the auto-detection logic.
Sinatra::Application.app_file = app_file

require 'rspec/expectations'
require 'rack/test'
require 'webrat'

Webrat.configure do |config|
  config.mode = :rack
end

class MyWorld
  include Rack::Test::Methods
  include Webrat::Methods
  include Webrat::Matchers

  Webrat::Methods.delegate_to_session :response_code, :response_body

  def app
    Sinatra::Application
  end
end

World{MyWorld.new}

All that "app_file" business near the top of the file pertains to the plain script style of a Sinatra app file; that is, not a subclass of Sinatra::Base. I was happy to see the example because it suggested a way to set things up such that both cucumber and a web server could understand the file. Using this as an example, I set up an env.rb file for a small test app like this:

ENV['RACK_ENV'] = 'test'
app_file = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', '..', 'lib/my_app.rb')
require app_file

Sinatra::Application.app_file = app_file 

require 'rspec/expectations'
require 'rack/test'
require 'webrat'

Webrat.configure do |config|
  config.mode = :rack
end

class MyWorld
  include Rack::Test::Methods
  include Webrat::Methods
  include Webrat::Matchers

  Webrat::Methods.delegate_to_session :response_code, :response_body

  def app
    Sinatra::Application
  end
end

World{MyWorld.new}

With this env.rb file, I can run

bundle exec cucumber features

and I can run the app in a web browser. I'm not crazy about it and I don't fully understand how it works, but at least it works and I can proceed with development while gradually learning more about Sinatra.

I posted a question on Twitter about these problems, and three people offered help. But they're not at my beck and call, and I need to learn about these things anyway.

Now that I have a working ruby 1.8.7 environment again, my next step will be to install rvm and bring up a 1.8.7 environment, then to ensure everything that's working now works the same way in that environment. That will give me a basis to explore ruby 1.9.2 with a bit more clarity about where the differences lie. Once I get rvm working properly, I can install 1.9.2 under its control without losing my functional 1.8.7 environment. All good; but it will take this noob some time to get there.

Next: Success with rvm and ruby 1.9.2

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade: Summary

2010-11-08T18:25:00.011-05:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: TrueType fonts & VSM font

I had no problems following the basic installation procedure guided by the installation disk. Differences I noticed:

9.04 did not recognize the integrated Bluetooth adapter in my Toshiba Satellite laptop. 10.04 also does not recognize it.

9.04 did not wake up from sleep after I closed the lid on the laptop. 10.04 works properly.

9.04 did not shut down the computer on shutdown, and did not restart Ubuntu on restart. 10.04 works properly.

9.04 supported the internal microphone on my laptop. 10.04 does not support the internal microphone. I found a bug report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/584051 and it appears as if the bug is not considered important. I bought an inexpensive headset and found that 10.04 works fine with the external microphone.

The biggest change is that Ubuntu no longer comes with a pre-installed Java JDK. The official JDK from Oracle is available from the Canonical partner repository. Since it is no longer free software (in the FSF sense), it cannot be part of the basic Ubuntu multiverse. The Ubuntu community recommends Open JDK, but I installed the Oracle version. No doubt the day is coming when I will switch. Same sort of thing applies to OpenOffice and MySQL. Free alternatives exist for both.

Next: Ruby 1.9.2, rvm, and Sinatra follies

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: TrueType fonts & VSM font

2010-11-03T17:12:00.003-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Instiki wiki

To install some favorite TrueType fonts, I installed the basic TT font package:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

To install the very handy Value Stream Mapping font from Ambor, I followed the procedure documented in this blog entry.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade: Summary

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Instiki wiki

2010-11-02T22:25:00.007-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Ruby Version Manager

Recent practice migrating my wiki on the Acer netbook made the process go smoothly on the Toshiba.

First step was to install prerequisites::

sudo apt-get install
    libxml2-dev
    libxslt1-dev
    sqlite3
    libsqlite3-dev
gem install sqlite3-ruby

Then, I downloaded the latest Instiki from http://instiki.org/ and unpacked the tarball. I copied the instiki directory to /home and renamed it .wiki. Next, I changed to the .wiki directory and ran

ruby bundle

Finally, I renamed the installed db and public directories to db-shipped and public-shipped, and copied the db and public directories from my wiki backup. Instiki came up clean the first time.

Now to get my wiki startup and shutdown scripts working. I copied the icon, instiki.png, to the new .wiki directory. Created a .bin directory in /home and copied the wiki and wiki_stop scripts there. The new directory structure was different, so I edited the scripts accordingly.

My shutdown script didn't work, and after some experimentation I realized that instiki startup is a bit different than it used to be. Previously, it printed the pid to stderr, and I picked it up with awk to generate a shutdown script on the fly. This version of Instiki appears not to do that, so I need to work out another way to handle shutdown nicely. Not worth pursuing at the moment.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: TrueType fonts & VSM font

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Ruby Version Manager

2010-11-02T21:45:00.008-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Skype

Installation of rvm went pretty smoothly after the practice I got installing it on the Acer netbook. First step was to install prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install
    curl
    git-core
    build-essential
    zlib1g-dev
    libssl-dev
    libreadline5-dev

Next step was to run curl to do the basic install of rvm:

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

Then I edited .bashrc and commented out the line

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

I noticed I had made a mistake when adding the source line to .bashrc on the Acer. The line should be

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

After that, I executed .bashrc like this

. ./.bashrc

and when I ran

type rvm | head -n1

I got the response

rvm is a function

just as the original instructions said to expect.

Next I ran

rvm install 1.9.2

and it downloaded and installed ruby 1.9.2 and rubygems 1.3.7.

At this point ruby -v said "The program 'ruby' is currently not installed". After I ran

rvm --default 1.9.2

then ruby -v said "ruby 1.9.2p0..." and gem -v said "1.3.7".

I uncommented the line

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

in .bashrc to see if my guess was right about reinstating it after rvm had been used once. I closed the Terminal window and opened a new one, and ruby -v still worked. I logged out and in again, and ruby -v still worked.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Instiki wiki

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Skype

2010-11-02T19:54:00.013-04:00

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Adobe Flash Player

The last time I checked, there was no 64-bit Skype client for Linux. On http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-skype/on-your-computer/linux/ I found a beta version available, and they showed a 64-bit version available. I downloaded it to give it a try.

No instructions were provided, but I saw by the filename that it was a .deb file. Fellow noobs might recall that Ubuntu is descended from Debian, so we can use Debian utilities on Ubuntu. In Terminal, I ran the following command:

sudo dpkg -i skype-ubuntu-intrepid_2.1.0.81-1_amd64.deb

The installer complained of missing dependencies. I tried apt-get install on the exact names of packages the installer listed:

sudo apt-get install
    lib32stdc++6
    lib32asound2
    ia32-libs
    libc6-i386
    lib32gcc1

Ubuntu could find no installation candidate for any of these packages.

An Internet search brought me to http://blog.mypapit.net/2007/06/how-to-install-skype-on-ubuntu.html, which mentioned adding deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free to Synaptic Package Manager.

I made a backup of /etc/apt/sources/list

cd /etc/apt
sudo cp sources.list sources.list.backup

and edited the file, adding the repository at the end.

When I tried the apt-get install command above, everything was found except list32stdc++6. Another Internet search took me to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1457771, where someone had reported a similar problem and later posted that an update had fixed it. I tried

sudo apt-get update

but the update complained that it could not find http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/dists/stable/non-free/binary-amd64/Packages.gz.

I went back into /etc/apt/sources.list and commented out the line for that repository, then tried the update again. No complaints, so I tried

sudo apt-get install lib32stdc++6

This time it complained about unmet dependencies, and suggested running this:

sudo apt-get -f install

This did quite a lot, including installing or updating all the dependencies the dpkg command had complained about. It took a while.

To my surprise, it installed the Skype client as well. I called my wife, and she could see me but not hear me. I could see and hear her. We were unable to resolve the problem. Afterwards, I browsed the Internet and eventually found a bug report at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/584051 that said the internal microphone on Toshiba Satellite laptops doesn't work under Ubuntu 10.04 due to a bug in the alsa driver. It's low priority and they may or may not fix it. Other postings online suggest an external microphone will work. I might try that later.

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Ruby Version Manager

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Adobe Flash Player

2010-11-02T19:41:00.006-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Prep and basic install

At the time of this installation, Adobe Flash Player for 64-bit Linux systems was still in a preview release. I went to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html and downloaded the tarball for Linux. No installation instructions were provided.

When I unpacked the tarball, I found it contained a single file: libflashplayer.so. The filename jogged my memory, and I looked on this blog for previous notes about installing a non-production version of Flash Player with Firefox. I found it in this blog entry, and copied libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins and restarted Firefox.

Gold!

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Skype

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Prep and basic install

2010-11-02T19:19:00.006-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Instiki migration

The "upgrade" consisted of a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04. To prepare for the install, I did the following:

Cleaned up files and directories.
Moved Gnome .desktop files for certain apps from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications.
Backed up my /home and /usr directories to an external hard drive

I learned a couple of lessons in the past few months of using Ubuntu. First, I learned that it's possible to define .desktop files under one's home directory. I moved some of these so that they could be backed up and restored with my /home directory. I also learned that there's no particular benefit in a separate partition for /usr.

Before committing to the new release, I ran 10.04 from the installation disk without doing the actual install. I was pleased to see that the 5100 AGN wireless adapter was supported. Everything looked okay to go forward with the installation.

Based on lessons learned, I defined partitions as follows:

ext4    30.0 GB    /        /dev/sda1
ext4   362 GB    /home    /dev/sda6
swap     8 GB             /dev/sda5

The installation went smoothly. I restored /home from the backup.

I checked to see if 10.04 might support the integrated Bluetooth adapter in the laptop, but unfortunately it does not.

I opened a presentation file that contains images to see whether the bug related to hardware graphics acceleration had been fixed in OpenOffice 3.2. Yes!

I opened Firefox and saw that it is now branded as Firefox instead of Shiretoko. Good! I went to http://www.xmarks.com and installed the plug-in, then synced my bookmarks.

On the local system, I went to System -> Preferences -> Appearance and changed the Theme to Radiance.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Adobe Flash Player

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Instiki migration

2010-11-02T06:55:00.003-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Ruby Version Manager and Ruby 1.9.2

One final check on the Acer before attempting this install on the Toshiba: Will my local Instiki wiki run under ruby 1.9.2?

First, I installed the usual prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install
    libxml2-dev
    libxslt1-dev
    sqlite3
    libsqlite3-dev
gem install sqlite3-ruby

Then, I downloaded the latest Instiki from http://instiki.org/ and unpacked the tarball.

When I started Instiki, it complained:

Bundler couldn't find some gems. Did you run 'bundle install'?

This hasn't happened before in my experience, so I assume it has something to do with running ruby under rvm vs. running it native.

I did an Internet search for 'instiki bundle install' and found useful information at http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/wiki/instiki/show/installation. After reading that information, I thought I had everything in place to run the bundle command, so I ran it from the instiki root directory:

ruby bundle

No complaints, so I started Instiki and it came up clean.

I shut down Instiki and copied the 'public' and 'db' directories from my old wiki (still on the Toshiba) to the one just installed on the Acer. This was sort of a risky short-cut, since I didn't follow any of the instructions for migrating the database. When I started Instiki, it came up clean. Apparently there have been no changes to the basic database structure since the last release. (Whew!)

I noticed that they've added a 'Skip the navigation links' link as the first link in the navigation bar of Instiki. That's a nice accessibility feature and a convenience for anyone who prefers the keyboard to the mouse. Kudos.

At this point, it looked as if Ubuntu 10.04 was okay for the Acer.

(Actually, Ubuntu has been more than just 'okay' for the Acer. IMHO it's a very good environment for a netbook. It's functional, simple, clean, relatively safe, and supports all the usual social networking tools. OpenOffice provides the tools I need to make presentations and so forth when on the road. A $200 machine with a free operating system and all the applications I need ... ideal for the purpose.)

Open questions about how 10.04 would run on the 64-bit Toshiba and whether it would support the wireless adapter could only be answered by installing it on that machine. Installing typical development tools should be no different on either machine, and since I don't use the Acer for development there was no value in going any further with those installs.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Toshiba Satellite: Prep and basic install

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Ruby Version Manager and Ruby 1.9.2

2010-11-01T21:55:00.003-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Adobe Flash Player

The things I had done so far on the Acer did not tell me much about how 10.04 would play on the Toshiba. I was leery of 5100 AGN support, and the Adobe Flash Player for 64-bit Linux was still in a pre-release state.

Installing software development tools ought to be less problematic than all that. I found that many people were singing the praises of Ruby Version Manager (rvm). It gives you the ability to run multiple releases of ruby on the same machine without having to uninstall and install different releases. It sounded useful, and most of the comments online were very positive.

Following advice on http://web2linux.com/installing-rails-3-on-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx/, I began by installing prerequisites to rvm and ruby:

apt-get install
    curl
    git-core
    build-essential
    zlib1g-dev
    libssl-dev
    libreadline5-dev

I then proceeded to make a series of noob mistakes, and after cleaning off various partial and incorrect installs, this is how I got rvm working. The official installation instructions at http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/ are pretty good, but are not exactly right.

The installation instructions mention three options — install as user, install as root, and system-wide install. I wanted to install as user so that everything would be under /home. That makes it easier to upgrade Ubuntu, since I can restore /home from a backup after doing the basic install. That was my plan for the Toshiba, anyway. For the Acer, I just blew everything away and installed fresh.

First step was to use curl to get the latest version of rvm from head:

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

This step appeared to work. The author, Wayne Seguin, kindly included the following advice in the console output: "Be sure to get head often as rvm development happens fast." Sound advice.

They suggest running

rvm notes

to install dependencies, but in fact it only displays a description of dependencies.

They say you must not have any returns in .bashrc. They specifically call out a line in Unbuntu's .bashrc:

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

and they recommend wrapping this in an if structure so that rvm will work correctly. I found that after completing the rest of the installation steps, rvm never worked. It turned out that this change is required only for the installation process, and once rvm has been installed you should reinstate the original statement. I changed it to

if [[ -n "$PS1" ]] ; then
    return
fi

and afterwards changed it back to

[ -z "$PS1" ] & return

The installation instructions also say to put this line at the end of .bashrc:

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

They then say you have to run

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

the first time you use rvm. In fact, you have to run this command every time you want to use rvm. I added the source command to the end of .bashrc, and rvm now works properly.

The other thing to be aware of is that the installation instructions say you run

type rvm | head -n1

and it should display

rvm is a function

Then, you run the source command for the first time. In fact, that results in

rvm is hashed (/usr/local/bin/rvm)

You have to run the source command first, and then rvm will be a function.

Finally rvm was working. I used it to install ruby 1.9.2:

rvm install 1.9.2

and then to make 1.9.2 the default version of ruby (as far as rvm was concerned, anyway):

rvm --default 1.9.2

Good news: It installed rubygems automatically.

Now I could install other gems and run ruby to my heart's content, but only when running as 'user'.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Instiki migration

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Adobe Flash Player

2010-11-01T21:50:00.004-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Basic install

I went to YouTube and chose a video at random from the default page. As expected, it prompted me to install the Adobe Flash Player. I clicked on the Adobe link and it took me to the Adobe download page, as expected. There was a 32-bit Linux download for APT, so I chose it. It prompted me to enable the 10.04 Partner Channel. This enables downloads of non-free software for Linux. You must enable this to download the Flash Player. After that, it prompted me for my root password.

After a rather long wait, during which the system gave no indication that anything was happening, I was prompted with the Install Additional Software? dialog, asking Do you want to install package 'adobe-flashplugin'? I chose Install, and the installation appeared to work fine. When I tried the YouTube video again, it prompted me again to download the Flash Player, as if it couldn't find the one I had just installed. This time, I clicked on the Install Additional Plugins link instead of the Install Adobe FlashPlayer link.

This time, I got a list of available plugins. I highlighted Adobe Flash Player (installer) and clicked Next. That brought up the Install Additional Software? dialog, asking Do you want to install package 'flashplugin-installer'? I clicked Install. It removed the adobe-flashplugin package I had just installed, and installed flashplugin-installer. This took a long time. The installation appeared to work.

Now I was able to play YouTube videos.

So, the key to success here is to use the Install Additional Plugins link instead of the direct link to Adobe.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Ruby Version Manager and 1.9.2

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Basic install

2010-11-01T21:45:00.005-04:00

Previous: Border around images in OpenOfficeImpress

Time for me, a not-on-the-bleeding-edge user, to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04. I had problems using 9.10 on my Toshiba laptop due to problems in support for the Intel 5100 AGN wireless adapter. Various bugs were reported regarding Linux support for that product. I've been running 9.04 on the Toshiba and 9.10 on the Acer netbook. Oddly, 9.04 supports the 5100 AGN just fine, while later releases do not.

The Toshiba is my main workhorse, and I use the Acer for presentations and meetings as well as a host for a Windows XP instance that I need for two particular applications. Because it's easy to install Ubuntu alongside Windows using Wubi, I decided to approach the upgrade cautiously by installing on the Acer first. My thought was this would minimize the risk of messing up my primary machine. This approach would not tell me whether 10.04 supported the 5100 AGN wireless adapter, or whether it would be possible to get the 64-bit version of Adobe Flash Player working, but it would at least identify any major issues with the new release.

The Wubi install is different from a straight install from an iso disk. I booted into Windows XP, downloaded the Wubi installer, and ran it with

wubi --32bit

The installer recognized that Ubuntu was already installed and offered to remove it. I chose Yes, the installer removed Ubuntu 9.10, and exited. I ran the command a second time, exactly the same way, and this time it downloaded the installation files and proceeded with the installation. This took quite a while, but completed without any problems.

