The thing which I was doing wrong from the beginning was to use 64 bit JDK as I had not read the later sections about problems with 64 bit in the install guide. After few failed attempts and messing around with the GC Overhead workaround as well as adding more RAM to MAVEN_OPTS I got to 32 bit JDK and at least I was able to make it till the next step (ie selenium and acceptance tests).

As of now the build gets stuck here and I am not able to make a significant progress.I can finally get a successful build, but its too slow to do any thing. I will be looking into speeding it up.

I think the whole approach to unit testing needs to be revised in MIFOS. There are probably too many tests in the entire system and they could be modularized. It wont be easy just separating out business logic in a production system, but clear steps need to be taken so as to reduce the build time for Mifos. This is probably the biggest hurdle for MIFOS community, to attract good developers you need a workable codebase and 10+ mins of buildtime is not a workable codebase in my opnion.

I will be looking into making the build run faster on my own system first and then perhaps see what I can do to make the whole testing thing better. Here is the build summary of my latest build

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Mifos - Parent ........................................ SUCCESS [2.626s]
[INFO] Mifos - Common ........................................ SUCCESS [27.094s]
[INFO] Mifos - Test Framework ................................ SUCCESS [14.122s]
[INFO] Mifos - Service Interfaces ............................ SUCCESS [7.460s]
[INFO] Mifos - User Interface ................................ SUCCESS [13.232s]
[INFO] Mifos - Application Programming Interface ............. SUCCESS [4.165s]
[INFO] Mifos - Service Provider Interface .................... SUCCESS [1.453s]
[INFO] Mifos - Application ................................... SUCCESS [1:36:39.031s]
[INFO] Mifos - Acceptance Tests .............................. SUCCESS [2:25:11.122s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 243 minutes 1 second
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Apr 20 07:36:19 CEST 2010
[INFO] Final Memory: 87M/380M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

As you read this I have also moved on from Linode.com to HostEurope.de.  Linode was a good service, but I needed a service closer to home and with a little more juice (RAM) packed into it. The installation of wordpress on top of Ubuntu LTS was a breeze compared to what had to be done for Ruby on Rails based Typo.

I will be porting my older blog entries slowly (both from Blogger and Typosphere blogs). I am experimenting with themes and plug-ins. If you would like to suggest any of those, please be my guest.

In Pakistan one cannot use other VOIP services easily for now. May be even skype gets blcoked in the future. i will try to investigate a better solution.

The only other thing besides Skype that i am running is VNCServer and DynDns update client to be able to log into the machine. The dyndns client is not very rasilaint as it does not detect IP changes.

Infact I am sitting more and more on my windows 7 installation out of necessity as it’s video chat in skype is better than what I can get in Linux at the moment. Here is a screen shot of skype video chat with advanced statistics enabled. In this you can see various statistics for a call made to Pakistan from Gothenburg (with one way video). The green needle in the bottom says that the call quality is good (which is rare actually)

One cannot do multiparty video chat with skype. I have found a nice new application called TokBox for that which does if for free. Another utility is from oovoo, but it’s not free for multiparty video chat. This might be enough to push me into writing some thing of my own on top of already available SIP clients.

You will ask how come? As I have previously mentioned that I have a DIY video conference system in my parent’s home. Apparently with Skype 4.0 which is not available for Linux yet, you can have a much better video call quality. It may also have to do with the webcam driver for my laptop, which is not at par with the windows based driver.

My clients (or to be politically correct, my boss’s clients) are mostly on windows and require help with windows based systems as well as expect windows native solutions (so even working with Java based technologies, I am still expected to come up with .exe files and installers)

But it’s not that bad. I am coming back to windows after a very long time and after good changes in it. Windows 7 is actually a very slick system, but it does lack the raw power of any linux system. Hopefully I will be able to own a second machine in coming future to have as a windows only machine (I am thinking about Nokia netbook with 12 hour battery life). FYI I have a genuine windows dvd, thanks to Chalmers academic alliance with Microsoft.

One thing which I discovered while on my new system is that my extended screen was flickering rather bad. I  googled (binged?) it up and found that it could be my battery or the charger. Taking out the battery did solve the problem, I have yet to get my charge cable checked to see which problem is it (battery or charger). But while digging up information on battery health I came across page from BatteryCare(which I discovered thanks to lifehacker) detailing proper laptop battery usage guide. I had never really read up on battery care before so I will try to follow these suggestions from now at least.

I now have a battery wear level of around 30% on my laptop which considering my usage and the life of the battery (18 months almost continuous use) is not that bad.

But the last distribution was not so much fun for me and I now know the primary reason for it. I have had a 64 bit machine since April 2008 and I was using 64 bit Ubuntu (with work around for 32 bit apps and plug ins). The performance of firefox was unbearable. As soon as the current release of Ubuntu became available (which was around April 23, 2009) I downloaded an ISO image so I could do a plain install (primarily to resize the partition size and to get a new partition on the newly shipped ext4 filesystem). I didn’t realize at first but I installed the 32 bit distribution by chance (which was a blessing in disguise). The first I realized that it was a 32 bit system was when I tried to install VirtualBox from a deb file (I could have sworn that I had burnt the 64 bit CD, but it was installed).

The first thing which I did was to update drivers for Nvidia GPU (which was painless, since a popup automatically gives you that option). Then I went on to install RubyOnRails following my own blog entry. After that I tinkered a bit with Firefox to check for performance. In my experience firefox with it’s stack of plug-ins performs much better in native 32 bit than in 64 bit wrapping mode. I could not only run BBC.com/urdu radio, but also had better  performance of flash and other plug-ins.

There are various incremental improvements in latest Ubuntu. Faster booting time bing one and seemingly cleaner/faster UI is another. There are many nice new UI themes to choose from. One small new feature which I found was the automatic logout (once you press logout, you don’t have to confirm it, it  can logout automatically in 60 seconds if you choose to not confirm).

Another nice feature is the Ubuntu Janitor (which keeps track of packages and files installed from outside of repository, ie possible junk). In my case Janitor was able to detect that I had installed VirtualBox. (Later it also found Adobe Air run time and some AdobeAir applications which I had installed)

Installing fonts is super easy. Just make a new folder .fonts and put your TTF files there. Following are some screen shots of urdu websites utilizing some of the installed fonts on my system.

I followed the guide of medibuntu to install repositories and enable win32 codecs for streaming content as well to easily install other non-free software (you can’t live with them if you have non geek family and friends). I also installed sun-java6 plugin to make JavaFX work nice and VLC with mozilla plugin as my primary media player and Adobe Air run time.

Last but not least I installed screnlets, compiz config manager and GnomeDo to make my desktop work like a charm (I didn’t find any of the other software from Lifehackers’s top 10 Jaunty download list to be of much use)

As for hickups I did experience a bit of sound starvation (clicking in sound) when using plain Alsa drivers. After looking around and trying around some configurations I used this tip and now I am running the Pulse sound server without any problem.

Call it a charm of a clean install, magic of ext4, or simplicity of coming back to 32 bit system, for me this is Ubuntu’s best release to date.