The Small Wonders of Linux

If it wouldn’t have happened to me, I would not believe it… But since it did, I just write it down.

Let’s take the following laptop: Lenovo W520. It behaves very badly under Windows (Highly possible some faulty driver, it drops me the following blue screen all the time – the screen to the left is my favourite CrunchBang linux, runs on a different machine), so I decide to install the latest openSuse (12.3 .. .at the time of writing).

Everything goes well, linux installs itself like a charm, it works, I work, etc… everyone is happy and smiling, time goes on.

Then one day, I forget to take my mobile disk with me to copy some pretty big files (bigger than my dropbox account can handle …) I need to take to some other place, it’s quite urgent … so I decide to take out the harddisk from above mentioned laptop and just like in good old times take it home in my pocket… it fits

At home, I still have the old ASUS N75 which deserved its post here some time ago, when I was unable to find a suitable linux for it, and fortunately that laptop has an extra empty slot for guest hard disks. In a few minutes the second hard disk is installed when I suddenly realise, that the Windows on the Asus Won’t be able to recognize my ext4fs linux disk …

As the last desperate act I try to boot from the secondary hard disk (yes, the linux, which was installed on the Lenovo W520) … and it works. Flawlessly. It finds all the dirvers, including the so cumbersome nvidia, detects the network card, signs me in to my wireless home network, and it’s behaving excellently.

Excellent work openSUSE guys, I never would have expected something like this with modern operating system. I should try this with other distros too, just to see what happens Maybe with other operating systems…

Debianizing Database Deployment Manager

I have started to create a debian package for my small Database Deployment Manager tool… It will be the best on long term.

Useful commands:

dpkg-depcheck ../../dbm-build-Desktop-Debug/ddm 

will check the files accessed by the application. From the huge list create a python file with the content:

import os
li = ['/usr/lib/libdlrestrictions.so.1.0.0',
..... and all the other files
'/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/plugins/imageformats/libqmng.so']
for i in li:
  os.system("dpkg -S " + i)

an run this as:

python ./deplist.py  | cut -d: -f 1 | sort -u > deps.txt

This will give you the list of the debian packages the application is using.

Install latest subversion (1.7) on a Debian 6 machine

Firstly:

sudo apt-get remove subversion

sudo apt-get install libapr1-dev libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dev

Then:

wget http://apache.komsys.org/subversion/subversion-1.7.7.tar.bz2

then unpack, configure, make, make install.

Should do it

Financial thoughts about Database Deployment Manager

According to ohlohs my tiny little project of database deployment (http://ddmproject.weebly.com/) is worth 11 person/years with a cost of around $600.000 … dammit, I am working on it in my free time since January, 2010 with BIG gaps in the development process, there were long weeks when I couldn’t commit anything being busy with stuff that actually brings money in the house (you know, I also need to eat…), there was one developer (me) writing the code (worth of 11 years) and this nice site tells me that I did work worth of $600K …

If someone would have given me that money in January 2010, today the tool would be at version 1.0 (not 0.1i … and planning 0.1j in the coming weeks) with fancy features such as complete version management (I am working on this right now.. and it’s far from complete), deployment package installer generator (plan for the next releases), support for different databases (planned for the next release), a report generator tool (who knows when), ORM mapping for various languages (in the far future near the end of the galactic kingdom) … and lots of useful and unique features that all sit in my “Documents” folder in the /home/myself directory in a document named “wanted_for_ddm.odt”.

But let’s not get angry and frustrated, I am also very happy this tiny amount of code managed to get itself released for the last years a few times, and this way I had the freedom to implement things the way I want, in the order I want, with the speed I considered matching my style.

Of course, you can ask why not “hire” extra hands from the open source community. I have tried… I prepared nice documentation on how to get started, long chains of emails, directions, hints, advise, etc… and then waited for things to happen. Things didn’t happen. That’s why I am alone in the project right now, and I like it this way. I will not go out again on sourceforge to hunt for developers, testers, it’s a waste of time. They have high level of enthusiasm in the first days, and when they see, that yes, this is also like a day to day job, writing code, fixing a bug, testing, re-testing, regression testing, etc… they just evaporate…

Anyway, my product is and will be developed and supported for some time from now on, feel free to download use it, and if you consider it useful click on the “I use this” button on the ohloh site for the project.

kdesvn and bcompare

I wanted to use bcompare as the default compare application for kdesvn, so here is the quick way:

- install bcompare and kdesvn
- go to Settings -> Configure kdesvn
- go to Diff & Merge
- select “Use external diff display”
- in the “External diff display” text field put: “bcompare %1 %2″

Done.

 

Why do I like crunchbang linux

The reason is pretty simple: because it works right out of the box. It has no flashy fancy graphics, on the contrary, it’s pretty puritan, but by default it comes with a pre-configured X, a tiny desktop environment for X, just enough to switch between applications and a nicely configured conky and it is perfect for my developer needs: it allows me to open a BIG terminal, when running under X, and it gives you the feeling that in fact you are in text mode, however, you can run Qt Creator next to it… So you are pretty productive. With minimal effort I have configured conky to show what I was interested in and the big debian repository allows me to download everything I am interested in. Here’s a screenshot:

And one more important thing: crucnhbang runs on a pretty old 64 bit hardware… One from the first generation 64 bit AMDs…

Database Deployment Manager and Linux 1.

I have to admit that supporting a GUI tool that will equally well perform both on Windows and Linux using Qt is not necessarily the easiest task to accomplish. For some time this is the situation with my beloved pet project, Database Deployment Manager. My very first reaction when I have started writing this tool some 2 years ago was to support every platform Qt can support and to deliver the easiest way for the users to get the app up and running. Under Windows this was not an issue. Compile the stuff, gather all the required libraries, create an install package (right now I use Inno-Setup after switching from InstallJammer because on August 16th, 2011 they just simply discontinued the development), test it, upload to SF.net and let the users download and use it.

Now, under Linux as everyone knows, the history is a little bit different. The easiest way for me, and the hardest for the users would be to take the application source and compile it. They are free to do it, but this is not my point. I want beginner and intermediate users to have access to the application and get it on their system without too much hassle, and they would be definitely terrified if they would need to start compiling Qt and installing all kind of dependencies just to get it up and running. To not to mention, that these dependencies on every Linux distro are called differently, thus not making easier the life of someone who wants to maintain a documentation for the would-be users (that’s me). This basically means, that I picked my two favorite distros (Fedora, and Ubuntu) and using InstallJammer created a package for them. If the distro of the users matched mine, they were able to run, after installing the necessary mysql libraries. (Yes, now I already hear the voices, Why didn’t you make RPM and DEB packages … they are the proper way of installing software under Linux… but actually I did make an RPM, but the download rate was simply terrible compared to Windows and it was not worth spending the time and effort I have dedicated to it… instead I chose to write code).

Now, as a courtesy of BitRock I have got an open source license of their Install Builder, this promises to have an install package for my Linux up and running in no time.It does, unfortunately the download rates of the Linux version are still way behind Windows.

Next chapter will be the bottlenecks of Qt.