The first thing I noticed was that it was hard for me to read the display and to distinguish the edges of windows. It seems the default desktop theme for 10.04, Ambiance, is based on a color palette of black, dark black, deep black, and pitch black. I changed the desktop theme to Radiance, which has a lighter color palette. The default on 9.04, Human, was not listed as an option. Radiance is similar.

Now that I could read the display, the next order of business was to slow down the mouse a bit. By default, 10.04 ships with the mouse set to very fast and very sensitive; that is, the sliders are about half-way between minimum and maximum. I changed the settings to be more compatible with my slow, old hands, after some difficulty in making the mouse cursor land where I wanted it.

The next thing I noticed was that .bash_aliases is called by default from .bashrc. In 9.04, those lines are commented out by default in .bashrc. I think the 10.04 default makes more sense. I put some of my favorite aliases into .bash_aliases and began to check out the new version of Ubuntu.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Adobe Flash Player

Border around images in OpenOffice Impress

2010-10-03T13:39:00.004-04:00

Previous: sudo:must be setuid root

When preparing presentations for upcoming conferences, I noticed that images on slides appeared normal in edit mode but were rendered with a border in slide show mode. I Googled for the problem and found this thread on openoffice.org where people described the same issue.

One contriubtor discovered that he could remove the border by choosing Tools > Options... to get the Options dialog, then opening OpenOffice.org > View in the dialog. In OpenOffice 3.0, a checkbox is presented with the title, "Use hardware acceleration." By unchecking the box, the contributor found the borders disappeared, but anti-aliasing was also disabled.

I found that OpenOffice 3.1 offers two separate checkboxes: One for "Use hardware acceleration" and another for "Anti-aliasing." When I unchecked "Use hardware acceleration" and left "Anti-aliasing" checked, everything worked as expected.

So, one key to solving the problem is to ensure you're using at least OpenOffice 3.1.

Next: Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade on Acer netbook: Basic install

sudo:must be setuid root

2010-06-01T18:49:00.004-04:00

Previous: Installing Android development tools

As a noob, I do noobish things. Here's the latest.

Something went haywire with Firefox (probably because I deleted something inadvertently when I was getting rid of old files), and I restored /usr from my backup drive using rsync in an attempt to fix Firefox. Apparently, rsync changed the ownership of /usr to the userid under which it was executed. When I tried to run sudo, I got this:

sudo:must be setuid root

Browsing the net for advice, I found scattered, incomplete help for questions that were close to, but not quite the same as mine.

Basically, the solution is to change ownership back to root. Culling bits and pieces from different sources, here's what I ended up doing:

1. Rebooted and hit ESC at the prompt to get the grub menu.
2. Chose 'root console' from the grub menu.
3. Ran the following commands:

chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo
chmod 4755 /usr/bin/sudo
chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers
reboot

When the system came back up, everything was normal again.

Next: Border around images in OpenOffice Impress

Installing Android development tools

2010-05-18T06:46:00.004-04:00

Previous: Installing Oracle Express and ADF - FAIL!

Because Android development is supported by a special Eclipse plugin, I wanted to run a separate instance of Eclipse configured for Android development. I downloaded the basic (non JEE) version of Eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org/ unpacked it into my home directory using

tar xzvf eclip*

and renamed the resulting eclipse directory to .eclipse-android.

Next, I followed the instructions at http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html#Installing to install the Android SDK starter package. After downloading the package (in this case, the 64-bit Linux version), I unpacked it into my home directory with

tar xzvf android-sdk*

and renamed the resulting directory from android-sdk-linux_86 to .android-sdk.

The instructions suggest adding the tools subdirectory to PATH in .bash_profile or .bashrc. Because of the way I've got my startup files organized at the moment I'm setting PATH in .profile, so I defined it there by adding the line,

PATH=$PATH:~/.android-sdk/tools

Then I followed the instructions at http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html to install the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin for Eclipse.

I started Eclipse and created the workspace android-sandbox when prompted. Then I went to Help > Install New Software > Add... and entered this URL into the Location field:

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/

It seemed to take longer than these things usually take, but eventually Developer Tools appeared in the list of available software. Android DDMS and Android Development Tools came up, as per the instructions. I clicked Next, accepted the license agreement, and clicked Finish. After a fairly lengthy download process and a warning about installing unsigned content, the plugins seemed to install. When Eclipse restarted, I found Android Project and Android Test Project listed under New... > Other.... So far, so good.

Next, I told Eclipse where to find the Android SDK. In Window > Preferences > Android, I browsed to the .android-sdk directory and set that as the SDK location.

In a Terminal window, I started the ddms utility, went to File > Preferences... > Usage Stats and unchecked the checkbox for sending usage statistics to Google.

The instructions say you should use the "Android SDK and AVD Manager" to download at least one platform and any additional components you want. The real name of the program is android. I determined that by starting each of the executables in the tools directory one by one. Fortunately, android was only the second one in the alphabetical list! (Note: Later I noticed that Android SDK and AVD Manager is an option on Eclipse's Window menu.)

I chose Available Packages and the program populated the list. Being new to this, I wasn't too sure what I needed. I chose the documentation as well as the platform and API for Android 1.5, API 3, revision 3, and the samples. I clicked Install Selected, accepted the license agreement, and clicked Install. This started an insanely long download. I went to bed and let it run overnight.

The next morning I browsed through the SDK directory tree to see what had been installed. Then I followed the "Hello World" tutorial at http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html. The tutorial covers some of the basic setup you have to know about in order to develop Android apps, so I suggest following it if you're doing this for the first time. The tutorial assumes you're using Eclipse for development. If you're using a different development environment you'll have to work out how to take the equivalent setup steps.

The tutorial instructions were accurate and everything worked as documented.

There doesn't appear to be much documentation about TDD for Android apps, but there is some sample test code in the ApiDemo sample app. I think my next step in learning about Android development will be to work out a good way to do TDD, with this example as a starting point.

Next: sudo:must be setuid root

Installing Oracle Express and ADF - FAIL!

2010-05-11T20:56:00.008-04:00

Previous: Renaming NTFS filesystem on external drive

The client for my next coaching engagement will be using Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF). I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with some of the tools they'll be using, so I went to Oracle's website to download single-user versions of tools that are available at no charge. Oracle Express provides all the basic functionality of the Oracle RDBMS and ADF is a Java-based webapp framework tailored for Oracle back ends.

While I appreciate Oracle's willingness to make these tools available, I must say I was a bit surprised at the difficulty of obtaining them. The servers appear to be extremely slow. The Oracle Express download is a few hundred megabytes, and it took several hours. The ADF download is about 1.5 GB, and it ran more than 12 hours. Downloads of other software, videos, music, etc. from other sources have been considerably faster on the same (hotel) wireless connection and using the same laptop.

Before starting the lengthy download of Oracle Express, I first had to reach the link and click on it. Normally, clicking on a link is a relatively routine operation on the Internet. Not so on this occasion. The download page for Oracle Express for Linux reported an error refreshing the browser, and advised me to contact the site administrator. Interesting advice, as there appears to be no way to contact a site administrator.

Oracle's webapp is the only suspect that had opportunity...not quite sure about motive, though. Then again, it may be a failure of logic on my part: The business motive to provide poor customer service has never been intuitively obvious to me. I can but trust the good folks at Oracle have sound reasons for it. After spending some time searching the website for a contact link or for an alternative way to obtain the software, I gave up and did a Google search for "oracle express linux download."

Of course, the official download page was the first hit. Google offered a link to a cached version of the page. I tried that and, lo and behold! the page appeared with all links working. The software was in fact right where it was supposed to be and was available, but there was (still is?) something wrong with the website; you just can't get to the appropriate page through the front door. Thanks to Google's cache, a side window was open. I slid through and downloaded the Debian package for the Western character set.

One positive aspect of Oracle's service is that they provide documentation. The first documented step to install Oracle Express was to run the following command:

dpkg -i oracle-xe_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb

It turned out this has to be done as superuser, so I tried

sudo dpkg -i oracle-xe_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb

This time, I got

package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)

There is no mention of a 64-bit version on Oracle's site, nor any warning that the package they offer is for 32-bit systems.

What is worse than "useless?" "Misleading."

I guess I'll have to learn these tools using the client's time and equipment. The cynic in me wants to say that's part and parcel of their having chosen Oracle as a vendor. The professional in me doesn't like to say it, and wishes companies would simply provide what they claim to provide, whether free or not, or else not make the claim at all. The consultant in me says nothing about it for the moment, but has filed the experience for future reference when clients ask for advice about vendor selection.

Next: Installing Android development tools

Using rsync for backups

2010-04-14T19:34:00.007-04:00

Previous: Renaming FAT32 and NTFS filesystems

Being a n00b and all, it's probably no surprise to you that I've been backing up my files by dragging and dropping folder icons in Nautilus. Knowing that, it's probably no surprise that these backup operations might take hours to complete. I used to start a backup operation before going to bed, and leave it running while I slept.

I had n00bishly assumed that when gnome asked me if I wanted to merge files with matching names, it would only copy those files that were different than the version on the target. After all, that would be the logical thing to do, wouldn't it? No such luck.

Then I discovered a very useful file syncing utility, rsync. It's already installed on Ubuntu as shipped. It's nothing new, but it's new to me. It only copies files that have changed.

I found I could back up any of my top-level directory trees to an external drive quickly. For example, this command backs up my /usr directory, which is the mount point of a partition on the internal hard drive:

sudo rsync -av /usr /media/1TB_HDD_external/

The first time, when there was nothing at the destination location, rsync took about 15 minutes to back up a partition of 320GB+. Subsequently, it ran in just a couple of minutes. Very convenient!

It was easy to script this so that everyday backups are easy to run. For instance, this

backup personal

will run

sudo rsync -av /home/dave/Personal /media/1TB_HDD_external

Next: Installing Oracle Express and ADF - FAIL!

Renaming FAT32 and NTFS filesystems

2010-04-14T18:20:00.007-04:00

Previous: Installing Gwibber

I wanted to rename my Western Digital My Book volumes, because they are all named "My Book." It would be too easy to make a mistake and format the wrong volume or restore from the wrong backup. From community help at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive, I learned that gparted can rename an NTFS filesystem without reformatting it.

To install gparted, I opened a Terminal and ran

sudo apt-get install gparted
sudo apt-get install mtools
sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Gparted is the partition management utility, mtools is a package of utilities for working with FAT filesystems, and ntfsprogs is a package of utilities for working with NTFS filesystems.

Running gparted as root (that is, sudo gparted), I saw the partitions on my internal drive but none of the external drives. There's a Devices drop-down in the GParted menu, and there I found three devices /dev/sda, sdb, and sdc. I identified the volume I wanted to rename, right-clicked on it and chose unmount. This ran for a long, long time. I checked using Nautilus and the drive was not mounted. I cancelled gparted and started it up again, to see if it would let me try the rename operation. It just kept searching and searching and searching for partitions on /dev/sbc.

I disconnected the external drive, killed gparted, and started it again. This time it immediately displayed the list of partitions on the internal drive. I shut down gparted, then reconnected the external drive. After it automounted, I unmounted it using Nautilus, but left it physically connected. Once again, gparted just looped, ostensibly searching for partitions on the device.

A FAT32 filesystem

So, gparted did not work. I tried the command-line approach outlined on the community help page cited above. I connected the external drive and waited for it to automount. Then I ran

mount

to see the mounted filesystems and found where the external drive was mounted. In this case, it was /dev/sdc1. I unmounted it with

sudo umount /dev/sdc1

Then I verified it was the volume I wanted with

sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdc1 -s ::

Finally, I changed the volume label with

sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdc1 ::500GB_FAT32_external

I mounted the volume and it worked fine.

An NTFS filesystem

Followed a similar procedure to relabel an NTFS volume. Connected it, waited for it to automount, and unmounted it with

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Checked the current label with

sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdb1

Changed the label with

sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdb1 1TB_NTFS_external

Checked to be sure I had changed the label correctly, then re-mounted the volume. Worked great!

Next: Using rsync for backups

Installing Gwibber

2010-04-13T22:25:00.003-04:00

Previous: Installing a gmail notifier

Ran the command

sudo apt-get install gwibber

Gwibber then appeared under Applications > Internet > Gwibber Microblogging Client. Defining the Twitter account was easy. Defining the Facebook account was confusing. Not sure if it worked.

The program appears to work fairly well and looks good. It locks up if I use the scroll wheel on the mouse too rapidly. It's not limited to Twitter, but when using Twitter it doesn't seem to be as functional as the basic Web interface. I will try it for a while and see how it goes.

Next: Renaming FAT32 and NTFS filesystems

Installing a gmail notifier

2010-04-13T22:05:00.002-04:00

Previous: Upgrading Eclipse after reinstalling Ubuntu

Followed instructions at Ubuntu Geek to install CheckGmail, a Gmail notifier for Ubuntu.

Ran the command

sudo apt-get install checkgmail

Instead of pressing ALT+F2, I just typed checkgmail in Terminal. It started the program. I entered my Gmail account information, changed the External Command to

firefox-3.5 %u

and left all other defaults unchanged. The program was unable to log into Gmail. It complained that the userid or password was incorrect. After checking to be sure I had entered the correct values, I decided the program simply does not work, and I removed it with

sudo apt-get remove checkgmail

Next, I tried gm-notify from Launchpad. Downloaded the tarball, unpacked it, and read the README for installation instructions. It's a Python app and has some dependencies, duly noted in the README. Per the instructions, I ran

sudo apt-get install python-indicate python-notify python-gst0.10 python-gtk2 python-gconf python-twisted-mail

to install the prereqs, then from the top-level directory of the extracted files, ran

sudo ./setup.py install

The README says the application will appear in the menu Applications > Network > GMail Notifier, but in fact it appeared in Applications > Internet > GMail Notifier. Furthermore, the README says the configuration app will appear under System > Settings > GMail Notifier Configuration, but in fact it appeared in System > Preferences > GMail Notifier Configuration.

Sent myself an email to see what the application would do. Works well, is simple, looks good. I'll keep this one.

Next: Installing Gwibber

Upgrading Eclipse after reinstalling Ubuntu

2010-04-13T21:31:00.001-04:00

Previous: Reinstalling some favorite apps after reinstalling Ubuntu

Ubuntu repositories have Eclipse 3.2. I wanted a more recent version. I went to http://www.eclipse.org and downloaded the basic JEE packaging of Eclipse Galileo as a tarball.

Deleted the old ~/.eclipse directory. Unpacked the tarball into /home and changed the name of the top-level directory to ~/.eclipse. Changed /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop to point to the executable. Works fine.

Next: Installing a gmail notifier

Shell personalization after reinstalling Ubuntu

2010-04-13T21:20:00.002-04:00

Previous: Reinstalling some favorite apps after reinstalling Ubuntu

Shell personalization after reinstalling Ubuntu

I set up some preferences in login files a little differently than before, based on tips from Stefaan Lippens. I put environment variable definitions in .profile and sourced .profile and .bash_aliases in .bash_profile. This seems to be quite a convenient setup. Added the following to .bash_aliases

# Shortcuts for directory listings
alias ll='ls -lF --color=auto'
alias la='ls -alF --color=auto'
alias ls='ls -F'

# Highlight matches in grep
alias grep='grep --color=auto'

# Start and stop my local wiki
alias wiki='~/.bin/wiki'
alias wiki_stop='~/.bin/wiki_stop'

# Start Freemind mind-mapping tool
alias freemind='~/.freemind/freemind.sh'

# Start UMLet diagramming tool
alias umlet='umlet.sh'

Uncommented the following lines in the provided .bashrc

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
    . ~/.bash_aliases
fi

Next: Upgrading Eclipse after reinstalling Ubuntu

Reinstalling some favorite apps after reinstalling Ubuntu

2010-04-13T21:15:00.007-04:00

Previous: Restoring Firefox personalization after re-installing Ubuntu

So, I wanted to reinstall some of the apps I had been using before. But the way I had them scattered around the filesystem was pretty sloppy. Better this time.

Recovering my local wiki

Installed sqlite3 and sqlite ruby support (Instiki depends on them):

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Put the wiki under /home/.wiki so that it would not show up in normal directory listings.

Moved the wiki icon to /usr/share/pixmaps to make it consistent with other applications.

Put a wiki icon on the top panel for convenient starting.

For more information about how I've customized Instiki for personal use, see http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/pimp-my-instiki.html.

Reinstalling Google Earth

Installed Google Earth by following the instructions I documented on this blog at http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-earth-install.html. I downloaded a fresh copy in case there have been any updates since the last time I installed it.

Had a problem this time that I didn't have last time. The installer complained that gtk2 was missing.

Searching for similar problems, I found that some people had installed lib32nss-mdns, and this solved the problem for them. I tried

sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

and ran the installer again.

The console output was:

setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2: error while loading
shared libraries: libxml2.so.2: cannot open shared 
object file: No such file or directory
setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk: error while loading
shared libraries: libSM.so.6: cannot open shared 
object file: No such file or directory
The setup program seems to have failed on amd64

Better, but apparently I forgot to install libxml2 after reinstalling Ubuntu. I found a security notice for 9.04 at http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-815-1 advising an upgrade. I did that and tried

sudo apt-get install libxml2

and it informed me the latest version of libxml2 was already installed. So, that wasn't the problem.

There are many personal blogs out there written by people whose installation worked properly on the first try. I found no help that addresses the problems I'm seeing today.

