javafreedom.org

The ArchLinux Development Stack found a Home. I received some very friendly, personel and quick support from the guys at Open+Pario and that was the main reason I chose this one. They are hosting a Redmine instance and GIT, so this is a perfect fit for the stack.

Please browse to http://openpario.mime.oregonstate.edu:3000/projects/archdevstack to get an impression of the project.

Like already stated, any help is welcome, so register yourself and provide feedback, suggestions and everything else you can think of.

Like already stated, I would like to build a Development Stack for ArchLinux and especially Java. Now I have published another Package of this stack – Sonar. Sonar is a quality metric tool for Java and especially Maven peojects. This package is in its early phase and it is using the default Derby Db and Jetty as the Web Daemon. The Wrapper delivered with Sonar to start the daemon is still in place and uses the user root.

AUR – java-sonar

So, this is the first release of this package and I think that there is a lot more to come. BTW, I am still looking for support for this “project”. Any help is welcome.

Long time no see. So this weekend, I have had some time to put the new Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) on my Laptop. I wanted to use this together with the latest Trac (0.11dev) on my server using Mylyn. This is not really working out of the box. Therefor I discovered some patches and put some more patches into place as well (Patch concerning the Attachment of files) and Trac-Hacks Ticket 1075. This is running with Trac 0.11dev-r5982.

Also I have created the egg file for the XMLRPC-Plugin of Trac on my server (TracXMLRPC-0.1-py2.4.egg). Also there is the patch available on the above mentioned page http://trac-hacks.org/ticket/1075, which you should apply on the 0.10 trunk of the plugin.

I just compiled a new version of PasswordSafeSWT, with a new export feature for GNU Keyring. This works only for GNU Keyring 2.0x at the moment. You can download it right here for Linux. The sourcecode is already sent to the project, so await more stuff to come soon. The exporter currently works for Password Safe Files Version 1 and 2. The additional stuff for Version 3 files will be added shortly.

Currently I am looking a little into the Java EE 5 Stuff from SUN. During the researches I discovered a new company on the horizon Simula Labs. This company seems to be basically build up on the work done in the open source area of the Apache Software Foundation.
I am not sure, if this is right. Is this company just getting products out of the ASF and market these products or is it also investing time and money into the ASF? I hope it is the latter.
Anyway, I believe that Open Source is not really anymore an area, where some geeks just write up some nice code. Now it seems that it is all about earning money and about getting attention. The main example of this is probably SUN, which releases their application Server as Glassfish in an Open Source manner, IBM with Eclipse pretty much the same, and even Red Hat (with JBoss) is an example for this.
So where does this take us? I hope, that the communities are not going to be splitted due to the mentioned facts. Let’s wait and see…

I already told you in my last post, that I am currently looking at Buildix, a continuous integration/development stack build ontop of Knoppix. This is a pretty nice distro derivate. The thing is, that I have already a couple of other applications running on my Ubuntu Server and wanted to have something similar on this machine.
After a couple of hours, I figured out, that most of the components in Buildix are already available as Ubuntu Packages, therefore I went ahead and installed all these tools on my server.
In the Buildix-Environment you can also find some tools from Thougthworks (like the UserManager) as well as some nice scripts to e.g. create new projects very easily. Some of these tools are pretty nice and make the life of the administrator of this machine easier. I would like to point out the script for the creation of new projects. In a later post I will probably point out on how to transfer these scripts.
In the following, there is a short description, on how to install this stack. In most of the steps, there are only the packages, you have to install, mentioned.

1. JDK (1.5.0_08)
Ubuntu Package:
sun-java5-jdk
2. ANT (1.6.5-6)
Ubuntu Packages:
ant
ant-doc
ant-optional

3. Tomcat (5.0.30)
Ubuntu Package:
tomcat5

4. Apache HTTP (2.0.55)
Ubuntu Packages:
apache2
apache2-common
apache2-doc
apache2-utils
libapache2-mod-jk
libapache-mod-jk-doc

5. Subversion (1.3.2)
Ubuntu Packages:
subversion
subversion-tools
subversion-helper-scripts (0.5-2)
libapache2-svn
db4.3-util

After the installation, you have to create a Subversion Repository:
http://www.howtoforge.com/debian_subversion_websvn

    mkdir /var/svn
    mkdir /var/svn/sample
    svnadmin create /var/svn/sample

6. Trac (0.9.6)
trac
enscript
libapache2-mod-python
python-docutils

After the installation of trac the Trac Environment has to be created:

mkdir /var/trac
trac-admin /var/trac/sample initenv Sample sqlite:db/trac.db /var/svn/sample
   /usr/share/trac/templates

This will create a trac project named Sample in the directory /var/trac/sample and using an SQLite DB and the subversion repository in
/var/svn/sample and the templates in the trac default directory.
After this you will get an output from the system:Project environment for ‘Sample’ created.
You may now configure the environment by editing the file:
/var/trac/sample/conf/trac.ini
If you’d like to take this new project environment for a test drive,
try running the Trac standalone web server `tracd`:
tracd –port 8000 /var/trac/sample
Then point your browser to http://localhost:8000/sample.
There you can also browse the documentation for your installed
version of Trac, including information on further setup (such as
deploying Trac to a real web server).
The latest documentation can also always be found on the project
website:
http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/
Congratulations!

After this, you can try your installation with the tracd (like stated in the message above). But since I wanted to use the apache2 server
I have had to do some more stuff:

    /var # chown -R www-data trac
    /usr/lib/cgi-bin # ln -s /usr/share/trac/cgi-bin/trac.cgi trac.cgi
    /var/trac/sample/conf # htpasswd -c trac.htpasswd cruise

To enable the trac-configuration in Apache, you have to create a new file in the directory
/etc/apache2/sites-available. I named this file trac.
The following configuration file (trac) works with mod_python.

