Known Element Enterprises Corporate Blog

So I am logged in via ssh to a vmware machine and running qemu -cdrom oserServer.iso and the output is coming back to my system via X over ssh.

Scary.

I had configured the IP address on the host machine as well as the virtual machine. This is why ssh/nmap etc were going to the host. The documentation was a bit confusing and made it sound like I needed to have an ip address on the host for the virtual machine. Oh well. It is all figured out now.

Seen on bottom of IBM part number 1887724:
DO NOT EXPOSE MOUSE PAD TO DIRECT SUNLIGHT FOR EXTENDED PERIODS OF TIME.

Whew!!! That’s to funny. Hehehe.

I have began researching installers. I am looking at:

• anaconda
• debian installer (the new fancy graphical version)
• morphix installer

As I said my original goal was to look at rewriting the Morphix installer in python. The front end (GUI) is done in Glade. Glade is very nice. It looks like I shall need to figure out python and glade/xml integration. Or I could cheat. Hehe *laughs mischievously…. Ah fun stuff.

Yes…. If I generate the stubs/handlers and then drop in code from Anaconda it could work. Mmmm. *looks at anaconda code*….*runs and hides due to sheer complexity* (i.e wc -l *.py returns 21625 total). Time to fire up eclipse to get all its wonderful cross code indexing GUI goodness.

I just had a thought. Why isn’t the init system using a library? You have a shell script for each service doing practically the same thing. Start/Stop/Restart etc. Why not create a library that has the functionality and a configuration file for anything specific. The only specific things I can think of off hand involve reading configuration files for the various services and exposing underlying application specific functionality (for example a “clean shutdown and a forced shutdown with apache”. However even that could be done with a kill -9. Hmmmm…. *thinks about a python based init system.* I think its an interesting little thing. Debian would be ideal for it utilizing the power of debconf. Oh well something to work on in my next project

I have been making good progress on my project. I just need to get the installer finished and then I will release my second beta/tech preview. This will allow people to install the software and report bugs/receive fixes. I have obtained a copy of The Official Gnome 2 Developer’s Guide (written by Micahel Meek’s a good friend of mine from the Gnumeric project). This combined with the Gaim Book and the various on line guides should be enough. I will be blogging bout my installer hacking over the weekend as I run into issues/pitfalls etc.

So who knows I might release a second beta this weekend. That would be awesome.

I have been working out every day this week in the pool. As I exercise more and more muscle fatigue takes longer and longer to set in. I used to only be able to do a few laps before needing to rest. Now I can do 15-20 before taking a break.

I have been reading up on diet and exercise and came across some good links:

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Smith_073004,00.html

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Smith_062305,00.html

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Smith_051904,00.html

The second two are very similar.

Well I am off to exercise some more. I won’t have as much time for this much longer as it looks like I will be getting a job shortly.

http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html

Got this from a good friend of mine blog
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/

He and I go way back. As do me and Jody Goldberg. This is back in my excel hacking days about 5 or so years ago.

I am setting up another 2 VmWare machines to do all my OSER development/testing under.

1. OSER-development. This is a debian testing system with the various development tools and such installed. This will be where I do my module/iso building as well as work in the chroot environment.

2. OSER-testing. This will be where I boot my ISO and do install/user testing.

The main reason for doing this under vmware is the fact that I need a separate IP/process space (essentially another machine) so that I don’t interfere with things I am running on my production box (such as apache/postfix/mysql). It’s been a real pain trying to run things in the chroot environment and having it interfere with the host. VmWare is so nice

For now I am giving up on packaging sync4j as a debian package. I feel that the support in debian is to weak at the moment for j2ee/tomcat stuff. Its great if your doing j2se. Also I need to read up on debian MySQL packaging stuff as sync4j needs a database to operate. There are debian packages that create/populate/use databases and they use debconf to do so. This is necessary as mysql DBA tasks like creating a new database/user and assigning it privileges require use of the MySQL root account/password.

So I am just going to install the package manually. I will then be moving on to the Morphix installer. I need to get a release of OSER out that people can install/test and download updates to. Release early release often In order to do that they will have to installer OSER to there hard drive. Ah the joys of GUI programming. We (the morphix team and I) are thinking of rewriting it in python. The GUI is done in glade and that can easily be tied to another back end. I will be investigating Anaconda the Red Hat installer program. It is written in python/C. I can take major portions of it and use it with my glade front end.