I ran across a comment by Daniel Holbach buried in a long list of comments on one article that advised the following:

$ sudo apt-get install googleearth-package
$ make-googleearth-package --force
Doubleclick on the resulting .deb file.

I gave that a try, since there was little to lose at this point.

The make spewed hundreds of warning-level messages. The installer proved to be a very long-running process. I left it running during the day and checked on it after work. It worked fine.

This time I put the app in ~/.googleearth so that it would not show up in normal directory listings.

Reinstalling Freemind

Copied my old installation of Freemind from a backup. Referred to to set it up. This time, I put the app in ~/.freemind and set an alias for 'freemind' instead of putting the absolute path in the freemind.desktop file. No problems with this install.

Reinstalling UMLet

A new version of UMLet is available. I downloaded the standalone version and the Eclipse plugin from http://www.umlet.com, version 10.1. I had 10.0 previously. Recovering from a system crash offers all sorts of opportunities for improvement.

I set up the standalone version in the same way as I had set up Freemind. This time, I noticed that UMLet has its own logo. I downloaded the logo from their site and associated it with the app, instead of the icon I came up with before.

Installation of the standalone UMLet consists of unpacking the zip file. The shell script that starts the program already had execute privileges. Convenient. The default directory name is UMLet. I changed it to .umlet. I defined an alias, umlet, in .bash_aliases, ran my .bash_profile and gave it a try.

Didn't work. I took a look at the UMLet.sh file, and learned that it looks for an environment variable, UMLET_HOME. So, they've made things a bit more formal. I added these lines to my .profile:

UMLET_HOME=~/.umlet
export UMLET_HOME

then copied ~/.umlet/UMLet.sh to ~/.bin/umlet.sh and uncommented the line that changes to the UMLET_HOME directory. Typing umlet at a command prompt started the program properly.

I copied the umlet.desktop file from my backup and changed it to refer to the new logo file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=UMLet
Comment=UML diagramming tool
Exec=umlet
Icon=umlet_logo.jpg
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
StartupNotify=true

and copied the logo file to /usr/share/pixmaps. At this point, UMLet appeared in the gnome menu under Applications > Programming, but the logo image was not displayed. I used Gimp to change it from .jpg to .png. Worked!

Logged out and in and tried to run UMLet from the menu. The launcher was unable to start the child process. It complained that there was no such file or directory as "umlet." I checked .bash_aliases and it looked correct. There must be something about launchers I don't quite understand. I changed the alias to give the absolute path of umlet.sh, logged out and in, and tried again. Worked!

Dropped the jar for the UMLet Eclipse plugin into the Eclipse plugin directory and started Eclipse. Created a UML diagram from Eclipse's New... dialog. Looks good.

Reinstalling Banshee

Ran the command

sudo apt-get install banshee

Banshee appeared in the gnome menu, and started normally. It imported my music files correctly. It played mp3 files correctly. It imported my video files correctly. It played .flv, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .mpeg correctly.

Next: Shell personalization after reinstalling Ubuntu

Restoring Firefox personalization after re-installing Ubuntu

2010-04-11T22:08:00.004-04:00

Previous: Installing .NET development support

1. Version update


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5

Then edited the Properties for the Firefox launcher in the Applications menu to invoke firefox-3.5 instead of firefox.

Fortunately, the Ubuntu Modifications for Firefox aren't compatible with this version, so there was no need to disable them manually.

2. Plugins

Went to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer to try and install Flash Player. (I've had problems with this in the past. Expectations are low.) Selected the .deb file option from the dropdown list. The installer complained about "wrong architecture." FAIL.

A search for "install flash 64-bit linux" found http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html, with instructions to download a tarball of a beta 64-bit version of Flash Player 10. Adobe provides no help about what to do with the tarball's contents. I found several threads about problems with multimedia on Ubuntu, and surmised that plugins might belong in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. I unpacked the tarball and copied libflashplayer.so to that location, then restarted Firefox. Youtube videos then played normally.

3. Preferences

In Firefox, I went to Edit > Preferences.

* On the Main tab, under Startup, for the When Firefox starts dropdown, I selected "Show a blank page."

* On the Main tab, under Downloads, I left the default setting of "Desktop" for Save files to. Previously, I had a downloads directory under /home. Now I think that was only an invitation to be lazy. If downloaded file icons appear on my desktop, it's an incentive to put them where they really belong or delete them.

* On the Main tab, under Location Bar, set "...suggest" to "Bookmarks". When I had it set to "History and Bookmarks" it tended to be too cluttered to be useful after several hours online. This way, I can whitelist useful sites by adding them to my bookmarks.

* On the Privacy tab, under History, I deselected "Keep my history..." and "Remember what I enter..." and left "Remember what I've downloaded" selected. I don't use the history to find sites I've visited before. To me, the other options are more distracting than useful. I like simplicity.

* On the Privacy tab, under Private Data, I selected "Always clear...when I close..." and deselected "Ask me..." In Settings I left the default selections.

* On the Security tab, under Passwords, I deselected "Remember passwords for sites." This is a laptop, and there is a risk of identity theft or other problems if people can discover passwords easily. Besides, if I have to enter passwords every time, I'm less likely to forget them.

* On the Advanced tab, under Browsing, I deselected "Check my spelling as I type." Another distraction of dubious value.

* On the Tabs tab, selected "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately". Why else would I open a link, besides wanting to read it? What were they thinking when they defined this default?

4. Add-ons

* From http://www.xmarks.com installed the XMarks plugin. When you complete the installation, it walks you through a series of dialogs to help you get set up. I logged in with my XMarks account and told it to "Keep data on the server; discard data on this computer." This was the first time I had used the service in this way. It worked perfectly.

* From http://readitlaterlist.com/firefox/, installed Read It Later. It did not recognize the Read It Later folder in Bookmarks, and thought I had no entries. After searching for help on that without success, I decided there was no need to keep those bookmarks anyway. I had marked them to read later, but had never bothered to do so. They must not have been important after all.

I didn't bother with all the add-ons for development and testing, email notification, and so forth. I'll add them as I find I need them. I think I got carried away with add-ons last time around. Clean start this time.

Next: Reinstalling some favorite apps after reinstalling Ubuntu

Installing .NET development support

2010-04-11T11:53:00.004-04:00

Previous: Installing Tomcat (partial FAIL)

I'm not actively working on a mono project at the moment, so I didn't spend too much time configuring a development environment. Actually, I didn't spend any time configuring a development environment. I installed the basic tools with these commands:


sudo apt-get install 
    mono-devel 
    libmono-winforms2.0-cil 
    monodevelop 
    monodevelop-nunit 
    monodevelop-debugger-mdb

If you're interested, my notes about getting started with these tools are in this post: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-net.html.

Next: Restoring Firefox personalization after re-installing Ubuntu

Installing Tomcat (partial FAIL)

2010-04-11T11:24:00.002-04:00

Previous: Installing Java support

The last time I installed Tomcat on Ubuntu 9.04, the documented easy installation method didn't work and I resorted to installing from a tarball. Since I'm installing 9.04 again rather than a later release, there's no reason to expect different behavior from the installer today.

This time, I want to run Tomcat from a hidden directory under /home so that the everyday view of /home won't be cluttered with various development tools, as before. I decided to go with Tomcat 5.5 for the moment.

I wanted to be able to run customized Tomcat instances for particular development projects on localhost. To that end, I configured a vanilla instance to use as a template to copy into different projects as needed.

This is what I did:

Install Tomcat Core

1. Went to http://tomcat.apache.org/ and download the following distros:

* Core
* Deployer (did not install this)
* Administration Web Application (did not install this)

2. Under /home/.bin I created a directory for local Tomcat instances, tomcat. So I had /home/.bin/tomcat.

3. Moved the Core tarball to /home/.bin/tomcat and unpacked it in place using


tar xzfv *

This resulted in a directory containing the Tomcat core at /home/.bin/tomcat/apache-tomcat-5.5.28.

4. Deleted the tarball apache-tomcat-5.5.28.tar.gz.

5. Granted execute permission on everything in Tomcat's bin directory


cd /home/.bin/tomcat/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/bin
chmod +x *

6. Edited [TOMCAT-HOME]/conf/tomcat-users.xml and changed the default entries


<tomcat-users>
  <user name="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="tomcat" />
  <user name="role1"  password="tomcat" roles="role1"  />
  <user name="both"   password="tomcat" roles="tomcat,role1" />
</tomcat-users>


<tomcat-users>
  <user name="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="tomcat" />
  <user name="admin"  password="admin" roles="tomcat,manager" />
</tomcat-users>

7. Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. To find out the value to set, I looked in /etc/alternatives for the java link and found /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java. So, the value for JAVA_HOME should be /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre. Edited /etc/environment and added the line:


JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre"

8. Gave Tomcat a trial run:


cd [TOMCAT-HOME]/bin
startup.sh

Exceptions were thrown complaining that native libraries recommended for good performance in a production environment were not found. This is not relevant to my localhost dev environment.

Opened a browser and went to localhost:8080. Tomcat was up and running. The Manager application worked with the userid and password I had set in tomcat-users for the admin role.

Install Administration Web Application — FAIL

1. Unpacked the Administration Web Application tarball to a temporary location.

2. Copied directory server/webapps/admin to [TOMCAT-HOME]/server/webapps.

3. Copied conf/Catalina/localhost/admin.xml to [TOMCAT-HOME]/conf/Catalina/localhost.

4. Restarted Tomcat.

Tomcat restarted normally. Going to http://localhost:8080/admin just resulted in the default message that the Administration app is not shipped by default anymore. Going to Manager, I could see the admin application deployed but not active. Choosing start resulted in an unhelpful message telling me that the app could not be started.

I found a number of threads online where people had reported the same problem. There were several workarounds, and I tried a couple. Apparently this problem occurs sometimes, but not always, and people are able to work around it by uninstalling and reinstalling, possibly five or six times, but this does not always fix the problem. In my case, it made no difference.

My personal view is that tools should not get in our way. The truth is I don't need the Administration app for local development. I don't really need the Deployer, either, so I blew off even trying to install it.

Since I finally got a basic Tomcat instance up and running, I won't delete it. However, the next time I'm working on a Java-based webapp, I'm going to try some alternatives to Tomcat. I've heard good things about Jetty and Glassfish. There are others, as well. Tomcat used to be pretty handy, but now it's evolved to the point that there's more administrative overhead involved with it than the value it returns, for purposes of development. It's still a nice servlet container when used in conjunction with Apache HTTP Server in production, but I'm done using it as a development tool unless and until they make it work smoothly.

Next: Installing .NET development support

Installing Java support

2010-04-11T08:30:00.006-04:00

Previous: Installing Ruby testing tools

Since my system was trashed anyway, I decided to take the opportunity to apply lessons learned over the past few months of using Ubuntu as my primary work platform. I didn't reinstall exactly the same tools as before for Java development. I want to check out some different tools for building, version control, and continuous integration. This time around, I just installed the basic Java tools.

If you're curious about experiences with installing maven2 and/or migrating Java projects from Mac OSX to Linux, please see this post: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-java.html.

These commands get the latest and greatest JDK and make it the system default.


sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin
sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Although Java is available for free, it is not Open Source. The Java install will prompt you to agree with license terms. So, don't expect to "fire and forget" this installer.

To verify that Java 6 is the system default, check the default version:


java -version

Next: Installing Tomcat

Installing Ruby testing tools

2010-04-11T07:11:00.004-04:00

Previous: Installing Rails

These are tools for test-driven-, behavior-driven-, and storytest-driven-development:

* Autotest - continuous testing (part of ZenTest)
* Cucumber - storytest tool
* RCov - coverage tool
* rspec - BDD tool
* Webrat - browser simulator (used by Cucumber)

On Debian variants (like Ubuntu), you have to install a couple of libraries before installing Webrat. They are needed by Nokogiri, the XML libary used in Webrat.


sudo gem install ZenTest
sudo gem install rcov
sudo gem install rspec rspec-rails
sudo gem install cucumber
sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev libxml2-dev
sudo gem install webrat

Next: Installing Java support

Installing Rails

2010-04-11T07:08:00.003-04:00

Previous: Installing MySQL and Ruby bindings

Use Gems to install Rails. Open a Terminal window and enter


cd ~
sudo gem install rails

If the installation succeeded, the following command will display version information:


rails -v

Next: Installing Ruby testing tools

Installing MySQL and ruby bindings

2010-04-10T23:55:00.002-04:00

Installing MySQL and ruby bindings

Previous: Installing basic ruby support

MySQL Server

In Terminal, install MySQL Server with apt:


sudo apt-get install mysql-server

During installation, you will be prompted to enter a password for the root mysql user. While it's possible to run mysql with no root password, it's generally considered a good practice to use a password.

The installation will automatically start the server. To verify the installation was successful, check to see if the server is running:


ps ax | grep mysql

You can also check for the existence of this file, which exists when the server is running:


/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

The commands to stop and start MySQL Server are


sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

If you want to stop the server while continuing to install software, you can do so.

MySQL command-line client

I wanted to configure MySQL to put database data somewhere under my /home directory because it's in a large partition and so that it will be easy to backup and restore my data. To do this, I created the data directory and set permissions so mysql could use it:


cd
mkdir -p .mysql/data
chown mysql .mysql .mysql/data

Now stop the mysql server.

Edit the file /etc/mysql/my.cnf. Look for the section labeled [mysqld] and change (or add) the datadir specification:


datadir=/home/you/.mysql/data

After making those changes, start the server.

To see if the configuration changes worked, start a command-line client


mysql -u root -p

If it starts normally, then the server is running and the localhost connection is working. To ensure mysql is using the datadir you specified, create a test database:


create database test1;

Exit the command-line client by typing "quit". Change to the directory you specified as datadir. If you don't have permission to cd to the directory, use sudo to add read and execute privileges on it. (You need execute privileges to cd to a directory.)

MySQL GUI client

From the main menu bar, choose Applications > Add/Remove....

1. If prompted to update the list of available packages, do so.

2. Under Show, choose All available applications.

3. A few applications may be pre-selected for you. Browse the list and see if you really want any of these. De-select the checkboxes for the ones you don't want. In some cases, the system will warn you that other packages depend on the one you're trying to de-select. In that case, you will need to install it.

4. Select "MySQL Administrator" for a GUI client and "MySQL Query Browser" for a GUI tool to run queries. (If you type "my" in the Search: field, the list will jump right to these entries.)

5. Choose Apply Changes to proceed with the installation. If any of the applications requires administrator rights to install, the system will prompt for your administrator password. This is normal and not an exploit.

After the installer finishes, the two applications will appear under Applications > Programming from the main menu bar.

To ensure MySQL Administrator was installed correctly, with the MySQL server running, go to Applications > Programming and select MySQL Administrator from the menu. The program should open a window containing a form where you can enter connection information. Enter "localhost" for host, "root" for user, and the password you defined earlier for password. If you didn't define a password earlier, then leave the password field empty. Choose Connect.

Check the installation of MySQL Query Browser in the same way.

Install Ruby bindings for MySQL

Open a Terminal window and enter the following commands:


cd ~
sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev

The package libmysqlclient-dev is a virtual package. When you run the command above, you will see an error message that shows the name of the real package. Substitute it in the command line and run it again. When I ran it, it showed libmysqlclient15-dev, so I ran the command this way:


sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient15-dev

Run this command to build it:


sudo gem install mysql

Expect a lot of error messages for missing definitions in ri and rdoc. As long as the gem and native extensions build okay, you're good to go.

Next: Installing Rails

Installing basic ruby support

2010-04-09T07:54:00.006-04:00

Previous: Rethinking directory structure

Still recovering from the system problem reported earlier.

I documented this before, but I've learned a few things since then so some of these steps may be a bit different. If you're using this as a guide for setting up your own Ubuntu system, I'd suggest using the latest posts on each topic.

First, I need support for git:


sudo apt-get install git-core

I want to install various software development tools. Let's start with Ruby. I'll take care of plug-ins and so forth later, when setting up specific projects. For the moment I just want to get basic tools installed.


sudo apt-get install ruby-full

and verify it worked


ruby -v

Also need ruby gems support. The ruby community reports problems when apt is used to install rubygems. The following procedure is recommended instead.

Take your browser to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126. In the list of available downloads, hover the mouse cursor over the name of the one you want to see which URL would be downloaded (but don't download it yet). In my case, the URL was http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/69365/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz.

The key elements to note are the numerical path segment 69365 and the version number, 1.3.6. These elements will vary as new releases are posted. Not very RESTful, I suppose.

Armed with this information, get rubygems this way:


cd ~
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/69365/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.6.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.6
sudo ruby setup.rb

The setup.rb script will display the name of the rubygems executable on the console, like this:


RubyGems installed the following executables:
 /usr/bin/gem1.8

Use the name to set a symlink like the following


sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

and verify it worked


cd ~
gem -v

It will display the version number of gems that is installed. This should match the version number you found on rubyforge.

Now you can delete the installation directory and the tarball:


rm -r rubygems-1.3.6
rm rubygems-1.3.6.tgz

Note that the software is installed under /usr. This is the reason I decided to mount /usr from its own partition. I will be able to repair or upgrade Ubuntu itself without having to reinstall all my software piece by piece.

Next: Installing MySQL, admin tools, and ruby bindings

Rethinking directory structure

2010-04-09T07:51:00.007-04:00

Previous: Interesting times

Recovering from interesting times

So, I've got most of my work on an external drive and I've got a nice fresh /home in its own partition. Why not just slap the contents of the backup into /home and declare victory? Well, a fair amount of cruft has accumulated in my /home directory. It could be organized more conveniently. I've got various software development tools installed here and there, and shell scripts in various places. And I really don't need all the jar files and libraries and sample code and old projects and local maven repo and copies of articles to read in my spare time and on and on and on. It's just clutter.

