Hmmmm read what miguel wrote, this looks really good for the future, or dare we say the future is now? 🙂 I for one am going to give that novell desktop a go.
Well I really hope we’re gonna pick up some more business when vista’s comes out, hmm, if it comes out that is 😛
I lied, sorry!!
Okay, in my last post I said I was going to use one of the discussed design patterns, but because of of the lack of time (short deadline) I didn’t do it, sorry 🙁
Well that said, let me shortly explain. I was asked to develop an application to keep track of some runners. These runners would run a fixed track for a duration of 6 hours. Well I thought this was the perfect occasion to get up to date with gtk(#) and mono. I also did a fresh install of dapper drake (more on that in the near future), and installed almost everything I could find on mono from the ubuntu repositories.
I most say, development went smooth, okay I have to admit, I do know some things about the Gtk Object Model and widgets, so I had a head start. Well its far from finished, but I thought, lets blog about it 😉 And because we all like screenshots, here are some from the development.
Here’s the monodevelop, okay I know its C# and a lot of you guys are gonna throw something at me, but I did 90% of my work in VM enabled programming languages, and I like it. I have to admit the monodevelop IDE is far and I mean far from where VS.NET is, but at least there’s something. I also mailed with one of the developers a year ago and he told me that he was refactoring the whole code base to use the plugin pattern (as almost all tools do these days). The version I installed was already the refactored one, and from the plugin manager I had the option to install some plugins. I wanted to give the Version Control plugin a go, but it just draw a blank panel, hmmm, maybe I’ll check it out later.
As you can see I don’t have much at this time, but the big picture is to have 1 form with 3 tabs. First tab is for doing the CRUD on our runners. The second tab will be tab where the users can enter the number of the runner when he passes and a new record will be inserted with the timestamp to keep track of how many laps the runner has done, and also what time it took him to do all his laps.
The third pannel will be an overview panel where the user can see all the runners with their laptimes, and there will be a print option. Now about the print option, I’m not quite sure yet. I think I’m going to use OpenOffice Calc, build a template and than call that template from my mono app. Then the user can choose whether he wants to print it, send it to an email adres,… Its up to him.
The backend will be implemented using NHibernate, the hibernate buddy but than in mono/dotnet. It should work the same, as hibernate what I’ve used in several java projects already. And no matter what some managers say, it does shorten the development cycle!! And no its not a miracle tool, some things are just better done in plain Sql code.
The db will off course be mysql, what else? (okay, maybe postgre or sqllite)
In the next screenshot you will see my dear old glade-2 tool builder. How else would you build a gnome app, right?!
I hope to have it finished by the end of the weekend, otherwise I’ll be in trouble. After its finished, I’ll put it under the GPL or LGPL license and see if I can get a hold of a sourceforge pass (or maybe even gnome pass), to store it on their CVS.
Zimbra a collaboration suite
I already tried some collaboration suites lik groupware and such, and got my mind set on given zimbra a go. I’ve installed it on a FC4 server install, only had to get on rpm (compat-libstdc++) couldn’t get it from dags repo, but no prob.
So downloaded the tarbal, ran the install, it checked all the dependencies, everything was fine. Wait,wait,wait,… Ok set the admins username. Done… Log in on the admin web gui, add a dummy account. Finished I’ve set up my first zimbra user 🙂
Logged into the webgui using my freshly created user, made some appointments in the shared calendaring. Hmmm, would it be accessible from a client soft. Hmm let’s google the zimbra forum, hmm, wait what’s this a web calendar available. Hmmm, lets see, try my evo. Hmm nope, well I’m running dapper and its an unstable version of evo, let’s try mozilla calendar (as plugin of firefox) Hey what’s that, nice my appointment, let’s edit it, … Error put not supported. Let’s read on in the forum, okay ics calendar editing not yet supported. But what’s this, outlook and sync4j are going to be supported, but only in the NON oss version 🙁
I saw there were a lot of java projects in the source, and it uses a tomcat. Kinda curious what this runs on, I’ll report back later with some screenshots and who know maybe even some reviewing of their code 😉
Linux chooser
Just read Nicolas his post and immediately tried it, and worked for me 2. Ubuntu and Debian came out, exactly my 2 prefered distro’s (and what I’m running on most of my computers). So check it out and try the distro they tell you, you might be surprissed at how far we’ve already come.
imho for regular destkop users, linux is almost if not further than windows. By this I mean an out of the box installation. Heck we support more drivers out of the box than windows, and I do speak out of experience here, I installed a windows on a ibm work laptop and had to fetch the network drivers from the internet, before I was able to get internet to download the rest of my drivers (videocard,soundcard,…) when I popped in my ubuntu disc, everything was up and running, even glxgears ran smoothly!!
Comparing prepared versions doesn’t count if you ask me, because those are custom made and everybody can do that 2 with a linux to fit some specific needs, to bad nobody does it for linux, who knows what’ll happen when windows come with their vista. I hope to see more ubuntu laptops pop up.
Mono in rawhide
Finally the day has come, but you already knew this, right?
I for one am 100% behind the mono project. Why, well in my opinion it will open the door to a lot of new developers on the market. Let’s face it, there are a lot of companies who have invested in custom developped applications, these applications are mostly written for the microsoft platform. But a lot of companies are migrating their solutions to newer technologies, be it dotnet or java or …
If the developers were smart enough to just just the default libraries and nog use any com wrappers, it shouldn’t be to difficult to port their new solutions to linux.
Okay, it isn’t as simple as that off course, but it makes it more simple than porting a c# app to ansi C or python. Let me rephrase that, you won’t have to rewrite all your code. Maybe this will persuade some more companies to invest in linux development (mono) because they can still use it on their windows system while they are migrating.
I’m really curious if this is going to make a shift somewhere. I hope so, can’t wait to turn this freaking ms workstation into a gnome desktop!! Be it FC, ubuntu, Novel desktop,… as long as its a linux and if its gnome, even beter!
setting up chroot scp on my xen
Yesterday I tried to install a chroot scp/sftp on my xen, first of the setup_chroot.sh script failed because it couldn’t find my ld.so (a like) file. By looking in the script I found out, it checked against some possible candidates.
I’m running a debian in my xen, but also at home and at home the script ran without a glitch. So finding out which candidate was the good one, I came a cross a file like /lib/ld-linux.so-2, using dpkg –search ld-linux.so-2 if found out this file was in the libc6 package.
So in my xen I did a dpkg -L libc6 en there it was the file was called something different, so making a link (ln -s /lib/… ld-linux.so-2) it now seemed to work.
However when I logged in a test account using winscp, I got a lot of errors. But these errors will have to wait for the next night.
also in my todo, finding out what libc6 does, don’t know the package.
new server online
Hey Everybody,
sorry for the problems and the inconvenience, but we switched from server and one hd of the old server failed on us. So now I’ve got my own server to manage.
I’ll try to get my wiki also up and running as soon as possible. I do miss some of the notes I had in there, makes the importance of backups again clear. As kris once told, ask you customer do you have a backup plan? But more important, does it work?
We’ll find out soon enough 🙂
I’m doing a project at the moment so i’m really busy, can take some time before the tiki is back up. sorry 🙁