Category Archives: Open Source

MacPorts tips

If you do development on Macs and you don’t use MacPorts, you should seriously consider it, especially if you come from a Unix background. Formerly known as DarwinPorts, it’s the equivalent of the Debian package-management system for Macs, and exceedingly useful when you find you just need to grab a copy of libpng, or try something with PHP 5, or some such.

The documentation will help you get started, but it’s very handy when someone like Garrett Albright writes a helpful tutorial to explain some of the more obscure features. Thanks, Garrett!

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Building a Debian package using SCons

I wanted to do this and couldn’t find any examples, so I’ve posted some notes on how I did it.

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Virtualisation

A while back I thought virtualisation technology was going to be the hot topic of 2006. Well, it was, in certain niche areas, but the momentum is still growing.

Shortly after VMware’s amazing IPO, XenSource, a spin-out from the Cambridge Computer Lab, have been bought by Citrix in a deal worth $500M. And not all of the money is virtual – there’s a good chunk of cash there too.

Many congratulations to my pals there, who will now definitely be buying the drinks next time we meet at the pub.

But this is also a nice challenge to those who don’t believe you can make money from Open Source…

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Hex your Mac

Want to edit binary files on your Mac? Hex Fiend looks neat.

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Open Source in action

I had a great time last night visiting Catalyst, who provide software and services to some pretty high-profile NZ projects, but also seem to have a lot of fun. I liked them immensely, and it’s always encouraging to see successful businesses built around Open Source.

Some of them are helping with OLPC on the side, and I was able to play with one of the laptops for the first time. I was quite impressed.

olpc-gw.jpg

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MacFusion

Michael blogged recently about MacFUSE, which lets you mount SSH-accessible servers as file shares on your Mac. It’s very handy.

And now it has a prettier front-end, in the form of MacFusion.

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Tick-tock

SVG – scalable vector graphics – is an XML-based standard for storing images based on lines, curves and shapes (as opposed to photo-type pictures, which are arrays of pixels).

It’s been around for some time – I think I first experimented with it in around 1999 – but there were a very limited number of programs able to create or view SVG files. That’s changing, however, and SVG is gaining ground for a variety of reasons:

  • An SVG file can include Javascript, which can modify the graphical components to create an animation
  • It turns out to be quite a good format for delivery some types of graphics to devices like mobile phones
  • Firefox supports it – which means that a very large number of people are now able to see SVG images without installing any extra software

Martin sent me a link to this simple but very pleasing SVG animation by Tavmjong Bah, which you should be able to see if you’re using Firefox or similar browsers.

It assumes you’re on a large display, though, and if not, you might like this version, which I simply scaled down using the free Inkscape application. Note that the animation still runs, that it shows your timezone, and that if you were to scale it back up you’d get the full quality of the original.

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GRUB CD image and Error 15

This is a post for anyone who, like me, has been doing web searches to find out what might be the problem if your Linux machine displays GRUB Error 15 on booting. Or who has general GRUB issues to debug.

My problem was Error 15, which indicates that GRUB cannot find one of the files it needs. If you get it while setting up GRUB, it’s often fairly easy to find out what’s wrong. But if GRUB thinks it’s installed OK, and you then reboot, you can still get this message but without any further information to help you debug it.

To cut a long story short, the issue for me was that the BIOS (and GRUB while booting), saw my two hard disks in a different order from the way the kernel saw them after booting. So my assumptions that /dev/sda was the same as (hd0) was invalid.

Finding this out took a very long time, though, because, for reasons too complex to go into here, I was booting this server not from a regular CD but from an emulated CD the other side of the Atlantic.

Things became a lot faster when I found this section in the GRUB documentation which explained how to make a bootable CD ISO image with GRUB on it. To save you the trouble, here’s one:

I could mount this and use the GRUB console command line to find out what was wrong. It’s worth exploring the GRUB console, if you haven’t already. It can do things like filename completion when you press TAB, and can even display the contents of text files using, for example,

cat (hd0,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst

In my case I found that the BIOS of the machine allowed me to choose the boot order of the hard disks, and swapping them there was the easiest solution.

Hope this is useful to somebody!

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Europe’s feeling foxy

The Firefox browser continues to gain popularity in Europe, with a market share of just over 23%, according to research done by a French firm and reported in The Inquirer.

We in the Royaume Uni are a little behind some of our neighbours at 15.8%, while Slovenia has adopted Firefox to a whole-hearted level of over 40%.

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Virtual-Q

I’m just moving Status-Q to a new server. If you can see this, it’s working!

The Status-Q server is now actually a virtual one, based on the Xen virtualisation system. I had about 18 web domains on the old server, and I wanted a bit more flexibility in how they’re managed, so I’m gradually migrating them onto a set of virtual servers on the new machine, which will make it easier, for example, to upgrade key bits of software without endangering all the sites at once.

Please let me know if you notice any problems…

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Open Source database frontend

These days, most databases use a web browser as a frontend and something like Ruby on Rails or Django to link the web to the database. But if you’re on Linux and looking for a desktop equivalent to Microsoft Access, Knoda is a good place to start.

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Still not quite foxy enough

Firefox 2 is out. Can’t say I really notice much difference, but I thought 1.5 was just fine, so I’m not upset.

On the Mac, though, it still doesn’t deal with RSS feeds as nicely as Safari, so it won’t quite displace my default browser yet.

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