I took the time to decide what I really need on this machine and how it should be organized, and then selectively restore those items from the backup. I also decided to reinstall just the software that I'm actively using, rather than to reinstall everything that had been on the system before.

The default /home directory structure is:


/home
    |
    +---- Desktop
    |
    +---- Documents
    |
    +---- Music
    |
    +---- Pictures
    |
    +---- Public
    |
    +---- Templates
    |
    +---- Videos

Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X also ship with a similar default directory structure. The default structure is only a suggestion, to help novice computer users get started. But I just don't organize information according to file type (music, pictures, videos, etc.) I keep files that pertain to a given topic together, whatever their various formats and types. I decided to define a structure that reflects the way I usually think about what I'm doing with the computer.

At the highest level, I don't want to have to look at a million folder names to find what I'm looking for. It boils down to this:


/home
    |
    +---- Desktop
    |
    +---- Personal
    |
    +---- Professional
    |
    +---- .bin

I changed the top-level directory structure just below /home to the above, and removed the old directory names from the Places pane.

Next: Installing basic ruby support

Interesting times

2010-04-09T07:49:00.002-04:00

Previous: Microsoft drives another Windows user to Linux

Interesting times

My Ubuntu system had a bad night. I deleted some files from my external hard drive. When I clicked on "empty the trash," odd things started to happen. The external drive's filesystem switched to read-only mode. No error messages that I could find. At some point while I was fiddling around to try and clear out the trash folders, either I did something inadvertently or a glitch in the driver corrupted part of the Ubuntu kernel.

Now Ubuntu couldn't mount filesystems on the internal hard drive. I tried rebooting, on the chance that a fresh start would clear up whatever was wrong. No such luck. Now Ubuntu couldn't boot.

Using someone else's system and Internet connection, I searched for help. I discovered this sort of thing has happened to other Ubuntu users. Apparently the only thing to be done is to reinstall fresh.

The downside: My system was dead in the water. I was in a hotel room, far from any helpful resources I might have had in my home office.

The upside: I had a backup of my work from a few days earlier. I had bootable CDs with me for Ubuntu 9.10 and 9.04. I had my Firefox bookmarks online on XMarks, where I could sync them when ready. Finally, this very blog contains instructions for installing and configuring my system, and warnings about what not to do, just in case I've forgotten. Things could have been so much worse!

Recovering the system

I decided to take the opportunity to do a bit of housecleaning and to apply some of the lessons learned so far in my n00b journey. My hard drive had a dual-boot configuration with Ubuntu and Microsoft Windows Vista. It occurred to me that I hadn't even thought about booting into Windows in the past few months. Why use up half the hard drive space with Windows partitions?

More housecleaning: I had read that most Ubuntu users define a separate partition for their /home directory. It makes upgrades easier, since you can install a new release of the OS in the root partition and keep your /home intact. Another thing I've learned is that /usr/local and /usr/share are updated when you install software and customize gnome. You don't have to install things in those locations, but they are default locations. With that in mind I wiped the drive and created the following partitions:

* /
* /usr
* /home
* swap

I tried installing from the 9.10 disk, and had problems. Again using someone else's system to look for help, I learned that 9.10 has some known kernel issues, one of which is that it doesn't support the wireless adapter that my machine has (Intel AGN 5100). It also seemed to have problems mounting the /home and /usr partitions. No helpful error messages.

Next I installed from the 9.04 disk, and had similar problems booting and mounting the partitions. I also noticed that there was no driver for the wireless adapter and that audio was disabled. I remembered that these problems had been fixed at some stage in the evolution of 9.04, and surmised that I had an old release of Ubuntu on that disk.

I installed from the 9.04 disk again, this time defining just one partition for the whole OS. This instance could boot, but had no network support. Again using another system, I downloaded the last stable Ubuntu 9.04 iso from releases.ubuntu.com/9.04 to a thumb drive, and used the old 9.04 instance to burn it to a DVD.

This version of 9.04 installed nicely into the partitioning scheme described above and booted without complaint. I felt like the Apollo 13 astronauts after they'd restarted the Command Module. Well, okay, maybe that's a stretch.

Update mistake

To bring the new instance up to date, I opened a Terminal window and ran these commands:


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get build-essential

At this point I made a mistake. I used Update Manager to check for available updates and install them. After more than two hours, the update process became confused when trying to install a package. The process hung, and the last message on the console was "stopping bluetooth." I waited a while just in case it was doing something under the covers, but ultimately I killed the process and rebooted. The system was very confused about what was installed and what wasn't. Network support was gone again.

Since I was still early in the recovery process, I just reinstalled from scratch again. This time, after running the update commands in Terminal, I didn't try to do any updates through Update Manager.

To the contrary, I started the gnome configuration editor (alt+F2, enter gconf-editor, click Run), went to apps > Update Notifier, and deselected the auto-run checkbox. This is to protect myself from responding to the prompt about available updates. I'll update packages that are flagged as dependencies for software that I want to install. Otherwise, I'll stick with the working version of 9.04.

Next: Rethinking directory structure

Microsoft drives another Windows user to Linux

2009-12-03T07:30:00.004-05:00

Previous: CD to MP3 conversion

This is a Good News, Bad News post. The Good News is summarized by the title of the post. The Bad News is called "Ease of Access."

My wife recently had a strange problem with Microsoft Windows Vista. For no apparent reason and at irregular times, a pop-up window appeared offering various accessibility options, and a synthesized voice read the contents of the screen aloud. This was particularly puzzling since nothing of the sort has happened in the several years she has been using the machine, running the very same copy of Windows Vista the whole time.

We learned this annoyance is an intentional feature of Windows Vista, ironically named Ease of Access. Far from making access "easy," its actual effect is to render the system completely unusable. With the feature active, whenever you type more than three characters into any input field in any program, the Ease of Access pop-up window appears and takes control of all keyboard input. The feature seems to activate and deactivate itself whenever it feels the urge.

I found an inquiry on a Microsoft forum from a customer who was experiencing the same problem: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistaappearance/thread/cefa6d08-f32f-4de6-a74f-a6bd53843b52. He writes, "...i have had nothing but trouble with the ease of access randomly opening without provacation, EVEN AT START UP before I have even logged on to my computer, when it is doing that I can almost NOT CONTROL my mouse at all, it keeps pulling my mouse down to the lower left of my screen and opens up!"

A Microsoft engineer with the screen name "Keith" replied, "...Ease of Access is built into the operating system and you will not be able to uninstall it but...you can search the Web for a 3d party program that will disable Ease of Access." He goes on to warn us about the dangers of running programs not published by Microsoft Corporation.

Restoring keyboard control and blessed silence

I found that by unchecking the appropriate checkbox we could silence the annoying synthesized voice, but we were unable to find a way to disable the Ease of Access feature altogether. "Keith" offered the following suggestion to disable the onscreen keyboard:

1. Click the Start Orb on the Desktop

2. Select Control Panel

3. Select Ease of Access (Classic View)

4. Select Use the computer without a mouse or keyboard

5. Remove the Checkmark by Use On-Screen Keyboard

6. Select Apply and then close the window

Disabling the Ease of Access button on the logon screen

There is no practical way to remove the Ease of Access feature from Windows, since Microsoft have so cleverly hard-wired the bloody thing into the guts of the OS. There is a free download from Softpedia called Ease of Access Disabler that can render the Ease of Access button on the logon screen inactive. The program is described at http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Ease-of-Access-disabler.shtml. This will, at least, protect you from people who play pranks by activating Ease of Access while you're away from your desk (yes, that's right: anyone can change the settings, even when the computer is locked - another clever design point by the fine folks at Microsoft), as well as protecting you from accidentally clicking on the button yourself.

Please welcome a new Linux user

My wife is a long-time user of Windows and has resisted change, even through the years when I switched to the Mac and later to Linux. In the past when I've mentioned ease of use and convenient features of other operating systems, she has responded with the sort of friendly pro- and anti-Microsoft banter that many people enjoy. You know the script: "I'm a PC, ha ha ha." So, I figured she simply preferred Windows, and that's fine. It's a personal choice.

As I tinkered with her machine in search of a solution, my wife grew impatient. I told her that I knew she liked Windows, so I wanted to try and fix the problem for her. Exasperated, she said "I don't care if it's Windows or Utoombo or Watonga or whatever. I just want to use my computer!"

Well, I can relate to that.

I had recently installed Wubi on that machine and set up a dual boot with Ubuntu and Vista. I showed her how to log in and where to find her files. She was already using OpenOffice and Firefox, so those programs were familiar. Ubuntu supports our wireless printer and household network out of the box. I showed her how to play audio CDs on Ubuntu. Now she can do everything on Ubuntu she ever did on Vista, with the sole exception of running a client for an online game site that is only available for Windows or OS X. When she wants to play, she takes her chances with Ease of Access popping up. If worse comes to worst, she can download the game client for OS X and use my old MacBook Pro for that activity.

Next: TBD

CD to MP3 conversion

2009-12-01T21:13:00.002-05:00

Previous: Installing Wubi on HP Pavilion notebook

RubyRipper - FAIL

RubyRipper was recommended on the Ubuntu community documentation site. To install it, install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install cd-discid cdparanoia flac lame mp3gain normalize-audio ruby-gnome2 ruby vorbisgain

Get RubyRipper from http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/Rubyripper-Download-20741.html and follow the installation instructions for the format of your choice. I used the Debian package install, and it seemed to work fine.

RubyRipper then appeared in the Gnome menu under Applications -> Sound and Video. I tried it with a couple of CDs and specifying different output formats with absolutely no success. As far as I can tell, RubyRipper doesn't even begin to work.

Grip

Grip was also mentioned on the community documentation site. The project home page at http://nostatic.org/grip/grip-download.shtml does not mention an Ubuntu repository package, but when I ran

sudo apt-get install grip

it installed fine and Grip then appeared in the Gnome menu under Applications -> Sound and Video.

On starting Grip, it warned me that it was a development version and not a stable version. I tried it with the same CDs as I had used to test RubyRipper. Worked fine, no problems.

Next: Microsoft drives another Windows user to Linux

Installing Wubi on HP Pavilion notebook

2009-11-24T08:43:00.003-05:00

Previous: Flash player for Firefox libnspr4-dev dependency

I liked Wubi so well on my Acer netbook that I installed it on my wife's HP Pavilion laptop as well. After rebooting the first time to complete the basic installation, the grub boot loader would never recognize the Linux OS. I tried various this to fix it but was unable to get it to work.

I noticed that the Wubi installer site always downloaded the 64-bit version of the program and offered no way to override this. The Wubi FAQ at http://wubi-installer.org/faq.php includes an entry about installing the 32-bit version of Wubi. It suggested running Wubi from a command line with the 32-bit option:

wubi --32bit

This worked, and the HP Pavilion now has an Ubuntu instance installed.

Next: CD to MP3 conversion

Flash player for Firefox libnspr4-dev dependency

2009-11-24T08:37:00.007-05:00

Previous:

Ran into a dependency problem with Ubuntu Karmic 9.10: Adobe Flash player plugin for Firefox depends on package libnspr4-dev, which apparently is problematic for one reason or another. I got the player to install by doing the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libnspr4-dev

Without doing the update first, the install warned that it would remove several packages, including Firefox itself. Not very convenient.

Next: Installing Wubi on HP Pavilion notebook

Installing Wubi on Acer Netbook

2009-11-15T16:33:00.018-05:00

Previous: Firefox addon toolbar buttons not displayed

I've been using my Toshiba Satellite as my main workhorse, and my Acer Netbook as a system for running presentations at conferences and user group meetings and for clients. I took only the Acer with me on a business trip recently, and I became quite frustrated with using Windows XP all the time, rather than just for running presentations. Besides that, I missed having the usual tools available. I decided to load Ubuntu Linux on the Acer so I would have similar environments on both machines, and to avoid the hassle of using Windows.

I have a conventional dual-boot setup on the Toshiba. For the Acer, I decided to try Wubi, a program for Microsoft Windows that manages an Ubuntu dual boot for you, without your having to repartition the hard drive manually. I wanted to see how the user experience compares with the conventional dual boot setup.

Wubi install

First, I went to http://wubi-installer.org/ and downloaded the Wubi installer.

Next, I started Windows XP on the Acer and ran the installer, following the prompts as needed. Everything went smoothly.

After rebooting into Ubuntu Linux, Wubi copied the basic installation files and set up its pseudo partition. It installed 9.10 Karmic.

Making Ubuntu the default OS on boot

By default, Wubi has Windows as the default OS. To change that, here is what I did:

1. Boot into Windows XP.

2. Go to Control Panel

3. Switch to Classic View

4. Choose: System -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery

5. From "Default Operating System" drop-down list, choose "Ubuntu"

6. Click OK on all open dialog windows to close them

Ubuntu upgrade

From there, I followed my own instructions for updating the system and loading the various programs I use, starting with this blog post: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/updating-ubuntu.html. The system upgrade went smoothly.

Ruby development support

The next step was to install support for ruby development. I followed the steps I had documented previously in this post: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-ruby.html.

Things had changed a bit since I installed 9.04. Here are the differences I encountered:

1. When I ran the command

sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev

the virtual package name libmysqlclient-dev was resolved automatically and the correct components were installed without the need for any additional action on my part.

2. When I installed the ruby bindings for MySQL, the software installed correctly but the ri documentation was missing a lot of bits and pieces. I did not consider this a serious problem.

3. The menu option Applications -> Add/Remove Applications was replaced by Ubuntu Software Center. I discovered that when I started to type the name of an application into the search box, it auto-filled all matching names. This was faster than the old way of finding the packages I wanted.

No problems with the rest of the ruby-related stuff, except some of the ri docs for nokogiri were missing. For the scripts and aliases documented in the original blog post, I just copied the files from the Toshiba laptop.

Java development support

I followed the instructions I had documented earlier in this post: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-java.html. Everything worked the same as the first time, with the following exceptions:

1. Eclipse Galileo was installed by default. No additional steps were needed on my part.

2. Previously, Eclipse installed with a default value for the classpath variable M2_REPO. This time, it had no default definition. In Eclipse, under Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Build Path -> Classpath Variables, I added M2_REPO to point to /home/dave/.m2.

3. This time, migrating my existing projects to the new instance of Ubuntu was easier, since I was copying them from another Ubuntu instance that was configured in the same way. The first time around, I copied project files from an OS X system that was configured a bit differently.

Tomcat install

I had some difficulty with the standard installation procedure the first time around, as described in this post: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-tomcat.html. This time, I checked for updated documentation and found this information about installing Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu 9.10: https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/serverguide/C/tomcat.html. Per that documentation, I ran the command

sudo apt-get install tomcat6

and the It Works! page came up fine.

ColdFusion install

I skipped the ColdFusion installation for the moment, since I wouldn't need it in the near future.

.NET support

As before (see http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-net.html), I entered the command

sudo apt-get install mono-devel

To install the IDE, used Ubuntu Software Center, and then found it under Applications -> Programming. Go figure. I didn't try the Hello, World! programs this time, because I'm confident in the package.

The NUnit and debugger installs went smoothly.

Git install

The git install went smoothly, as documented here: http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-git.html.

eXPlainPMT install

I skipped this install, since I've started using the Kanban approach rather than the iterative approach on personal development projects.

Firefox development add-ons

I skipped this, since I won't be using the Acer as my primary development platform.

...and the rest of it

All that remained was to copy files from the Toshiba to the Acer. Up and running!

Next: Flash player for Firefox libnspr4-dev dependency

Firefox addon toolbar buttons not displayed

2009-11-01T09:30:00.005-05:00

Previous: Troubles with Flash player

After installing some addons to Firefox, I noticed that some of the buttons associated with addons that were supposed to show up on the navigation bar were not displayed. From a thread on the Read It Later site, I learned that the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" addon may cause this problem. I disabled "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" and the problem was solved.

Next: Installing Wubi on Acer Netbook

Troubles with Flash player

2009-10-28T15:23:00.010-04:00

Previous: Static from the speakers

I had been having a lot of trouble with the Flash player plugin for Firefox on Ubuntu. When I first switched to Ubuntu, there was no Flash plugin for 64-bit Linux in general release. After a while, they published an "alpha" version, and it appeared to work. But after the latest Firefox upgrade, YouTube videos did not play and no error message was displayed to indicate any problems with the plugin.

A post on launchpad.net suggested using any of the following Firefox plugins:

MPlayer (package name mozilla-mplayer)
Totem (package name totem-mozilla)
VLC (package name mozilla-plugin-vlc)

I've noticed that MPlayer, which came bundled with Ubuntu, appears to play every kind of media file I've got with no difficulty, so I decided to try the MPlayer plugin. I installed it with

sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

and restarted Firefox. Absolutely no problems. This is the way to go, rather than the Flash plugin.

That is, it's the way to go when it works. I haven't investigated the cause, but sometimes Firefox doesn't seem to know it ought to launch the MPlayer plugin. I suspect it has to do with the way the HTML is written on some sites. The observed behavior appears to be: When the page checks for the existence of the Flash plugin so that it can initiate a download for clients that don't have it installed, it finds a plugin associated with Flash video so it doesn't prompt for the download, but it also doesn't know how to invoke the MPlayer plugin, so you end up with nothing.

I've found that if I download the video manually, it will play just fine with MPlayer. Another workaround is to launch Opera and view the video with the "standard" Flash player in Opera. That seems to work without any problems.

