Posted by hatim
Thu, 15 May 2008 09:38:00 GMT
In the last few days I had been reading reviews and hearing some good things about Fedora 9, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the 64 bit version of fedora kde-livecd. The CD booted easily on my Acer Aspire 7720-6604. I was greeted by a dark theme (which is not my taste). I then tried out some preinstalled software and frankly I was not impressed. The KDE version comes with Koffice and Konqueror. Since I have not used KDE for some time now I had not realized that I had grown used to Gnome. Overall there was nothing mindblowing about KDE 4 and it was yet another Fedora release. I then tried to do a dummy install to check that how ext4 support works, again to my disappointment there was no ext4 option available (i later tried with the kernel parameter ext4 but without any luck) I think ext4 is only available on the full installer version.
The lack of packages in precompiled distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora is prompting me to move back to Gentoo (or some even flexible operating system choice). Lets hope that Gentoo guys release 2008.0 before the start of 6th month of this year (its already behind schedule)
Posted in Technology | Tags gentoo, linux, ubuntu | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Fri, 02 May 2008 07:27:00 GMT
I tried Ubuntu 64 bit Alternate Installer on a brand new desktop with core2duo and software RAID (i previously wrongly reported it as Ubuntu Server). The installation was a brreze but for some reason I was not able to install GRUB out of the box. Once I realized what I was missing I staright away copied the grub files (stage1 stage2 files etc) and installed grub and I was on my way.
Installing RAID on ubuntu is easy with server installation, but one has to make the software RAID partitions manually before the install. I also made the unused space after RAID as part of LVM so as to utilize the disks effeciently. I also installed webmin through a deb package, I realize that its not very secure, but from webmin one can learn alot of configurations and can supplement some user based managament of the server.
As for Ubuntu's latest offering, I am fairly impressed. This distro is getting better with every release. The other day I was having a discussion on #opennms about using customizable distros like "Gentoo". I think I have done good by trading in felxibility for stability so I can concentrate on the real problems at hand. One learns alot on Gentoo, but one could also learn much stuff on gentoo as well becuase kernel and other packages are essentially the same.
I have yet to install Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 on my laptop but I think I will probably wait for Ubuntu 8.10 to come to make the swicth. With summer of code and other devlopment activities, I dont have the time to meddle with new installations.
Edit: I did install te 32 bit version on my laptop for a test run and was not convinced of its stability. I would be sticking with 7.10 for some time now. It atleast works.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, ubuntu | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:21:00 GMT
I have been selected for Google Summer of code for the second time. My writing skills and my socilazing on irc has paid off well and now it time to concentrate on my software devlopment skills. Like last year I witnessed the irc party on #gsoc @ freenode. There were almost 900 people in attendence and Leslie was trying to calm every one down by frantically typing, 'calm down' , 'chill', 'patience' every other second :). I have so far gotten emails from both Google and OpenNMS. here is an excrept from Google's email
Dear Applicant,
Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. Please
check your student home page in the SoC web application at
http://code.google.com/soc/student_home.html to determine which of
your applications was accepted.
Over the next few days, you will be added to a special members only
......
If you cannot take part for some reason, please email us at
gsoc@google.com as soon as possible so that we can allocate your slot
to another student.
Other questions and concerns should be send to gsoc@google.com
Thanks for taking part; we're very excited to see what the Summer will bring!
Congratulations once again,
The Google Summer of Code Progam Administration Team
and here from RangerRick (Ben Reed from OpenNMS)
== Hello ==
So I just wanted to send out a quick note to welcome you to the OpenNMS
community, and to thank you for getting involved in Summer of Code!
This is our first time as a mentoring organization, so we'll be learning
alongside you how to do things. If you have any questions, please don't
hesitate to contact....
.....the next month, it's "Community Bonding" time. Time for you to get
to know us, for us to get to know you, and for everyone to get familiar
with interacting, checking out/building/working with the OpenNMS
codebase, and all that fun stuff. Get on the mailing lists, join us in
IRC, introduce yourselves, and most importantly, have fun!
- --
Benjamin Reed
The OpenNMS Group
http://www.opennms.org/
I am already a part of the Google Student mailing list and have updated my profile for this year's project. I aslo see that this year there is some one else working on Internet2 Java OWAMP project and hopefully they will succeed this time. As for me I will be start the tasking of my project as of today (ie identifying the small tasks for the migration).
