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Subversion new version, SourceSafe conversion

By on September 12, 2006 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Python, SourceSafe, Technology

OSNews reports Subversion 1.4.0 Released. “This is a feature release of Subversion [Updated link], featuring BDB 4.4 and repository auto-recovery support, a new tool for synchronizing repositories (svnsync), major speed enhancements in the versioned filesystem and the working copy, and of course the usual host of bugfixes and minor enhancements. Additionally, check this article on how to Set up Subversion and websvn on Debian.”

Good timing! I've been using subversion for the past year on a web development project with another (remote) developer, and have enjoyed the power and flexibility of the tool, as well as some of the cool add-ons, clients and scriptability.

Now, it's time to consider moving existing projects out of Visual SourceSafe and into subversion. The folks at Pumacode offer an vss2svn tool that runs as a native Windows executable, written in Perl and C, with the source available under an open license. Pumacode tried an interesting tactic to convert the VSS repositories: rather than interogate the VSS binary to retrieve files, it reads the repository files directly and interprets the results from there. There are some advantages where older versions might be corrupted, or to retrieve files flagged as deleted, which they say VSS will not allow.

On a 2 Ghz Pentium-M with a gig of RAM, it took about 2 hours to process my current VSS repository, which consists of forty thousand files and around 1.4 Gb of disk space. (The authors of vss2svn caution that it's better to convert the entire repository than to risk further corruption by pruning it first; leave that task to subversion post conversion.) This generated a dump file of 850+ Mb. Transferring that to the Linux box with a new repository took a few minutes, and loading the data about 20 minutes. Using RapidSVN from the Windows box, I was able to browse the subversion repository and confirm that files and folders and log history comments look about right. I'll confirm by checking out projects of interest and diff'ing them against the current development copies.

I had anticipated a different tack, using COM Automation to drive VSS, as I described in Essential SourceSafe. As a learning project, I had proposed using Python to browse the repository via COM Automation and use the excellent Python-svn bindings to migrate portions of a VSS repository to subversion. I still plan to try that, and to compare-and-contrast the results between the two techniques, while I learn a little more Python.

MythTV links

By on September 10, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

SlashDot misses the mark completely with in inaccurately-titled and summarized pointer to a great Tom’s Hardware story on MythTV. There’s nearly nothing in the story about the Microsoft media device, nor does there have to be. The MM is a plug-in-and-work device that locks you into their choices, their protocols and few extensions. MythTV is for the do-it-yourself tinkerer who wants to do lots more. This one’s been on my to-do list for way too long.

The comments on the Slashdot article are much more worthwhile than the post. Set your threshhold high and you’ll see the moderated posts. A pointer to Jarod Wilson’s installation guide was worth the browsing. Jarod integrates the great documentation on the MythTV site with his own experiences.

Terminal Email

By on August 31, 2006 in Technology

Slashdot post: Radio Shack E-Fires 400 workers. KingSkippus writes “You've got mail! …and no job! The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that RadioShack has notified 400 workers by e-mail that they are being laid off. The e-mails state, “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.” Nothing says thank you for your years of service to our company quite like an e-boot out the door.”

Ow. I got laid off from US DataCenters via cellphone, as I was working from home the day they let everyone go, and I thought that was bad. (One of the best things that ever happened to me, though.) But email! That's incredibly insensitive.

Novell working to implement VBA in OpenOffice.org

By on August 22, 2006 in OpenSource, Technology

OSNews reports “Novell is still working on improving the VBA support of its OpenOffice submission, and is therefore open to all sumbmissions of VBA macros which are not working on the OOo version of SLED 10. In the meantime the question is when – or even if – Sun will accept the patches for OpenOffice to get VBA support.”

Hmm. I'm surprised. VBA is one of Microsoft's Achille's Heels, the weak spot where lots of security flaws can be exploited, via Automation, AutoOpen macros and so forth. I'll be interested in learning how OOo can implement these.

One view of LinuxWorld Day One

By on August 16, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over at NewsForge, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier blogs A slow start at LinuxWorld during the seminar day before the main trade show opens. It sounds like the conference had many of the classic faux-pas, hard to avoid but difficult to overcome. I'm not picking on LinuxWorld for these, they happen at every show (and I've been guilty of more than one), but to remind us all what conference attendees expect:

  1. Schedule changes: “I'd hoped to attend Greg Kroah-Hartman's “Write a Real Working Linux Driver” session, but it had been cancelled.”
  2. Not delivering what was promised: “Unfortunately, the presentation was not a “hands-on” affair at all.”
  3. Losing control of the session: “Kirkland turned out to be something of a disappointment. Kirkland spent too much time at the beginning of the session discussing the types of RAID and taking questions from a particularly inquisitive attendee at the back of the room. I enjoy sessions where the presenter takes questions during the presentation, but a good speaker knows how to control the audience and will shut down questions when they start to derail a presentation.”

Lenovo offers SuSE ThinkPad T60p?

By on August 15, 2006 in Linux, Technology

Lenovo debuts Linux ThinkPads.

(InfoWorld) – “Lenovo Group announced on Tuesday the availability of the ThinkPad T60p, its first laptop computer preloaded with the Linux operating system… The new laptop is primarily aimed at engineers, the company said… Linux users will welcome Lenovo's decision to preload the open-source operating system on its new ThinkPad.”

Well, the left hand forgot to tell the right hand. The links on the Lenovo site lead to http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series/wor where it says, “The ThinkPad T60p Mobile Workstation does not come preloaded with SUSE Linux. Users must obtain SUSE Linux licenses from Novell. The ThinkPad T60p comes with DOS entitlement only and ships with a blank hard disk drive. SUSE Linux OS will be supported by Novell, while Lenovo will support Hardware,” Hopefully, they will get the story together over the next couple of days.

The whole point of buying such a machine is to get a pre-installed image that supports all the oddball features of Bluetooth, hibernate, ACPI, power management, the funky specialized buttons, the pointer, the touchpad and so forth. If you have to go out and buy and install SuSE yourself, what's the point? Buy the T60p with Windows, snapshot the image, shrink the partition and set up the machine to dual-boot.

HP endorses Debian as Linux of choice on HP

By on August 14, 2006 in Linux, Technology

HP announces support for Debian Linux.

(InfoWorld) – “Hewlett-Packard is throwing its support behind the Debian Linux distribution, the first major hardware maker to align itself with the noncommercial community-based Linux offering… HP also announced Monday that unit sales of 1.5 million Linux servers generated revenue of close to $6.2 billion for the 12 months ending in May, 50 percent more revenue than its nearest competitor.”

I think we'll continue to see some interesting alignments between vendors and Linux distributions: Lenovo's announced SuSE support, HP aligns with Debian. The Dell Linux site makes it clear they're not going to lose a sale over the choice of OS: you can pick your own, but RedHat and Novell SuSE are their top picks.

We don't want to go back to the one hardware vendor – one OS model: Ultrix, Solaris, HPUX, and the rest created a Balkanization of UNIX that lead to its downfall. However, vendors supporting Linux, especially multiple flavors, is a good sign.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.