Randquist Rants » Linux

CentOS – Parallels Virtual Appliance

CobyR — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:56:49 +0000

Parallels, provides as part of their community section a nice directory of virtual appliances for download with Parallels 2.0 and above. You can find it at Parallels Appliance Directory. The CentOS 5 Server application has been a great starting point for me for testing deployments of some of our applications. I really do love the ability to spin up multiple virtual machines for development and testing purposes.

Cleaning up the .svn directories from OS X or Linux

CobyR — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:38:42 +0000

Handy little command to quickly remove all those .svn subdirectories from a project.

find . -type d -name .svn | xargs rm -rf

another alternative

find  . -type d -name ‘.svn’ -print0 | xargs  -0 rm -rdf

Personal Brain 4.0

CobyR — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 08:35:55 +0000

I’ve been using Personal Brain (http://www.thebrain.com) for a little over five years now. With this latest version they have finally released a client for OS X as well as for Linux.

It is great to not have to use Parallels to access it. For a while I switched to Journlr under OS X, but I have so much stuff and time into Personal Brains that Journlr inspite of some really cool features, couldn’t overcome my history.

Now with PB 4.0 on the mac, I have made a couple of additional utilities. I wrote a small ruby script that I can run from a command line that creates entries into a text file. Then I wrote an applescript that will read the log file and locate the appropriate thoughts in my brain and add the children thoughts to it.

It’s been fun and interesting… next step is to play with RubyOSA, although I don’t think that will go very far. Currently Personal Brain is not a scriptable app with apple script, so RubyOSA can’t find a definition.

RoR on Debian on Sparc

CobyR — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 01:59:29 +0000

Installing Ruby on Rails from Source on a Debian Linux running on a Sun Ultra 5 Workstation, has been an adventure.

Actually getting ruby on – no problem, download, make etc…

Then getting Gems installed so I can install rails… not so easy.

When attempting to run ruby setup.rb for Gems I encountered an error regarding zlib not being installed.

After downloading ruby-zlib-0.6.0 and attempting to run ruby extconf.rb I got back a message saying that it couldn’t create the makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers.

So then I did an apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev.

Then ran ruby extconf.rb – it worked.

Then ran ruby setup.rb in my gems directory – it worked.

Then I ran gem install rails – it worked.

Now I need to get the latest subversion in place and the sparc box is fully ready to go as a RoR development machine.

Ubuntu – Dapper Drake

CobyR — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 04:48:18 +0000

I’ve been playing with my Ultra 5 Workstations again. I decided that with a bit more memory and a current linux current and Gnome or KDE that they would make nice introductory/development machines for my kids. I pulled Debian Sarge R2, which is still using the 2.4.2x Kernl, and got things running smoothly, except when in KDE the B key on the keyboard dies. I thought it was a hardware issue at first, but after playing with three different workstations and three different keyboards it was obvious it has to do with the mappings in KDE, works fine under Gnome.

I wasn’t really happy with using the 2.4.x kernel though, would prefer 2.6.x, so I pulled the latest Ubuntu release for the sparc architecture and have installed that. It’s up and running on one machine, now I’m trying to figure out exactly which packages to install to get the GDM up and running properly.

I installed Dapper in a VPC on Windows box, with minimal problems, had to escape out during the GRUB loader and reconfigure X to use 16 bit color instead of 24 but other than that it went smoothly.

So more on X and Ubuntu on Sparc in the future.

Linux on MIPS

CobyR — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:40:05 +0000

The ISO to CD approach for my Indy was flat wrong. I was unable to actually boot from CD’s. So I setup a TFTP server and DHCP server on one of my Ultra 5 workstations and booted the Indy using bootp to start from the network.

I was able to get a debian linux 2.4.18 kernel up and running successfully.

Started on X-Windows configuration and ran into some issues with the version of the kernel, need to upgrade kernel to 2.4.27.

Hopefully I’ll get back to that sometime this week.

Linux on different architectures

CobyR — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 02:09:01 +0000

Well as I have been spending more and more time on linux, I decided it was time to break out some of the old hardware. I have an SGI Indy, and several Sun Ultra 5 machines, that still have their native OS’s installed. It’s time to move them to Linux, I’ve decided to use debian since there are distros available for both the sparc and mips architectures.

Installed Jigdo and have been downloading ISO’s. Gotta burn them and start installing tomorrow.

A little bit of shell scripting…

CobyR — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 05:11:26 +0000

The following information was handy since I have not done much in the way of shell scripting in a very long time.

Borrowed this information from:

http://research.imb.uq.edu.au/~ksteube/Bshell/

Update: (10/7/2008) The above link is no longer valid, and since I didn’t reference enough of it to be useful, this post is now pointless.