Wish me luck :)
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:04:00 GMT
I wanted to setup Trac on my server, but haven't found a recepie which only uses nginx for Trac and SVN componenet. So I decided to go for plain Webbased SVN application. I chose WebSVN because it uses PHP and is easy to setup, it's used by KDE project for their SVN view and most of all, its readily available in Ubuntu :). I found a nice tutorial from HowToForge.com for setting up svn and websvn on Ubuntu. My websvn repository can be found here.
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, linux, svn | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:47:00 GMT
I was looking inot making my own spring-mvc project through maven and found the archetype:generate command. I was pleasently surprised to find app-fuse stuff within the realms of maven. These projects (maven and appfuse) are different but related projects and some times cause confusion. Appfuse basically allows devlopers to quickly setup an application for a Java EE project with the option of using state of art open source Java EE frameworks (Spring, Struts2, Tapestry). Where as maven is a build tool (like maven) with a flexible project model. It even has its own integration server by the name of continuum (which can tell devs if a build is broken).
I only ran mvn archetype:generate command and rest of the SpringMVC-Hibernate application was setup by the framework it's self. It even made it's own database and put in the required tables. It would be interesting to see how it does all of this with maven.
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, Java, maven | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:48:00 GMT
These days mutt is my default email client. Even though I still use webmail for my service based accounts (gmail, yahoo) and Evolution at work I would one day like to merge all my accounts under one roof with IMAP, spam control and mutt as my 'Mail User Agent'. The first thing which I wanted to do with my mutt was to make it send PGP-signed messages. I found the following links to be interesting read.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, mutt | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:13:00 GMT
I requested my hosting service to migrate my virtual private box from a User Mode Linux setup to a Xen setup. Xen seems to be the de facto visualization solution for Linux. It has become a considerable part of new Red Hat Certified Engineer's exam as well (for which I am prepping these days). Interestingly I was having troube running jetty plugin on User Mode Linux but now I am ablt to run that plugin (jetty wont bind to port on the local UML machine, now it does).
Posted in Technology | Tags Java, linux | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:33:00 GMT
following is a repost of my SoC proposal for OpenNMS
Synopsis
OpenNMS currently still depends on some PostgreSQL-specific behavior (especially in stored procedures) which keeps it from being database-independent. Although OpenNMS has been slowly transitioning its code to use Hibernate instead of direct JDBC calls, but there is a lot of code still using JDBC. The following is a project proposal for Google Summer of code 2008 to the OpenNMS project. This document gives details of project methodology, time lines, and risks.
in short
- The aim is to complete hibernate transition for the entire OpenNMS project. Author's aim is to complete major tasks by Dev-Jam 2008.
- The deliverable are code, test cases and documentation. OpenNMS installation documentation which deals with OpenNMS install with MySQL and perhaps a few other OSS Databases will be part of deliverable.
- Applicant has been a part of OpenNMS user community for a year now and has genuine interest in Java EE software development(due to his present job and future education and career directions)
- Applicant will be sharing code samples before project selection to show mentors that the applicant has sufficient background in Java EE software development.
Further info and code samples will be available at http://code.hatimonline.com/opennms
Read more...
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:56:00 GMT
Google's Summer of code application deadline for students has been extended for one week. It's now Monday April 7th 2008. This is good as well as bad. It's good because it gives me one more week to make my application even better, and it's bad because I will be spending now more time in the application process than in actual coding
Edit:
Well I didn't spend more time on my application, but I was able to get Jetty running through maven. Apprently User Mode Linux was preventing Jetty from binding to an IP, but after migrating to Xen every thing works smoothly now. It seems that I would also be able to run OpenNMS now :).
I am currently following the following good links for sample application devlopemnt
http://www.lulu.com/content/1087191 (Set of tutorials to start devlopment with Spring and Hibernate using Maven2)
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/03/01/building-web-applications-with-maven-2.html (Maven 2 Web application devlopment tutorial using Jetty plugin)
I have also found the following book to be useful
Thomas Van de Velde, Bruce Snyder, Christian Dupuis, Sing Li, Anne Horton, Naveen Balani
ISBN: 978-0-470-10161-2
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, contests, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:17:00 GMT
OpenNMS got selcted for Google Summer of code 2008. It seems that making enough noise on IRC and mailing lists does work :). I have also got my slef registered as a part time student in Virtual University of Pakistan as a Masters leve certificate course student, so it seems that pieces are falling into their places. I am thinking of applying for OpenNMS hibernate implementation coding. Right now I am just applying and I have hope that I will make it. But unlike last year I think I better take some time off from my full time job as I wont be able to juggle between job, course and SoC. For now I better post samples of hibernate coding on my site (possibly running under jetty)
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, contests, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