I don't intend to invest much personal time on this problem. Based on what I've seen, my guess is that it boils down to a problem in the 64-bit version of Flash player for Firefox. When looking for answers I found a CNET article about the Firefox Flash plugin that suggests there has been a history of problems with that plugin ever since it was first introduced.

Next: Firefox addon toolbar buttons not displayed

Static from the speakers

2009-10-23T14:41:00.005-04:00

Previous: Another reason to like Ubuntu

After a series of software updates, I noticed that the speakers were emitting static instead of clean sound whenever there was audio output. I did a net search on the keywords "ubuntu audio static" and immediately found this resource: http://beyondteck.blogspot.com/2009/04/ubuntu-audio-does-not-work-static-sound.html.

The problem description and the solution were exactly what I needed. Apparently, one of the software updates had modified my audio settings, for reasons unknown. After adjusting them, everything worked properly again.

Next: Troubles with the Flash player

Another reason to like Ubuntu

2009-10-23T14:29:00.005-04:00

Previous: UMLet install

Ubuntu provides automated updates much as Microsoft and Apple do for their operating systems. I recently accepted an updated kernel, and afterwards I noticed some rendering problems on the Gnome desktop. A quick net search didn't reveal any fixes, probably because the problem is so fresh.

I rebooted Ubuntu and selected the previous kernel build from the boot menu. It works just fine now.

I really appreciate the boot process that allows you to drop back to a previous kernel build in such a simple and painless way. Now I won't have to cope with that problem while waiting for the fix to be published.

I find this much easier than the procedures for recovering a previously-working version of Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X. Thanks, Ubuntu team!

Next: Static from the speakers

UMLet install

2009-10-22T13:48:00.006-04:00

Previous: Freemind install

I found a useful UML modeling tool that's suitable for agile modeling, called UMLet. I wrote my opinions about it on my Effective Software Development blog, and I won't repeat them here. This entry is just about how I installed it on Ubuntu Linux.

First I downloaded the archive from the UMLet site at http://www.umlet.com. I unzipped the archive for the standalone version of UMLet into /home/umlet.

To make it easier to start UMLet, I defined an alias in .bash_aliases as follows:


alias umlet='java -jar ~/umlet/UMLet/umlet.jar'

Then I created a desktop file for UMLet and saved it in /usr/share/applications as umlet.desktop. The contents are:


[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=UMLet
Comment=UML diagramming tool
Exec=umlet
Icon=uml_icon.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
StartupNotify=true

The desktop definition makes UMLet appear in the Applications -> Programming menu in the Gnome desktop. The icon file referenced in the desktop file is just an icon I found on the net somewhere that reminds me of UML. UMLet doesn't have its own icon.

Next: Another reason to like Ubuntu

Freemind install

2009-10-18T10:38:00.005-04:00

Previous: Google Earth install

Downloaded Freemind from Sourceforge and unpacked the distro in my home directory.

Downloaded the Freemind icon by Christian Foltin from this Wordpress blog, whose owner does not make it easy to identify him/her, so I don't know whom to thank for making it available. Copied the icon to /usr/share/pixmaps and named it freemind.png.

Created a desktop file in /usr/share/applications named freemind.desktop with the following contents:


[Desktop Entry]
Name=Freemind
Comment=Mind mapping tool
Exec=/home/dave/freemind/freemind.sh
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=freemind.png
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Office;

Freemind now appears in the Applications -> Office menu.

Next: UMLet install

Google Earth install

2009-09-26T14:49:00.007-04:00

Previous: Firefox 3.5 install

The Linux installation for Google Earth isn't a simple click or double-click. Here's what I did:

1. Open a browser and navigate to http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html.

2. Download the installer for Linux. At the time I did it, the file name was GoogleEarthLinux.bin. Download it to whatever directory you please.

3. Open a Terminal window and go to the directory where you downloaded the installer.

4. Grant execute privileges on the installer. I used


chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin

5. Run the installer with


sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin

Set the installation directory and bin path as you please, following the prompts displayed by the installer.

The install worked fine, but it didn't add an entry to the Applications menu in Gnome. They don't make any assumptions about which desktop you might be using. To add it, I took the following steps:

1. Copied the Google Earth icon from the installation directory to /usr/share/pixmaps.

2. Created a googleearth.desktop file in /usr/share/applications with the following contents:


[Desktop Entry]
Name=Google Earth
GenericName=Google Earth
Exec=googleearth
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=googleearth-icon.png
Categories=Application;Network;
StartupNotify=true

This worked fine.

Next: Freemind install

Firefox 3.5 install

2009-09-25T09:34:00.004-04:00

Previous: Value Stream Mapping font

A "normal" Firefox 3.5 for Ubuntu has been created, and it was a recommended system upgrade as of this morning's automatic upgrades. I chose it, and it messed me up badly. The Shiretoko install was gone, but the new Firefox 3.5 did not work.

I got around the problem by running sudo apt-get remove firefox-3.5 and then sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5. Fortunately, this cleared up whatever had been clobbered by the earlier install.

Next: Google Earth install

Value Stream Mapping font

2009-09-14T13:34:00.005-04:00

Previous: Partial success with Logitech EX100 wireless keyboard and mouse

I came across a useful tool for Value Stream Mapping: A free VSM TrueType font, offered by ambor.com. The ambor.com site provides instructions for installing on Windows and OS X. To install on Ubuntu, I did the following:

Downloaded the .ttf file from ambor.com

Copied the .ttf file to /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Ran the command: sudo fc-cache -fv

The font works nicely with OpenOffice under Ubuntu.

Next: Firefox 3.5 install

Partial success with Logitech EX100 wireless keyboard and mouse

2009-08-22T17:47:00.007-04:00

Previous: Ubuntu: No love for Kodak printers

The second home office peripheral I wanted to try with the new Ubuntu laptop was the Logitech EX100 wireless keyboard and mouse. I had hoped it would solve the usability problem with the Synaptic touch pad moving the input cursor when it detected hand movements above the pad.

It's one of those good news, bad news things. The good news is the wireless mouse worked flawlessly on a plug-and-play basis with no installation, configuration, or other effort on my part. With the touch pad turned off, I've been typing my little heart out for several minutes now, and Ubuntu is still responding to keyboard input (from the Toshiba laptop's keyboard).

The bad news is that I've got no response from the wireless keyboard. But the truth is, the wireless mouse solves my particular problem quite nicely.

I found a note on a forum complaining about this model of wireless mouse not working with Open Office spreadsheet on Ubuntu. I gave that a try, and apparently the problem was solved in a subsequent release. No problems here.

Next: Value Stream Mapping font

Ubuntu: No love for Kodak printers

2009-08-22T17:26:00.007-04:00

Previous: Installing Banshee media player

Or maybe I should say, Kodak: No love for Ubuntu. Either way, the outcome is the same.

Back at home, I was eager to try my shiny new laptop with some of my home office peripherals. I found no driver for the Kodak ESP-3 multipurpose printer on CUPS. The Kodak driver download site had nothing available for Unix, and no listing for Linux at all. A thread on Ubuntu forums where people were asking about this printer model indicated there is no driver for it and no practical workaround for using the printer with Ubuntu.

Last post, I reported one less reason to boot into Vista. Sadly, I must now report one more reason to boot into Vista.

You might ask: So, why not replace the Kodak printer with a supported model? I might answer: Remember the reason I was in the market for a new laptop in the first place? It was high cost of ownership of hardware. The Kodak ESP-3 is a low cost of ownership printer. It's also low-maintenance and very reliable. I'm keeping it.

Next: Partial success with Logitech EX100 keyboard and mouse

Installing Banshee media player and ffmpeg video converter

2009-08-20T20:27:00.006-04:00

Previous: Audio support fixed

With audio working, I went ahead and installed support for watching videos.

I started Firefox and went to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. There, I installed the Video DownloadHelper add-on. Then I installed ffmpeg (video converter) and Banshee (media player) from a command line:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install banshee

Smooth as silk, no problems, no extra steps. Done. Lovely!

One less reason to boot into Vista. That in itself is like a cool drink of water on a hot day.

Next: Ubuntu: No love for Kodak printers

Audio support fixed

2009-08-20T20:19:00.004-04:00

Previous: Problem with keyboard and Synaptic touch pad

Well, I told you I was a noob, didn't I?

Searching around the net I learned that one can check to see if one has support for audio by trying to run alsamixer. If the software isn't there, the program won't start. I tried

alsamixer

and a mixer panel came up. The master volume slider was set to minimum. I moved it to maximum.

Problem solved.

Geez, what a noob!

Next: Installing Banshee media player and ffmpeg video converter

Problem with keyboard and Synaptic touch pad

2009-08-16T20:47:00.008-04:00

Previous: Linux vs. Vista download performance

One of the problems I've mentioned here is that from time to time Ubuntu would stop responding to the keyboard and touch pad. I had not been able to find a report of exactly the same behavior with Ubuntu 9.04 or with Toshiba laptops. I did find some similar reports dating from 2007.

Today I was working on the Vista side of the system to disable some of its pre-configured annoyances, since it had become clear that I would have to use Vista for certain non-work-related tasks. The same behavior occurred once while I was working on Vista.

If the problem affects both operating systems, then it follows that it isn't a problem with the OS, drivers, or firmware. It has to be either the BIOS or the hardware.

This is good news, because if the problem affects Vista users then maybe Microsoft will pressure Toshiba and/or Phoenix Technologies to fix it. They certainly won't care about Linux users.

It may be coincidental, but I've observed an apparent correlation with using the hardware switch to turn off the touch pad so that you can type freely without having your hand movements interpreted as mouse movements. The problem has been less frequent when I avoid turning off the touch pad and just live with the occasional cursor jumps.

Another correlation is that when I close the lid and then open it again later to resume work, Ubuntu no longer responds to the keyboard. I have not observed this behavior when using Vista.

When I get home from this road trip I plan to test a wireless mouse with its own USB Bluetooth adapter. If that works, then the inability of Ubuntu to see the built-in Bluetooth adapter will be less annoying. I'm hopeful that this will eliminate the interference between the keyboard and touch pad, as well.

Next: Audio support fixed

Linux vs. Vista download performance

2009-08-16T20:30:00.007-04:00

Previous: Making Vista liveable

When installing one of the two Windows program I need, I noticed a significant discrepancy between the download times on Vista and Ubuntu. Vista doesn't always behave this badly, so there must be a factor involved in this that isn't obvious to me. In any case, here's what I observed.

I needed to install the Zune software (to manage my Zune portable media player) on the Vista instance on my dual-boot Toshiba Satellite P500. I booted into Vista, opened Internet Explorer, and navigated to http://www.zune.net/en-US/software/default.htm to download the Zune 3.0 software.

The download ran for about 10 hours before it was rudely interrupted by the scheduled automatic system update at 3:00 a.m. I awoke to discover the machine had rebooted into Ubuntu, the default OS, after the Windows update restarted the system. The download had not been completed. I tried again, and saw that the download was proceeding extremely slowly. I canceled it and decided to download the file from Ubuntu, just to see if there might be a difference.

In Ubuntu, using Firefox, the same download finished in 5 minutes. Same site, same file, same Internet connection, same hardware. Different OS, different Web browser. In other words: Two suspects.

The 133 MB file was not the Zune software. It was only the installer for the Zune software. Having installed Zune software before (on Windows XP), I knew the installer would have to download components during the installation procedure. Those downloads could not be done on the Ubuntu instance because they were tied into the actual software installation. So, there would be another opportunity to observe download behavior on Vista.

Booting into Vista again, I copied the Zune installer and ran it. When it got to the downloading components step in the installation, the downloads once again ran extremely slowly. I left it running and went to work for the day.

When I returned 11 hours later, the download components step was still running. It finished after 11.5 hours. The remainder of the installation steps finished in a few seconds.

Based on previous installs of Zune software, I can say the Zune installer was not the cause of the slow download. Internet Explorer was not involved in this step, so it could not have been the culprit. Only one suspect remained: Vista.

Hmm. Largest software company. Many of the top engineers in the field on staff. More than 25 years continuous product development experience in the Windows product line. And this is the best they can do? Really?

Interesting.

Next: Problem with keyboard and Synaptic touch pad

Making Vista liveable

2009-08-16T18:37:00.016-04:00

Previous: Firefox Web development add-ons

Okay, I've installed a lot of development tools and so forth, and I'm pretty happy with the way it all works. When I turned my attention to "consumer" uses of my shiny new machine, I encountered a couple of problems. Ubuntu cannot see the Toshiba's audio adapter or Bluetooth adapter. I spent a couple of hours online looking for solutions and found none, except for a problem with audio on Toshiba laptops dating from 2007 and involving an earlier incarnation of Ubuntu.

I did find a couple of references to a contractual arrangement between Microsoft Corporation and Phoenix Technologies, the makers of the machine's BIOS, that some people assume means that Phoenix may have designed the BIOS to be unfriendly toward operating systems other than Microsoft Vista. I think that is probably speculation on their part, and I plan to keep looking for solutions.

At the moment, I have no way to predict whether I will be able to get Ubuntu to work with the audio adapter and Bluetooth adapter in the Toshiba Satellite. It's possible someone will create drivers, firmware, or whatever else is required to support them. It's also possible that the Phoenix BIOS is actually the problem.

In any case, I need a way to organize my music files and sync my Zune, and I need a Windows system to run Music Publisher. If the audio problem is not solved, I will have to switch to Vista when I want to visit YouTube or Hulu, listen to music on Pandora or a streaming radio station, or listen to news. It would be nice to have audio when using Skype, too. That meant I would be spending at least some of my time on Vista.

OEMs have a long tradition of configuring pre-installed Windows systems in a way designed to piss people off and make them hate computers. Although Toshiba's motto is "leading innovation," in this regard they are respectful of tradition.

So, how could I make the Vista environment less annoying? Here are a few steps I took that seemed to help. None of this pertains to Ubuntu, of course.

Removing unnecessary programs from startup

Press the Start orb, type msconfig into the Search field, and press Enter. This opens the System Configuration utility. Go to the Start tab. YMMV, but what I did was to deselect the following entries:

Intel(R) Common User Interface - igfxtray.exe
Intel(R) Common User Interface - hkcmd.exe
Intel(R) Common User Interface - igfxpers.exe
TOSHIBA Button Support
TOSHIBA Zooming Utility
TOSHIBA Flash Cards
TOSHIBA Web Camera
SmartFaceVWatcher
RealConnect Agent
Google Toolbar Notifier
CyberLink Power Cinema
CyberLink MediaLibrary Service

These changes reduced startup time noticeably and reduced the number of annoying reminders and pop-ups almost to none.

Disabling "notification balloons"

Press the Start orb, type regedit into the Search field, and press Enter. This opens the Registry Editor. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Advanced. From the menu choose New -> DWORD(32 bit). Name it EnableBalloonTips. Give it a value of zero. Close the Registry Editor.

Disabling Auto-Complete in Internet Explorer

Start Internet Explorer. On the main menu, choose Tools -> Internet Options. Go to the Content tab. Under AutoComplete, press Settings. In the resulting dialog box, deselect all the checkboxes. Press OK.

To get rid of existing AutoComplete entries, in Internet Options go to the General tab. In the Delete section, press Delete Forms.

Disabling assorted annoyances in Google Toolbar

In Internet Explorer, choose the Tools drop-down near the right-hand end of the Google Toolbar. Choose Options from the drop-down menu. Choose the Search tab. Under 'Search features', deselect 'Suggest searches as you type'.

Go to the General tab. Under 'Additional settings', deselect 'Send usage statistics to Google'.

Go to the Custom Buttons tab. Deselect all the items you don't want.

Go to the AutoFill tab. Deselect 'AutoFill'.

Press the Save button.

Installing necessary Windows programs

As I mentioned previously, there are two Windows-only programs I need: Braeburn Software's Music Publisher and the Microsoft Zune sync software.

Music Publisher is a commercial product that comes on a CD. Installation consists of running the installer off the CD. No problems there.

The Zune software is a free download. Getting the download to work turned into an educational exercise on the relative downloading performance of Vista vs. Ubuntu. It's a tale in its own right, so I blogged about it separately.

Making frequently-used programs easy to access

I took the following steps to place entries in the Start menu for the programs I use most often on Vista:

Right-clicked the taskbar and chose Properties from the context menu to open the Taskbar and Start Menu utility.
Went to the Start Menu tab.
Deselected the checkboxes labeled Store and display a list of recently opened files and Store and display a list of recently opened programs.
Clicked the Customize button next to the Start Menu radio button near the top of the panel.
Deselect the checkboxes near the bottom of the panel labeled Internet link and E-mail link.
Clicked OK until I had clicked my way out of the Taskbar and Start Menu utility.
Clicked the Start orb and then the All Programs link.
Navigated to the shortcut for each program of interest, right-clicked it, and clicked Pin to Start Menu

General beautification

Downloaded the flattering photgraph of me from this very website and set it as my User icon in Vista.

Next: Linux vs. Vista download performance

Firefox web development add-ons

2009-08-16T13:00:00.008-04:00

Previous: Installing eXPlainPMT

Upgraded Firefox

Ubuntu came with Firefox 3.0.2 pre-installed. To upgrade it, I typed 'apt:firefox-3.5' in the Firefox location field. This is a front-end to Synaptic Package Manager that was added to Firefox for the Ubuntu distro.

This installed Firefox 3.5.2 and added an entry in the Applications -> Internet menu named 'Shiretoko Web Browser' (the codename for Firefox 3.5).

