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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.

NeoOffice/J 2.x free public beta

By on September 7, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, OpenSource

NeoOffice: OpenOffice.org native for Mac OS X. “The NeoOffice project has released the first free public beta of its upcoming 2.0 software. NeoOffice is a port of the OpenOffice.org codebase to native Mac OS X APIs and toolkits. The result is an office suite that is integrated with OS X core functionality.” Link via LXer

Cool! I've enjoyed NeoOffice/J in the 1.x version and look forward to seeing a 2.x release. OpenOffice.org 2.x has been my primary office suite for a while now on Windows and Linux, including some pretty intense collaboration with Windows users.

Remote secure desktop serving for Linux servers and Linux/Mac/Windows clients.

By on September 1, 2006 in OpenSource

OSNews reports NX Server, Client Released Under GPL. “2X today announced the release of 2X TerminalServer for Linux, an open source terminal server for Linux, which enables users to run a Linux desktop and Linux / Windows applications over any type of connection. “If Linux is going to happen on the desktop, it will require a terminal server approach such as that of 2X Terminal Server for Linux. Only with the more advanced thin client approach, will Linux be able to outdo Windows fat clients in a company's network. 2X is proud to contribute to this by opening the source code of its terminal server software for Linux.”

'Way cool. NX uses the underlying ssh technology to provide an encrypted tunnel to a remote machine. Through that tunnel, you can support VNC, RDP or compressed X Windows traffic for remote desktop access. I've cobbled together ssh-VNC-http solutions before, but they were typically a bit awkward. I'm looking forward to trying this one out.

Why are computers so hard to use?

By on August 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft

David Berlind's recent blog post pointing to Tim Bray's trials and tribulations on switching from a Powerbook to a Sun Ultra 20 running Ubuntu (!) has some interesting reflections on how hard all desktop switching is. David says,

[Tim] “used two words — “wrangling” and “gyrations” — in his last post that leap off the page as having long been (in my mind) desktop Linux's key stumbling blocks.”

I've got a half-dozen machines in the office I work at regularly: Dells, HPs, ThinkPads, Macs, running Win98 through XP, OS X, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Xubuntu and probably a couple of others. I am constantly wrestling with getting a PDF file just right on this one, or wrangling an icon to do what I want on the desktop of that one. They are all hard!

I got tired of using the supplied Apple keyboard with my iMac and thought I'd try a Microsoft Natural Keyboard I had spare around the office. It worked well, just plug it in and It Worked ™. However, the key labels and assignments had me stumped. On Windows and Linux, the control key is the lower, outer left key and I spend all day issuing ^X, ^V, ^F, ^T to cut, paste, fine and create a new FireFox tab. On the Mac, it's not the outer key, it's the option key, the middle of the three keys outboard the spacebar. Except when it's not. Subconsciously, I had gotten myself into the groove of using the different keyboard layout on the (different) Apple keyboard. When I swapped out the keyboard for the one I use on another machine, I lost the ability to touch type those characters on both keyboards.

In the above-cited blog post, Tim was annoyed when Ubuntu didn't follow the hand-patterns he had memorized on the PowerBook; I feel the same way when I use the Mac.

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.