Head On

At least in the server world, Linux has won.

Here in Sweden, Microsoft has an inexplicable stronghold, even in the server room. The last time Craig Larman, Valtechs Chief Scientist, was here he noted that nowhere did he see as large proportion of server side windows as in Sweden - and Denmark.

I don’t know what makes swedes pay for stuff others get for free. Perhaps the high taxes have made us used to money disappearing?

Why on earth doesn’t Sun provide a Java Communications API for Linux?

Good thing IBM does.

I feel I just have to try Ruby on Rails, I mean everybody else is doing it and I don’t want to feel left out.

So I started setting it up on my X40 which runs Ubuntu. There is still no deb available for it, you have to use the Ruby Gems system to set it up. I dont know if this is good or bad - it seems like a Ruby CPAN and my feelings towards Perls CPAN are mixed. I once ended up with two Perls on a Red Hat box when using it to set up Request Tracker. Let’s hope Gems works better.

To start out I had to apt-get rdoc and libzlib-ruby. After that it is installed. Whohoo. What now?

Ok rails ~/work/rortest … Bang. Some dependency is missing. Let’s search Synaptic to see what could possibly make it tick.

libwebrick maybe? Nope. libmysql-ruby? Nope. eruby? No. libdbi-mysql. Noo. libwhatever-ruby. Nothing works.

Maybe there’s some info on their site? Hmm … there are instructions on how to install it on Debian unstable which involves apt-getting the all ruby libraries known to man - but who cares - let’s try that.

Whohoo! It works. Let’s see some of the Ruby love in the browser then - it is indeed there.

Ok. Now for the database tweaking. Why three databases? I guess I’l find out.

Yaml is really, really nice.

Ok, according to the site, all I have left is to develop my Rails application, so I guess that is what I will do. Wish me luck.

Update: There are now instructions for how to set up Rails on Ubuntu.

I have been using Gnome 2.8 for a couple of weeks now, and I must say that it is getting really good. Gnome was the first window manager I used when I started using Linux, but I soon became hooked on more lightweight alternatives such as Fluxbox and XFce4, as I did not think that Gnome offered that much to compensate for its relative slowness.

But since I got my laptop, I have grown tired of having to do everything manually whenever the environment changes. And with the advent of Ubuntu it is really a snap.

I honestly do think that it is a way better working environment than Windows. It still has a lot to do to catch up with Mac OSX, but when I look at what is happening over at Planet Gnome I strongly believe that they will eventually get there.

My old 3Com Prism54 card for some reason did not work anymore on Linux. I finally gave in a bought a new MadWifi one which worked out of the box. Sweet!

After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux.

A Mini HOWTO:

• Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD
• I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great
• Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system.
• Get the network card driver from Broadcom, the card is a BCM-5700. Compile it and put it in the /lib/modules/kernel-version/kernel/driver/net/ folder. Run update-modules and modprobe bcm-5700 Add it to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4 if needed
• Get the ISL driver for the 3Com card. Follow the instructions closely, but patch the gs-sources kernel instead. I removed the pcmcia-cs package before compiling the kernel as it provides its own cardbus implementation. Supposedly only the card drivers can be compiled, but I didn’t try that.
• Emerge the wireless-tools package. iwconfig is your friend.
• ACPI is somewhat unstable, the battery information comes and goes in a undetermistic way.
• The modem is supported by the HSF driver but that in turn does not support preemptible kernels. Choose whatever you want

I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M.

As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted - no network. The Broadcom 5700 adapter was not supported out of the box, so after trying I few innovative ideas like creating a custom LiveCD, I suddenly realized that I could use my old Xircom card in the PCMCIA bus. Sometime the easy solutions are really hard to find, and sometimes I’m just a dork for not seeing them. This time it was the latter.

OK. After that the install went smoothly. I got the Broadcom driver from their site and could eject the Xircom card. Lm-sensors simply does not do IBM, so I had to turn to ACPI. It provided quite some headache, but after reading a lot about it I did at least get the battery stuff going.

Then we had the 3Com wireless PCMCIA card. The nice people of Rutgers University had put together a driver that supposedly should work. After working a lot with it and having a little private kernel patching festival, finally it compiled and I was a happy man. Until I rebooted, that is. The laptop simply did not boot with the 3COM card in it. OK, so I had to do a little more tweaking. Eject the card, and do a hard power off.

So I started the laptop up again just to get me a large fat kernel panic in my face.

Something had barfed on the Reiserfs b-tree and it would not start again. OK, boot with the Live CD and fsck, right? Wrong.

To make a long and sad story short but equally sad, my almost ready killer laptop was gone. Reiserfs could only recover the disk by doing a rebuild-tree. I could identify most folders, but since heartbeat applications like bash were not recovered, I simply had to start over again.

And this for two measly failed startups.

Needless to say, my new setup is running Ext3 and Resiserfs will never be used on a computer fo mine for a very very long time.

And as for the Gentoo install guide referring to Reiserfs as “rock solid” - yeah, right.

Har precis fått in RH8 hemma, och det ser helt enligt ryktena riktigt bra ut. De antialiasade fonterna blir riktigt bra, synd bara att de inte funkar i alla program. Däremot blir det lite antigeek varning på att det inte finns en konsol-knapp default i menyraden.

Inte heller denna varsion är en Windows-killer, men om de får fortsätta lite så kan det nog bli något riktigt bra. Personligen blir jag glad den dag jag slipper Windows helt och hållet. Idag använder jag det för spel och musik. Spel kan med fördel spelas på ett TV-spel och musik skulle jag gärna ha en Mac för. Med det skulle jag kunna slippa MS helt och hållet - toppen.