On starting the new browser, I saw that it had transferred my bookmarks correctly. However, it did not find a compatible version of Ubuntu Firefox Extensions. I typed 'apt:' and 'apt:firefox-3.5' into the location field and it complained about the protocol name. Maybe this handy feature is gone!

Add-ons for web development

I browsed to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ and selected the following add-ons (selected all before restarting Firefox):

Abduction!
Bottom Error Console
ColorZilla
Console2
Dom Inspector
EditCSS
Execute JS
Firebug
lori (Life-of-request info)
QuickRestart
SQL Injection
SQLite Manager
Web Developer
XSL Results

The current version of Html Validator was not available on the Mozilla add-on site on the date when I was installing add-ons. The version on the developer's site at http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/ turned out to be incompatible with Shiretoko. Too bad, since this one does validation locally in the browser and does not depend on any third-party sites.

The current version of Selenium IDE was not available on the Mozilla site. I installed it from "Selenium HQ" at http://seleniumhq.org/download/. The install worked fine.

Next: Making Vista liveable

Installing eXPlainPMT

2009-08-15T21:04:00.017-04:00

Previous: Installing Git

eXPlainPMT is an Open Source project planning tool geared for Extreme Programming.

Installation

I installed it like this:

Downloaded the distribution archive from http://github.com/explainpmt/explainpmt/tree/master.
Unzipped the archive into my home directory.
Renamed the top-level directory 'explainpmt'.
I'm using SQLite for this program, so I didn't need to create a MySQL database.
The instructions say to edit config/database.yml, but this distribution had no such file. There was a database_cruise.yml with an entry for postgresql, but I wanted to use sqlite. I created a database.yml file with the following contents:
```
production:
    adapter: sqlite3
    database: db/production.db
development:
    adapter: sqlite3
    database: db/development.db
test:
    adapter: sqlite3
    database: db/test.db
```
Created file log/production.log and gave it permissions 0666.
In the explainpmt directory: Ran
```
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
```
Note the syntax differs from the instructions given on Github. It complained about the Rails version and suggested this to fix it:
```
sudo gem install -v=2.0.2 rails
```
After that the rake command completed successfully.

Verify installation

From the explainpmt directory, I ran this command to start up the program:

./script/server webrick -e production -p 8100

In Firefox, I went to localhost:8100. eXPlainPMT started up clean. I entered the default userid and password, admin/admin, and everything looked normal.

Conveniences

When I want to use eXPlainPMT for a personal development project, I copy the full eXPlainPMT directory structure to /projects/projectname/explainpmt so that there is a separate "backlog" or "master story list" or "work queue" (pick your favorite buzzwords) for the project. That means starting a separate eXPlainPMT instance for each project. To simplify starting and stopping the tool, I created a bash script to wrap the command line shown above and to capture the pid to stop the server later. You can cd to the /projects/projectname directory and type 'backlog xxxx' where xxxx is the port number you want the server to listen on. When finished working on that project for the moment, you can type 'backlog_stop'. The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
# Start an instance of eXPlainPMT
# Assumes you are in the /projects/projectname directory 
# and eXPlainPMT lives in /projects/projectname/explainpmt
if [ ! $# == 1 ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 port-number"
  exit
fi
`./script/server webrick -e production -p $1 2> temp_$` &
sleep 5
# Grab the pid and create a quick and dirty shutdown script
echo `awk '/pid=/ {split($5,thepid,"="); print "kill -9 " thepid[2]}' 
    temp_$` > backlog_stop
chmod +x backlog_stop
firefox http://localhost:$1

Also added an alias to .bash_aliases:

# Start any eXPlainPMT server
alias backlog='~/bin/backlog_start'

A comment on the installation instructions

I've used eXPlainPMT in the past and so I was reasonably familiar with it. Had that not been the case, I suspect I would have given up and looked for another tool. The installation instructions are sparse and several releases out of date. I don't know that a novice user would be successful following the published installation instructions. This may not be the best way to encourage people to use an Open Source product.

Next: Firefox development tools

Installing Git

2009-08-15T20:43:00.004-04:00

Previous: Pimp My Instiki.

Git is a distributed source control management system that is useful both for managing my own local projects and for downloading and contributing to Open Source projects. I installed it on Ubuntu with this command:

sudo apt-get install git-core

Next: Installing eXPlainPMT

Pimp My Instiki

2009-08-14T11:59:00.008-04:00

Previous: Installing support for .NET development.

Instiki is a simple wiki that I use to keep track of useful information. I find it easier to find information if it's organized in a wiki than if it's scattered all over the filesystem.

To get Instiki, go to http://www.instiki.org and download it. There's no further installation to do, and no mandatory configuration before you can start using Instiki. Start an instance by navigating to the directory where you installed Instiki and running the instiki command.

Instiki is very simple and is Open Source. Users are encouraged to customize it. Some people use Instiki as the basis of public websites, and they do some pretty extensive customization. For my purposes, it's just a single-user wiki running on my laptop. To make it a little friendlier and better integrated with my desktop, I've made the following changes.

Start and stop scripts

As shipped, Instiki expects you to start it from a command line and stop it by typing ctrl+C. I set up a start script that starts Webrick in the background and saves the pid so that a kill command can be issued later.

Start script is ~/bin/wiki. It picks up the pid from stderr, where Instiki writes it, and creates the stop script on the fly in ~/bin/wiki_stop. The stop script does a kill -9, since Instiki appears to ignore SIGTERM.

#!/bin/bash
# Start the instiki wiki
cd ~/wiki/inst*
`./instiki 2> wiki_$` &
sleep 12
# Grab the pid and create a quick 
# and dirty shutdown script.
echo `awk '/pid=/ {split($5,thepid,"="); print "kill -9 " 
        thepid[2]}' wiki_$` > ~/bin/wiki_stop
chmod +x ~/bin/wiki_stop
# This will start Firefox if necessary. 
# Otherwise it will open in a new tab.
firefox http://localhost:2500/

I set up aliases for the scripts in ~/.bash_aliases.

alias wiki='~/bin/wiki'
alias wiki_stop='~/bin/wiki_stop'

Associated an icon with Instiki and created a desktop definition

AFAIK no one has yet created a logo or icon for Instiki. I found a nice one in a set called Influens by artist Matt U on Deviant Art, at http://mat-u.deviantart.com/art/influens-icons-62280875. It looks like this:

The icon is apopros of the way I use Instiki in that it depicts a folder of documents with sticky notes on them, suggesting an informal, working scratchpad area.

I copied it to ~/wiki/instiki.png and created an instiki.desktop file in /usr/share/applications with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Instiki
Comment=Personal Wiki
Exec=wiki
Icon=/home/dave/wiki/instiki.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
StartupNotify=true

Made the favicon for Instiki match the desktop icon by copying the .ico version of the file to ~/wiki/inst*/public/favicon.ico.

Reclaimed screen real estate when viewing a page

By default, Instiki displays wiki content in a narrow column centered on the page. To make this area wider I made the following change in ~/wiki/inst*/public/stylesheets/instiki.css. As shipped, the definition of #Content looks like this:

#Content {
border-top:none;
margin:auto;
padding:0.3em;
text-align:left;
width:100%;
max-width:55em;
}

I removed the max-width specification, resulting in this:


#Content {
border-top:none;
margin:auto;
padding:0.3em;
text-align:left;
width:100%;
}

Reclaimed screen real estate when editing a page

The edit and create views provide a small textarea for entering content. They also display a few examples of wiki markup in an area on the right-hand side of the frame. Since I'm using Instiki on my local machine only, I don't have to worry about accommodating different screen sizes or different markup languages. I'd rather have a large textarea that mostly fills the frame. I don't need the markup help to be visible all the time and I'm always using Textile, so I could free up some real estate by replacing the help area with a single link. Here are the portions of ~/wiki/inst*/app/views/wiki/edit.rhtml that were affected, as shipped:


<%- 
  @title = "Editing #{@page.name.escapeHTML}"
  @content_width = 720
  @hide_navigation = true
-%>

<div id="MarkupHelp">
  <%= render(:file => "#{@web.markup}_help") %>
  <%= render(:file => 'wiki_words_help') %>
</div>

 <% form_tag({ 
    :action => 'save', 
    :web => @web.address, 
    :id => @page.name },
  { 'id' => 'editForm', 
    'method' => 'post', 
    'onsubmit' => 'cleanAuthorName()',
    'accept-charset' => 'utf-8' }) do %>
  <div> 
  <textarea name="content" id="content" rows="24" cols="60">
  <%= h(flash[:content] || 
    ((params['content'] && params['content'].is_utf8?) ?  
    params['content'] : @page.content).purify) %></textarea>
 . . .

I removed the MarkupHelp div, added a link to Textile help to open in a new tab, and increased the size of the textarea, resulting in this:


<%- 
  @title = "Editing #{@page.name.escapeHTML}"
  @content_width = 720
  @hide_navigation = true
-%>
 <% form_tag({ 
    :action => 'save', 
    :web => @web.address, 
    :id => @page.name },
 { 'id' => 'editForm', 
   'method' => 'post', 
   'onsubmit' => 'cleanAuthorName()',
   'accept-charset' => 'utf-8' }) do %>
  <div>
<a href="http://hobix.com/textile/quick.html" 
    target="_blank">Textile Help</a><br /> 
<textarea name="content" id="content" 
    rows="30" cols="190"><%= h(flash[:content] || 
   ((params['content'] && params['content'].is_utf8?) ?  
    params['content'] : @page.content).purify) %></textarea>
 . . .

I made the same changes in ~/wiki/inst*/app/views/wiki/new.rhtml.

Disabled spam filtering

Since this instance of Instiki resides locally and is not accessible on the network, I didn't need Instiki to protect me from my own innocent updates. I disabled spam filtering by deleting the file config/spam_patterns.txt.

One more thing...

I copied my personalized version of Instiki over from my MacBook Pro rather than installing Instiki fresh and repeating the modifications. Initially, Instiki would not start up. It displayed the catch-all "Do you smell smoke?" message and offered no clues on the console or log file.

A brief Internet search turned up a note on http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/instiki-users/2009-April.txt reporting that on Debian and its variants (including Ubuntu) some packages on which Instiki depends are not installed by default. I ran the following command, and the problem was fixed:

sudo apt-get install 
    ruby1.8-dev swig libsqlite3-ruby1.8 flex bison

Next: Installing Git

Installing support for .NET development

2009-08-13T13:32:00.014-04:00

This is a follow-up from Installing support for ColdFusion development.

Fair warning: This is not a definitive tutorial, it's just an informal record of my experiences in trying to install software for .NET development on Ubuntu. I had not done any .NET development prior to this. Maybe in a future blog post I'll have something more interesting to share.

.NET development is supported on Linux by the Open Source project mono, at http://www.mono-project.com. In reading about this on the web, I learned that the Ubuntu distro includes support for running .NET applications with mono, but not for developing them. My first step, then, was to install the basic mono package:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel

To verify the installation worked, I followed the instructions at http://www.mono-project.com/Mono_Basics to compile and run a few simple Hello World programs.

The first is a command-line Hello World that looks like this:

using System;
 
public class HelloWorld
{
 static public void Main ()
 {
  Console.WriteLine ("Hello Mono World");
 }
 
}

To produce a .NET 2.0 assembly, I compiled with

gmcs hello1.cs

No errors reported. To execute the program, I used

mono hello1.exe

It worked fine.

BTW this was my first-ever C# program. I'm so proud! :-) Oh, wait. I didn't test-drive it. I'm so ashamed. :-(

The second test was a gtk# version of the same thing. It looks like this:

using Gtk;
using System;
 
class Hello {
 
        static void Main()
        {
                Application.Init ();
 
                Window window = new Window ("helloworld");
                window.Show();
    
                Application.Run ();
    
        }
}

and is compiled like this:

gmcs hello2.cs -pkg:gtk-sharp-2.0

I ran it with

mono hello2.exe

and it worked fine.

Next there was a Winforms sample. It looks like this:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
 
public class HelloWorld : Form
{
 static public void Main ()
 {
  Application.Run (new HelloWorld ());
 }
 
 public HelloWorld ()
 {
  Text = "Hello Mono World";
 }
}

I compiled it according to the instructions with this command:

gmcs hello3.cs -pkg:dotnet

This one didn't go quite so well. It complained about 13 missing dlls.

I found a suggestion at http://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/issues/detail?id=6 to try this:

sudo apt-get install libmono-winforms2.0-cil

and compile with

gmcs hello3.cs -r:System.Windows.Forms.dll

This time the compile worked. I tried running the program with

mono hello3.exe

and it worked fine.

So at that point I had at least a partial installation of basic mono development tools. Clearly, there were still missing pieces, but at the time I did not know what more to look for.

MonoDevelop IDE

This is an IDE for working with mono. The home page is http://www.monodevelop.com. I installed it with

sudo apt-get install monodevelop

Mono Develop appeared under Applications -> Programming and it started up nicely. I didn't know what more to check, so I declared victory and moved on.

NUnit (unit testing tool)

I didn't find any useful help on the NUnit site at http://www.nunit.org, so I searched the web and found some help at stackoverflow.com/questions/924239/what-the-best-setup-latest-mono-monodevelop-on-ubuntu-9-04. They suggested this:

sudo apt-get install
    monodevelop-nunit monodevelop-debugger-mdb

As far as I could tell, this appeared to work.

NUnit with MonoDevelop

I had to search for help with this, as well. There doesn't seem to be any single comprehensive source of "getting started" information for people who want to learn to work with mono. At http://www.dijksterhuis.org/using-nunit-with-monodevelop/ Martijn Dijksterhuis suggests the following.

First, create a new Solution in MonoDevelop. I chose Console Project and skipped the options presented in the Project Features dialog. Then, right-click the References item in the Solution tree menu in the left-hand pane. Choose Edit References and select NUnit.Core and NUnit.Framework to include them in the Solution. What I found at that point were two options named nunit.core (all lower case) and two options named nunit.framework. One of each had a version number. I chose the entries that had version numbers.

Next step was to paste in the sample program Martijn had posted:

using System;
using NUnit.Framework;

namespace bank
{
    public class Account
    {
        private float balance;
        public void Deposit(float amount)
        {
            balance += amount;
        }

        public void Withdraw(float amount)
        {
            balance -= amount;
        }

        public void TransferFunds(Account destination, float amount)
        {
        }

        public float Balance
        {
            get { return balance; }
        }
    }
}

namespace bank
{
    [TestFixture]
    public class AccountTest
    {
        [Test]
        public void TransferFunds()
        {
            Account source = new Account();
            source.Deposit(200.00F);
            Account destination = new Account();
            destination.Deposit(150.00F);

            source.TransferFunds(destination, 100.00F);
            Assert.AreEqual(250.00F, destination.Balance);
            Assert.AreEqual(100.00F, source.Balance);

        }

        [Test]
        public void DepositFunds()
        {
            Account source = new Account();
            source.Deposit(200.00F);
            Assert.AreEqual(200.00F, source.Balance);
        }

    }
}

namespace UnitTestDemo
{
    public class MyAccountingSoftware
    {

        public static void Main()
        {
            bank.Account DemoAccount = new bank.Account();
            DemoAccount.Deposit(1000.00F);
            DemoAccount.Withdraw(500.50F);
            Console.WriteLine("Our account balance is {0}", DemoAccount.Balance);
        }

    }
}

I chose View -> Unit Tests from the MonoDevelop menubar and right-clicked my Solution, then chose View -> Test Results to see the results. It appeared as if NUnit ran, and the sample program had 1 passing and 1 failing test. Looked good enough as a start.

Next: Pimp My Instiki

Installing support for ColdFusion development

2009-08-13T07:00:00.017-04:00

Previous: Installing Tomcat.

I wanted to set up a ColdFusion development environment similar to that used at a current client of mine. That environment is based on ColdFusion, ColdSpring, ModelGlue, and MXUnit. The software used in this set-up is:

Eclipse - development IDE
ColdFusion - the base product
ColdFusion Eclipse Plugin - Eclipse support for ColdFusion development
ColdFusion ModelGlue - an MVC framework for webapps
ColdSpring - a Spring-like IoC implementation for ColdFusion
MXUnit - a unit test framework for ColdFusion, based on JUnit
CFEclipse Plugin - Eclipse support for CFML
MXUnit Eclipse Plugin - Eclipse support for MXUnit

ColdFusion

I followed instructions on http://www.adobe.com to download and install ColdFusion Developer Edition.

Navigate to the ColdFusion product page on Adobe's website: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/.

Follow the link labeled Download the free Developer Edition.

From the drop-down list for ColdFusion Developer Edition, choose the appropriate language and operating system.

Click the button labeled Download next to the Developer Edition drop-down box.

I copied the downloaded file, which is an installation program, to an "installation" directory, gave myself execution permission on it, and ran it. I followed the prompts to install a standalone ColdFusion server with a root directory of /home/dave/coldfusion8, to listen on port 8500.

Started ColdFusion with
```
sudo ./coldfusion8/bin/coldfusion start
```
and navigated in Firefox to localhost:8500. (Yeah, you read that right: You need root privileges to start a single-user development server on your own machine. That's "enterprise" software, for ya. <sigh>) It told me no application was configured to respond to the request. I tried localhost:8500/CFIDE (based on what I saw in ~/coldfusion8/wwwroot, and not because I knew what I was doing) and it displayed a directory listing of wwwroot/CFIDE. I clicked on administrator and the ColdFusion Administrator app started up. It accepted the password I had defined during the installation process, and appeared to be working. I took this to mean a crude install of the base product had been accomplished. I looked, but couldn't find a sample app. Often, vendors include a sample app you can attempt to run, so that you can see whether the product installed correctly. No such luck here. If there are problems, I suppose they will turn up as I continue configuring the environment.