	Alias /trac "/usr/share/trac/htdocs"
	
		Options Indexes MultiViews
		AllowOverride None
		Order allow,deny
		Allow from all
	

	# Hack to get cruisecontrol shot the build log.xml file
	RedirectMatch ^/var/spool/cruisecontrol/(.*) /cruisecontrol/$1

	
		Dav svn
		SVNParentPath /var/svn

		AuthType Basic
		AuthName "SVN Repositories"
		AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
#	      AuthzSVNAccessFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.authz

		
			Require valid-user
		
	

	# Trac needs to know where the db is located
	 #set up Trac handling
        	SetHandler mod_python
     		PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
     		PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/trac
     		PythonOption TracUriRoot /projects
		SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/cache/python
	

	
		AuthType Basic
		AuthName "Trac"
		AuthUserFile /var/trac/trac.htpasswd
		Require valid-user
	

Because Apache2 will seg fault on my machine (I believe due to some dependency problems with BerkleyDB or so) my current
configuration is using the CGI-mechanism. Therefor you have to exchange the last part of the above configuration.

	# Trac needs to know where the db is located

	ScriptAlias /projects/sample /usr/share/trac/cgi-bin/trac.cgi
	
		SetEnv TRAC_ENV "/var/trac/sample"
	

	
		AuthType Basic
		AuthName "Buildix Trac"
		AuthUserFile /var/trac/sample/conf/trac.htpasswd
		Require valid-user
	

This is doing the job. Not quite as fast as with the mod_python, but it works After editing this file, it should be enabled throught the command a2ensite trac.

7. Cruisecontrol (2.5.2)
For Cruisecontrol you can use an existing Debian package at:

http://buildix.thoughtworks.com/download/cruisecontrol_2.5-2.deb

To get CC working with Tomcat5, you have to create a link for the webapp.

ln -s /usr/share/cruisecontrol/webapps/cruisecontrol
   /var/lib/tomcat5/webapps/cruisecontrol

If this does not work, then copy the directory.

8. Integration Trac -- CruiseControl
Get the Plugin at https://oss.werkbold.de/trac-cc/
Ubuntu packages:
libixml2
python-libxml2
python-libxslt1

Add CC-Section to trac.ini:
https://oss.werkbold.de/trac-cc/wiki/CruiseControlSection

9. Trac Plugins
I found some Plugins for Trac very useful. You have to install EZ-Setup for installing some of them:
http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
Install it with python ez_setup.py.

One of the most useful Plugins is the WebAdmin Plugin. This Plugin will be included in newer versions of trac, but for
the current version (0.9.6) you still have to install it manually
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/WebAdmin
Download the *.egg.zip, rename it into .egg and call easy_install *.egg, then the plugin is installed for all projects.

An extension of this plugin is the WebAdminUserPlugin:
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/WebAdminUsersPlugin
Just unzip the zip-file and then call python setup.py install
this installs the plugin globally for all projects

I installed some other plugins, you can find most of them on http://trac-hacks.org. Take a look at the GanttChart Plugin.
TODOs:
There are still some open points in this description. Like already stated there is a script to create new projects in the buildix-Distro.
I would like to include this into my server as well. Also, I am looking forward for the version 0.11 of trac, since there are some nice
new features included there.
Also I am still missing some project management features (like time and estimates in the trac tickets), which are already added in future
version of trac.
Another idea would be, to create a new distro based on Ubuntu (possibly called B-Ubuntu) using the Reconstructor Toolchain. If you are interested in this, please write me an email, and possibly we can create something like this.

I am currently trying to implement an application for the synchronization of some values from the Palm Pilot with the Desktop. Right now I try to do this using the Eclipse RCP Environment as well as Hibernate and HSQL. I have already installed the Hibernate Plugin for Eclipse (3.1) from there Homepage. To get this working in a RCP App you have to modify some files, so that the classpath is correct and you don’t get a “hibernate.cfg.xml not found” exception: Hibernate Classpath. This will work, but the last part (the stuff with the loading of a class) is not really needed. Although I have had some trouble, in loading HSQLDB. I added this to the manifest file of hibernate-Plugin. Now it works. Probably I will not use this plugin for the final release, I would like to use hibernate as well as hsql on its own, without too much dependencies.

Today I got a message from sourceforge.net, that one of my projects will be closed. It is XMLFavorites, which is really one of my first projects. It converts the bookmarks of Internet Explorer into an HTML-page, which is readable by any browser. So if you are interested in this project, please join it or write me an email, then I can leave it open to the public. Otherwise it will get deleted, because I am not interested in it anymore, since I am not an IE user any more

Hello, I wanted to install the JDK1.5 on Ubuntu Breezy Badger. I downloaded the rpm from sun and found, that even with alienating this file, I have had no luck. Therefor I searched the internet and found the make-jpkg tool. Try it:

• download JDK1.5 (.bin)
• sudo apt-get install fakeroot java-package java-common
• fakeroot make-jpkg sun-j2sdk1.5_1.5.0+update06_i386.bin
  This process should ask you for the detected product and if you would like to install it. Say yes and also say yes to the license agreement of SUN. Now you have created a new .deb file
• install this file using
  sudo dpkg -i sun-j2sdk1.5_1.5.0+update06_i386.deb
• now you need to update your configuration of Java: sudo update-alternatives –config java

Have fun using JDK1.5

Hmm, well, I just had to do something like


Didn’t work the last time