Install ColdSpring

ColdSpring is a port of Spring to ColdFusion. Its main features are support for IoC and AOP. I obtained it from http://www.coldspringframework.org/. The site offers a quick start guide, a reference guide, and API docs for CFCs. The simplicity and clarity of the packaging and documentation were a refreshing contrast to the "enterprisey" organization and packaging of ColdFusion itself.

I downloaded the pdf Reference Guide. The guide states you can install ColdSpring by placing the source in the web root directory. I learned the hard way that they should have said to unpack the distribution archive in the web root directory. "Place the source" there didn't imply that to me.

There is more than merely a problem with wording, though. While the Reference Guide says you can either place the source in wwwroot or define mappings in Administrator, in fact you must do both. After I defined a mapping for /coldspring to wwwroot, the quickstart app worked. The other sample apps did not work. This tells me the basic install is okay, and there are some configuration secrets that the developers and supporters of ColdSpring think are too obvious to bear mentioning. I'll have to seek help to complete the configuration later, when I'm ready to try using these tools.

Install ModelGlue

ModelGlue is a Model-View-Container framework that comes in ColdFusion and Flex flavors. I downloaded a zipped distribution archive from http://www.modelglue.org. At first glance, the documentation at http://docs.model-glue.com/ looks comprehensive, well-organized, and filled with concrete, practical examples, tutorials, and how-tos. One exceptionally good feature of the documentation is that the main heading on the first page reads, "Don't panic!" The site also has installation and configuration instructions, which I followed more-or-less like this:

Unpack the distribution archive
Copy the ModelGlue folder to ColdFusion's wwwroot folder

Install MXUnit

MXUnit is a unit testing framework based on JUnit. To get it, I went to http://www.mxunit.org/ and downloaded the distribution archive. Then I unpacked it in the coldfusion8/wwwroot directory.

To verify the installation, I started the ColdFusion server and went to http://localhost:8500/mxunit/index.cfm. It ran a trivial sample app and displayed a "Congratulations" message.

So far, so good with the ColdFusion setup.

Install the CFEclipse Eclipse Plugin

This is an Eclipse plugin that provides language support for ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). The CFEclipse wiki has current information about the Eclipse update site, recent versions, known problems and workarounds. When I installed it, the update site was www.cfeclipse.org/update. Installation instructions are at http://trac.cfeclipse.org/wiki/InstallingCfeclipse. I followed the instructions more-or-less this way:

Started Eclipse
From the main menu, chose Help -> Install New Software...
In the Install dialog window, clicked the Add button. Entered 'CFEclipse' in Name and 'http://www.cfeclipse.org/update' in Location. Clicked OK.
Eclipse displayed two downloadable items, the editor and the documentation. I checked both. I also unchecked the 'group items by category' box and clicked Next. This resulted in an error, apparently because it tried to grab the documentation for Eclipse 3.4 and 3.5. I only needed 3.5, so I deselected the documentation for 3.4 and tried again. It seemed to like this better.
Clicked Next on the 'review' dialog.
On the 'accept licenses' dialog, clicked the 'accept' radio button but the installation did not work. The Next and Finish buttons remained disabled. I tried checking 'do not accept', scrolling from top to bottom of each license, and then checking 'accept' on each one. This time, the Finish button became enabled.
Eclipse called for a restart, and I clicked Yes to restart it.

Since I have no existing ColdFusion code and no ColdFusion experience, I didn't try to write a test app. I noticed that when I opened the perspectives dialog, there was an entry for CFEclipse. I chose it and things looked pretty normal.

Install the MXUnit Eclipse Plugin

The installation instructions at http://www.mxunit.org/doc/index.cfm?doc=installplugin appear to be designed for an earlier version of Eclipse and for Microsoft Windows. It looks like a standard Eclipse software update, so I used the information from the site but followed a procedure like the one I used for the CFEclipse Plugin. The update site is http://mxunit.org/update. This installed MXUnit Test Runner.

At this point I believed I had a working installation of the ColdFusion development tools my client uses.

Next: Installing support for .NET development.

Installing Tomcat

2009-08-13T06:50:00.005-04:00

Previous: Installing Tomcat - FAIL!

I went to http://tomcat.apache.org and downloaded a zipped archive of Tomcat. I unpacked it into my home directory, resulting in a directory tree starting with apache-tomcat-x.x.x. I renamed the top-level directory tomcat-dev.

In Terminal I changed to the tomcat-dev/bin directory and granted execute permission on everything in it with

chmod +x *

Then I tried starting Tomcat with

startup.sh

I expected this to start a server listening on port 8080. It worked.

I edited conf/server.xml and set the connection port to 8081. I edited conf/tomcat-users.xml to define a user like this


  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="tomcat"/>
  <user username="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="tomcat,manager"/>
</tomcat-users>

Tomcat started properly on 8081, and I could get to the Manager app.

Next: Installing support for ColdFusion development

Installing Tomcat - FAIL!

2009-08-13T06:45:00.004-04:00

Previous: Installing support for Java development

Installing Tomcat should be routine. I've done it many times on Windows and OS X systems. Installing it on Ubuntu turned out to be a lengthy and frustrating experience.

The Ubuntu help pages have a description of how to install Tomcat system-wide or on a per-user basis for a development environment; see https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/serverguide/C/tomcat.html.

I followed the instructions provided on that page under Using private instances. The commands to install Tomcat and to create a user-specific instance were:

sudo apt-get install tomcat6-user
tomcat6-instance-create my-instance

This resulted in a Tomcat installation under ~/my-instance. I'm not crazy about that directory name. Before changing it, I wanted to verify the installation was okay so far. I checked my-instance/conf/server.xml and saw it was set to listen on port 8080, so I left it alone. I ran this command:

my-instance/bin/startup.sh

Browsing to localhost:8080 in Firefox got me a blank document. I tried localhost:8080/manager and got a blank document. I tried localhost:8080/tomcat and got a blank document. In my-instance/logs, both catalina.out and the log file indicated startup was normal, services started properly, and showed no other activity and no errors. I had not seen this behavior in a Tomcat installation before.

I edited my-instance/conf/server.xml and changed the connector port to 8088, then tried it again. Same behavior. The documentation states that no webapps are deployed by default. That might be the reason it serves nothing but blank documents. Apparently, the manager app is not included in the per-user package. Normally, I expect to see the "It works!" message by default.

My next thought was to download the manager application by itself and drop it into the webapps directory. All the documentation I could find stated that the manager application is included by default in Tomcat installations. Clearly, this is not the case for the user-specific Ubuntu package.

The Ubuntu Tomcat help page listed this command to install the manager application, assuming you had installed the service version of Tomcat. It looked as if this might do the trick:

sudo apt-get install tomcat6-admin

Unfortunately, this resulted in a Tomcat service automatically installing and starting.

It was unclear how to shut the thing down manually. I found a posting online that indicated the start and stop commands are in /etc/init.d. I ran

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 stop

to shut down the instance. I was unable to locate a .war file for the manager app anywhere.

A task that should have taken me five minutes had now extended into hours. I had to stop and go to work. Before I gave up for the morning, I found a backup copy of another Tomcat installation on an external hard drive. I was thinking of copying the manager and host-manager applications from there to the user-specific Tomcat installation on Ubuntu, but on reflection I realized this was not a repeatable or reliable way to install software.

I decided to install dev instances of Tomcat the "old-fashioned way."

Next: Installing Tomcat

Installing support for Java development

2009-08-13T06:22:00.019-04:00

Previous: Installing support for Ruby development.

Basic software installs

I installed the Java development tools, Eclipse, and Maven with these commands:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
    sun-java6-plugin maven2 eclipse

To check which version of Java was the default after the install, I ran

java -version

It displayed 1.5.0, so I ran this command to set version 6 as the default:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

After that when I ran java -version it came back with 1.6.0.

To verify maven2 was installed correctly, I ran the following command:

mvn --version

No problems at this point.

To verify Eclipse was installed correctly, I went to the Applications -> Programming on the main menubar and saw there was an entry for Eclipse. I selected it, saw that it started, and exited. I noticed the version was 3.2. I will check into getting a more recent version later.

Maven configuration

Although maven2 appeared to have installed correctly, I was unable to locate the local repo or the maven home directory or any environment variable settings pertaining to maven. A quick web search failed to turn up any useful information about the default location where apt-get installs maven2.

As far as I could tell, being a n00b and all, the environment variables maven2 supposedly needs to be set were not set, and there was no local repo. I decided to try

mvn archetype:generate

just to see whether it would do anything or complain about missing components or unknown paths or whatever. I chose quickstart when prompted, and it worked perfectly. It also created .m2/repository as it downloaded dependencies. Nice to know.

Upgrading Eclipse to 3.5 "Galileo"

At the time I installed it, the latest Eclipse release wasn't yet included in the Ubuntu distro. John Paulett provides a nice set of instructions for installing it on Ubuntu 9.04 on his site at http://johnpaulett.com/2009/06/26/install-eclipse-galileo-3-5-on-ubuntu-jaunty-9-04/. Using his instructions as a guide, this is how I installed Eclipse 3.5:

Created a directory for Eclipse under /home. John recommends ~/bin/packages/eclipse, and he later installs Galileo in ~/bin/packages/eclipse/eclipse3.5 because he needs multiple versions of Eclipse. I don't need multiple versions, so I installed it in ~/bin/packages.
```
cd ~/bin
mkdir packages
```

Downloaded the 64-bit version of Eclipse 3.5 (long lines are broken for readability in Blogger):

cd packages
wget http://d2u376ub0heus3.cloudfront.net/galileo/
    eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

Next, I unpacked the archive in place, in the packages directory:
```
tar xzvf eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk*.tar.gz
```
I deviated from John's instructions at this point, and just updated /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop to point to the executable I had just installed:
```
Exec=/home/dave/bin/packages/eclipse/eclipse
```

I started Eclipse from the main menu, Applications -> Programming -> Eclipse, and it started the new Galileo version. Eclipse had no trouble opening one of the workspaces I had copied over from my OS X system.

Eclipse configuration

I set the M2_REPO classpath variable in Eclipse to point to the local repo. I started Eclipse and navigated to Window -> Preferences, then expanded the tree menu items Java -> Build Path -> Classpath Variables.

I noticed that this version of Eclipse comes with an M2_REPO already defined. It points to the default location of /Users/dave/.m2. Then I chose Edit and changed the value to /home/dave/.m2.

Migrating Java development projects

I copied my ~/.m2/repository from the MacBook Pro to an external drive, and then from there merged it with the ~/.m2/repository on Ubuntu.

I copied my eclipse-workspaces directory from the MacBook Pro to the external drive, and from there to the ~/projects directory on Ubuntu.

Next step was to try and build the projects I'm currently working on to discover what configuration options I would have to change to get things working on the new system. I've been around the block too many times to expect things to "just work." Somewhere, something must be pointing to a resource that doesn't exist on the new system, or depends on a different version of something than the one I've installed. I decided to try building a Function Point Analysis application I'd been working on last year. It's a good test case for maven2 because it's got multiple components and a hierarchy of POMs.

I was surprised and pleased when mvn compile worked on the first try. I ran mvn test and got two failures out of many, many tests. Old, dusty neurons fired, reminding me that these tests used to fail with maven on my old system, too. They worked under Eclipse. So it was time to see if Eclipse would "just work," too. Wouldn't that be nice? Sure it would. Actually, I knew it wouldn't work because I needed to change the build dependencies in Eclipse to reflect their new locations. But I could at least see that no other, unexpected errors occurred.

The project would not build inside Eclipse because references to external libraries were invalid. I expected this, since I had set things up differently on OS X. I knew I would have to redefine a few things with the new setup. I was satisfied that things were in place and would work. There was just some housekeeping to do since I had decided to organize the files differently on the new system. Java was good to go!

Next: Installing Tomcat - FAIL!

Installing support for Ruby development

2009-08-12T04:57:00.027-04:00

Previous: Updating Ubuntu.

Ruby

To install Ruby support:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

Geany (an IDE)

Low let's get Geany, a rudimentary IDE I find handy for Ruby development.

sudo apt-get install geany

Gems (to install other Ruby packages)

This installation procedure is a little different from the usual apt-get thing.

1. Look on Ruby Forge and see what the latest version of Ruby Gems is: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126. Hover over the .tgz filename to see the correct URL for the wget command.

2. The Ruby community does not recommend using apt-get to install Ruby Gems because Advanced Package Tool and gems may get out of sync about versions. The recommended way is to open a Terminal window and enter the following commands (in this case the version I found in step 1 was 1.3.4). Long lines are split for readability in Blogger. Use common sense.

cd ~
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/57643/
        rubygems-1.3.4.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.4.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.4
sudo ruby setup.rb

3. Note which executable was installed (a message appears near the end of the installation) and define a symlink to it. In this case it was version 1.8.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

4. If the installation worked, the following command will display version information. In this case we want to see "1.3.4". By changing directories first I help myself believe the PATH was updated. I hear it's good to believe.

cd
gem -v

MySQL server

I use MySQL for Ruby on Rails development (and other things, too). To install:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Of course, you should set the MySQL root password to something other than "empty" when prompted. The installer starts mysqld. To be sure it worked, run

ps ax | grep mysql

and look for /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid.

After installation, you can stop and start MySQL through System -> Administration -> Services on the main menubar. Alternatively, you can start and stop MySQL from a Terminal window using the commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

and

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

MySQL GUI client

To install a gui client for MySQL, choose Applications -> Add/Remove Applications from the main menubar. If prompted to update the list of available packages, do so. Under Show, choose "All available applications". Select "MySQL Administrator" for a GUI client and "MySQL Query Browser" for a GUI tool for running queries. After the installer finishes, the two applications will appear under Applications -> Programming on the main menubar.

Ruby bindings for MySQL

Open a Terminal window and enter the following commands:

cd ~
sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev

sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient15-dev

Run this command to build it:

sudo gem install mysql

Rails

Use Gems to install Rails. Open a Terminal window and enter the following command

cd ~
sudo gem install rails

If the installation succeeded, the following command will display version information:

rails -v

Verify the installation by generating a trivial rails app:

cd ~
rails myrailsapp -d mysql

or, for sqlite3:

cd ~
rails myrailsapp

In myrailsapp/script, run the command:

./server

If all is well, a WEBrick server will start and will listen on port 3000 for HTTP requests. Try loading the following URL in a browser. You should see a welcome page.

http://localhost:3000

Testing tools

These are tools for test-driven-, behavior-driven-, and storytest-driven-development:

Autotest - continuous testing (part of ZenTest)
Cucumber - storytest tool
RCov - coverage tool
rspec - BDD tool
Webrat - browser simulator (used by Cucumber)

On Debian variants (like Ubuntu), you have to install a couple of libraries before installing Webrat. They are needed by Nokogiri, the XML libary used in Webrat.

sudo gem install ZenTest
sudo gem install rcov
sudo gem install rspec rspec-rails
sudo gem install cucumber
sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev libxml2-dev
sudo gem install webrat

Some conveniences

I'm rather slow-witted, so I find it helpful to follow a few conventions even though I'm the only person working on my system or on my little side projects. I put my software development projects under a directory called /projects. I nearly always use Geany for Ruby on Rails development. I use rspec and Cucumber with these projects. So it's convenient to have a quick way to set up a new Ruby on Rails project in the usual directory that includes the elements I usually want and that creates a Geany project file. To that end, I created a shell script in ~/bin that sets these things up for me. The script newrailsapp looked like this as of the time I posted this information:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z $1 ]; then
    echo "usage: newrailsapp appname"
    exit
fi
if [ -e $1 ]; then
    echo "Can't create $1 because it already exists. Quitting."
    exit
fi

# Create the rails app

rails -d mysql $1

# Generate rspec support for the app

cd $1
./script/generate rspec
./script/generate cucumber

# Create a geany project file for the app

echo "Creating geany project file $1.geany"
cd ..
echo "[indentation]" > $1.geany
echo "indent_width=4" >> $1.geany
echo "indent_type=1" >> $1.geany
echo "indent_hard_tab_width=8" >> $1.geany
echo "detect_indent=false" >> $1.geany
echo "indent_mode=2" >> $1.geany
echo " " >> $1.geany
echo "[project]" >> $1.geany
echo "name=$1" >> $1.geany
echo "base_path=/home/dave/projects/$1/" >> $1.geany
echo "make_in_base_path=false" >> $1.geany
echo " " >> $1.geany
echo "[files]" >> $1.geany
echo "current_page=-1" >> $1.geany

Also created these aliases in ~/.bash_aliases:

# Start Geany (IDE)
alias geany='geany &'
# Start and stop any Rails test server
alias server='script/server &'
alias server_stop='~/bin/server_stop'

The alias geany just starts Geany in the background. Saves a couple of keystrokes.

The purpose of server is to start a Webrick server for dev-testing a Rails app. It's meant to be run from a command line when you're in the appropriate project subdirectory. The server script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
script/server &

The purpose of server_stop is to stop a Webrick server. It looks like this (with the usual caveat about long lines)

#!/bin/bash
kill -9 `ps -o pid,cmd --no-heading -p $(pgrep ruby)
         | grep script/server | awk '{print $1}'`

The assumption is that there will only be one Webrick server running at a time. It's a safe assumption because all of this is set up for a single user environment.

Next: Installing support for Java development

Updating Ubuntu

2009-08-12T04:50:00.009-04:00

Previous: Toshiba Satellite Ubuntu-Vista dual-boot configuration.

With the basic install of Ubuntu done, it was time to bring the instance up to date. To do that, I ran the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential

The first two commands download and install various software updates for the OS.

The build-essential package consists of C header files, libraries, compilers and so forth necessary for building software.

Next: Installing support for Ruby development

Toshiba Satellite Ubuntu-Vista dual boot configuration

2009-08-11T16:23:00.013-04:00

Previos: The Great Laptop Quest Part 2: The Hardware.

It should be a straightforward matter to configure a machine to boot into alternate operating systems. Resize, move, and/or create partitions on the hard drive or drives; install the operating systems into the appropriate partitions; mount any shared data partitions in each operating system; and "To start, press any key."

It should be a straightforward matter.

In reading about the particular hardware and software products I intended to configure on the Toshiba Satellite laptop, I learned about quite a few problems people were having when trying to set up a dual boot with Windows Vista. Vista, it seems, is a bit non-standard in the way it manages its boot partition. What's more, it's fairly unfriendly toward those who try to muck with it. The salient points are:

Vista has to boot from the first primary partition on the hard drive.

Vista writes a special "boot code" into bytes 63 through 2047 of the boot partition. The "real" partition data starts at offset 2048. This appears to be designed to defeat partition management programs that were not published by Microsoft Corporation. If that was the design intent, then it has succeeded.

When you use a non-Microsoft partition management program to shrink the Vista boot partition to make space on the hard drive for a second operating system, the program might innocently rewrite the partition data starting at offset zero. After all, why shouldn't it? At that point Vista is broken.

Did I say "broken?" I'm sorry. I meant to say, "unrecoverable." There's no option but to reinstall Vista from scratch using the original installation DVDs. Unfortunately...

...you don't have the original installation DVDs if you purchased an OEM system with Vista pre-installed.

On my first attempt to set up the dual boot environment, I followed the tutorial at http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first.htm, which seemed to me to be well throught-out and reasonable. I used Vista's Disk Manager utility to shrink the partition. Then I installed Ubuntu using a Live CD burned on the Mac. The installation went smoothly and there were almost no issues on the Ubuntu side. I spent a few hours tracking down a problem with Ubuntu recognizing the Intel 5100agn wireless chipset, and there was an issue with power management settings causing "shutdown" to terminate Ubuntu but not to turn the machine off. When I booted into Vista the first time after the Ubuntu install, there were no errors related to the partition resize.

So I had a functional dual boot configuration. But the resulting configuration was not quite what I had in mind. Disk Manager would not allow the Vista boot partition to shrink any smaller than about half its original size. That resulted in a Vista partition of about 154 GB. Since my goal was to create a shared data partition occupying most of the hard drive space, most of the Vista partition would simply contain wasted space. What I really wanted to do was shrink the Vista partition to about 16 GB. Neither Disk Manager on Vista nor the partitioner in the Ubuntu install process offered a way for me to set up the partitions in this way, although the Ubuntu installer did have an option to set up all partitions manually. Under the circumstances, I wasn't confident that doing so would leave Vista undamaged or recoverable.

What I had in mind was a configuration like the one described in this description of a partitioning scheme: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partitioning. Although Ubuntucat considers this approach outdated and currently favors Wubi, I think the partitioning scheme shown below would be ideal for my needs:

What about the risk of destroying my Vista installation? I sifted through many online forum postings, blog entries, and articles. I kept finding contradictory information. It occurred to me that the apparent contradictions might simply be due to timing. Many of the horror stories about repartitioning causing a broken and unrecoverable Vista installation dated from 2007. Reading more carefully, I learned that gparted version 0.3.4 and later are reported to be able to resize a Vista partition without damaging it, although moving a Vista partition may require a system recovery using a bootable Vista installation disc. Well, I wasn't planning to move the partition, was I?

Furthermore, I read on a couple of forums (for instance, here: http://forums.computers.toshiba-europe.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=45393&tstart=0) that Toshiba ships its pre-installed Vista systems with a recovery partition on the hard drive, as well as a utility to create a bootable recovery disc based on the contents of that partition. It was claimed that the recovery disc can fix the problems that resizing the Vista partition might cause. "Recovery" in this case means restoring the factory settings; that is, putting the factory-installed Vista back where it was when the unit shipped. That would wipe out any user data or installed applications as well as the Ubuntu partitions. But it would (hopefully) get the machine back into a usable state so that I could continue to break it again and again in the process of learning how to get to the configuration I really wanted.

This information gave me greater confidence to try to configure the hard drive as I had originally intended. In addition, my risk of data loss was minimal. I had not yet installed anything on the Vista instance or the Ubuntu instance. They were both clean installs. If the Vista recovery disc failed to repair any damage I might do to the Vista partition, I could order an installation DVD from Toshiba for a nominal price (about $20). My greatest cost in that case would be the time lost while waiting for the installation DVD to be delivered. Even if that failed, I could conceivably install Ubuntu alone on the Toshiba laptop and use the little Acer unit for the two Windows-specific applications I cared about. All my current work is safely on the MacBook Pro and/or an external storage device.

So, why not?

I booted from the Ubuntu Live CD and followed the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot for setting up a dual boot configuration with Windows. The partitioner was unable to resize the Vista partition. After it spun for a long time at 0% complete, it aborted the operation with no further information.

End of story for now. Obviously, I need more knowledge and experience before I can successfully set up a system such as many Linux aficionados consider routine and simple. Frustrating!

Afterwards I tried booting into Vista. It detected a problem with the hard drive and ran chkdsk. It found no errors, yet hung at the point where it says, "Please wait while your computer restarts." After 15 minutes the computer had not restarted. With some apprehension, I powered it off manually and turned it back on. Fortunately, Vista started normally this time.

Next, I shut down Vista and booted into Ubuntu, to ensure I hadn't broken it. It started fine.

For the moment, the configuration has a couple of shortcomings:

I wasn't able to allocate as much hard disc space to Ubuntu as I had wanted; and
My /home directory will be embedded in the same partition as the rest of Ubuntu.

When I've learned enough to configure the system in a more suitable way, I'll be able to save my /home directory contents by making a backup of its contents prior to installing another Linux. That's slightly less convenient than having the /home directory in its own partition, but probably not a big deal.

Next: Updating Ubuntu

The Great Laptop Quest Part 2: The Hardware

2009-08-11T11:24:00.010-04:00

Previous: The Great Laptop Quest Part 1: Software Support

Okay, so we know Ubuntu Linux supports all the applications I need in my work and most of those I like to use for pleasure. Now it was time to find a laptop with the necessary hardware features, service life, and aesthetic characteristics.

I looked at quite a few specifications online. Having used Apple products for the past several years, I was very much out of touch with the current state of the art in non-Apple OEM products. I assumed all Intel-based laptops would be comparable. I was disappointed in the relatively lame hardware configurations offered by other OEMs. In the 15" display range, all the OEM laptops offer relatively poor display resolution. The other Intel OEM equipment lacks integrated Bluetooth support, and not all products offer Bluetooth even as an add-on. Many of the OEM units lack an IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire, I.Link, or Lynx) port. Many OEMs are still installing tray-style DVD drives instead of the more reliable slot-style drives. Backlit keyboards are treated as special upgrades rather than basic features.

A sturdy full-size keyboard is an important consideration for me, as well. I do a considerable amount of typing, and keyboard longevity has been a problem for me not only with my current MacBook Pro but also with past laptops, particularly those from Dell and Texas Instruments (probably a moot point).

Support for dual monitors is another useful feature. I like this feature when making presentations.

Eventually I was able to find only a handful of OEM laptops that were comparable to Apple equipment. I was surprised and a bit disappointed at just how short the list of candidates turned out to be. If only Apple's quality rose to the level of their coolness factor!

The price differential was so extreme that it became a decision factor for choosing the replacement equipment for the MacBook Pro. I found that I could obtain two laptops and pay less than one-third the price of a single MacBook Pro comparable to the one I'm replacing. The 15.4" MacBook Pro had always been a compromise size: Small enough (just) to carry to meetings and presentations, and large enough (just) to serve as my workhorse platform for everyday work. With the price differential greater than 3:1, it was feasible to consider a higher-end laptop that had more of the hardware options I wanted and that had a larger display, along with a "netbook"-sized unit for presentations and note-taking.

I found many favorable customer reviews regarding the Toshiba Satellite series, representing the higher-end product range, and the Acer Aspire One, representing the netbook product range. Customers were writing that they had purchased their second unit, and their first unit was still in good working condition after 4 years or more. If these units last 6 years and cost 1/3 the price of a MacBook Pro, then the total cost of ownership will be 1/6th that of a new MacBook Pro. It's hard for coolness alone to compete with numbers like those.

So, the "small enough and large enough" criterion could be met simply by purchasing one large laptop and one small one. No need for a compromise on size!

Global electrical system support is largely a non-issue these days, but it was still worth investigating, just in case. Optional power supplies and third-party adapters take care of this requirement nicely.

I must say no other laptop compares to the Mac in terms of aesthetic appeal. The highly-regarded Toshiba Satellite and Acer Aspire One units aren't bad-looking, though. In an era when most laptops still look like plain black slabs, the Toshiba and Acer stand out without looking garish.

Based on my assessment of software and hardware, my Mac replacement would consist of these two units:

My plan: Configure the Toshiba Satellite P500 with an 18.4" display as a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux as the default OS and Windows Vista as the alternate. Use the Acer Aspire One to run presentations and handle similar work-related tasks. Its pre-installed Windows XP environment is fine for the purpose.

Next step: Ubuntu-Vista dual boot configuration on the Toshiba Satellite.

The Great Laptop Quest Part 1: Software Support

2009-08-11T10:37:00.013-04:00

Previous: Macrilege!

As a consultant and knowledge worker, I use my computer for writing; preparing and giving presentations; developing spreadsheets with graphics; and writing, testing, and demonstrating software in various languages. These tasks call for software that supports document authoring and desktop publishing, image manipulation, presentation slides, and all aspects of software development including version control and test environments suitable for local deployment.

For exchanging files with clients and colleagues who use Microsoft Office, I need word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software that can read and write Microsoft Office file formats. Support for Windows fonts is also helpful, since most of the formatting issues that come up with transferring presentations between software packages have to do with font support.

As a consumer, I use my computer for surfing the web, viewing videos, listening to music, organizing my media files and syncing to my portable media player, and playing casual games, where "casual" means games like Tetris or Minesweeper rather than those like Warhammer or Halo 3.

Both for work and for pleasure, I also need the basic facilities people have come to expect in a personal computer system: Wireless networking capability, Bluetooth support, CD/DVD reading and writing, good display resolution, acceptable perceived responsiveness, and so forth.

The software support described above constitutes my needs in a laptop. Regarding wants, it would be nice to be able to watch DVD movies on the computer, to make phone calls using a service such as Skype, to organize and play my media files, and to sync my portable media player.

I installed several software packages on Ubuntu Linux under VmWare on my MacBook Pro to see whether Linux met these needs (and as many wants as possible). My findings were encouraging.

OpenOffice installed easily, worked well, and supported all my requirements in "office" software. The tools I use for Java development all work well - Java, Maven, Eclipse, etc. The tools I use for Ruby development all work well - Ruby, Rails, etc. I had problems getting NetBeans to start. I experimented with using Geany as the IDE for Ruby development, and found it satisfactory even if not as feature-rich as NetBeans. I understand there's a product called Mono that enables .NET development under Linux; that sounds interesting, but I didn't check it out for purposes of this investigation. For version control, I've been using subversion for quite some time and I've been transitioning to git. These programs work fine on Linux.

I was able to install Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL with no difficulties. I found it easy to build and deploy Ruby on Rails applications and Java webapps to the Apache environment. All the tools relevant to this type of work are well supported on Linux.

The mind mapping program I'm accustomed to using, FreeMind, works the same on Linux as on any other platform. For other tasks I perform on the computer, I had to try out different programs than those I had been using before. This turned out to be no problem at all. Gimp came pre-installed on Ubuntu, and works fine for my image editing needs. I found a news reader called Pan that has all the functionality I need. I installed ffmpeg and found it works fine for converting media files. A program called Banshee worked fine as a media library organizer and media player, although it is not able to sync my Zune. Banshee actually proves the case for Mono, since it's a .NET application. In addition to the basic Unix-style utilities for managing archive files, Linux supports ZipCreator, unrar, and several other tar-like and zip-like utilities.

Firefox is the web browser that comes with Ubuntu (Gnome), and it was already my personal favorite so this was a natural fit.

I like to use a wiki to maintain notes and reference information locally, for my own use. I had been using Confluence personal edition for this purpose. According to Atlassian's website, it's supposed to work on Linux, but I was unable to get it to start. I downloaded Instiki and manually converted my wiki pages; it wasn't too burdensome, and forced me to review the contents and delete out-of-date information, which was a useful exercise anyway.

I could not verify hardware drivers and firmware in the VmWare environment. I had to rely on information in Linux forums online to assure myself that the necessary support was available. What I read sounded promising.

It was not feasible to verify that Skype would work under 64-bit Linux, since my MacBook Pro is a 32-bit system and Skype does not (currently) offer a 64-bit version of its software for Linux. I did find explanations online of how to install the 32-bit verison of Skype on a 64-bit Linux system, so this sounded promising, as well.

There is one Windows-specific application in particular that I use: Music Publisher from Braeburn Software. I made no attempt to check out comparable software for Linux, because I strongly prefer this particular product. I will have to run it on a Windows system. This does not affect my assessment of laptops for professional use and general personal use.

The only disappointment was that I could not find a way to sync my Zune using Banshee (or even by copying files manually). It seems the Zune is not recognized at all as an external storage device. This is true both in Mac OS X and in Ubuntu Linux. Apparently, the Zune is specifically designed to work only with Microsoft Windows. This is not a show-stopper for my assessment, although it would be convenient to sync the Zune with my primary laptop.

One of my requirements about software was that the system demand an "acceptable level of tinkering." What does that mean? Well, most operating systems don't "just work," like a toaster. Mac OS X comes closest. Microsoft Windows requires tinkering to get rid of a lot of annoying little reminders, helpful hints, confirmation dialogs, security warnings, advertisements, talking paper-clips, and pre-installed programs that nobody wants. Windows demands further tinkering on an ongoing basis to keep it free of malware. Unix and Linux systems have a reputation for requiring a high level of technical tweaking just to get them into a usable state and keep them operational.

For my purposes, an "acceptable level of tinkering" falls somewhere between the tinkering the average consumer would accept and the tinkering a computer science major would accept. I have a technical background, so I am capable of learning and understanding whatever tinkering might be required. However, my goal in using my personal computer is not to tinker with it endlessly. I want my new system to be easy to use, but I'm prepared to do a bit of manual labor to get everything installed and configured properly.

With that in mind, my VmWare assessment of Ubuntu Linux passed the test.

As far as software support was concerned, Ubuntu Linux was looking good. Next step: Check out the laptops available from vendors other than Apple.

Macrilege!

2009-08-06T13:14:00.005-04:00

Apple customers are funny. They...that is, we...seem to have almost a cult-like attitude about Apple products. Over the past few years, nearly all my colleagues have purchased Mac laptops. At user group meetings, conference presentations, training classes, on airplanes and on client engagements they pull out shiny new MacBook Pro laptops almost to the total exclusion of any other product. That sort of reverence seems a bit silly; it's just another company, after all. Yet, it's part of the Apple customer culture. Maybe that's why I feel compelled to justify my recent decision to move away from the Mac platform. Maybe, too, it's why I feel an irrational sort of guilt about it.

I've been a happy Mac user for about five years now. I've got no complaints about Mac OS X. The problem is the cost of ownership of the Apple hardware. My MacBook Pro (the second Mac I've owned) is in need of replacement, and it's less than three years young. I've replaced the keyboard, and worn out the second keyboard. I've replaced the battery and the power supply. The display has many dead pixels and uneven brightness. The machine has started to exhibit intermittent scary behavior having to do with electricity, causing the occasional mysterious crash.

Okay, so why not just get a new MacBook Pro? Well, my first Mac, a PowerBook G4, cost about $2,500 and was serviceable for about two years. It still runs today, but not reliably enough to use for anything important. The MacBook Pro cost about $3,000 when it was new. A comparable replacement today would start at around $3,600. When beefed up appropriately, it would be around $4,000 to $4,200. With an expected useful lifetime of around three years...well, it just doesn't add up.

Non-Apple laptops don't run Mac OS X. Has Microsoft Windows improved to the point that I can work with it happily? Based on my occasional use of my wife and son's Windows Vista machines, I would say "No." Not to worry: There are beaucoup versions of Unix and Linux out there. One in particular has become relatively user-friendly: Ubuntu (and its cousins).

So, should I just dump my Mac and buy a one-way ticket to Ubuntuland? It turns out that I'm just a tiny bit too risk-averse to take such a rash step. To find out whether Ubuntu could meet my needs, I made a list of my needs and then loaded an instance of Ubuntu Linux under VmWare on the MacBook Pro to check out the available software.

When I thought about what, exactly, I actually do with my computer, I was surprised at how modest my needs really are. I spend a lot of my time working on the computer, but it seems I spend that time doing just a handful of different tasks.

My software needs:

Support for all the types of work for which I use my computer

Acceptable level of tinkering needed to configure the system and keep it running

My hardware needs:

Support for all desired hardware features

Reasonable initial price and total cost of ownership

Portable, yet large enough to be a comfortable platform for work; and small enough to be convenient to carry to conference sessions and business meetings for giving presentations and taking notes

Usable on different national electrical grids, since I travel in my work

Reasonably nice-looking; doesn't look like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Thus begins the search for a new laptop! Next: The Great Laptop Quest.