Month: August 2008

firefox 3.x on debian amd64

I’ve been running a firefox 3.0 pre-release build for ages now, and finally thought I’d upgrade – (it turns out) mozilla do not provide 64 bit binaries. The i686 build that you can download from getfirefox.org does not work on my debian amd64 system – but not everything is lost.

As I’m a developer, I’m reasonably happy to play with nightly builds – and so – http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ has what I need – today its firefox-3.1a2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2.

Unziped into my non-debian firefox dir, and runs seemingly fine, except that the firefox addins won’t run, as they are scared of firefox versions that they have not been tested on 🙂

That too can be solved – edit the application.ini file, and replace the Version=3.1a2pre with Version=3.0.1 or whatever the release is that your addons are willing to work on.

so far, only VMWare’s addon won’t run – perhaps I need to set the Version lower, as it worked on Minefield 3.0pre.

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=iceweasel&searchon=names&suite=testing&section=all tells me that 3.0.1 is in amd64 debian testing since July 2008

VMWare’s addon to give console access won’t run in the 3.0.1 debian version either – talk about disappointing. The 3.1 nightly build seems to feel faster too, so I suspect I’ll be running that most of the time, and will look to migrate away from VMWare over time.

Local Government Web Network Conference 2008

lgWebNetwork

I’m at the LgWebNetwork conference in Sydney at the moment – having seen John Allsopp do his thing on “The real and the virtual – closing the circle”, Bobert Beerworth not talking about Beer… and yet Social (networks), and James Robertson (ok, it was about CMS’s free and otherwise), and then Cameron Adams – designer guy and a session on Writing for the web (what no blog?) by Brian Hardy, I’m reminded at how much the Wiki community needs to get out more.

There are so many little improvements Wiki’s should make – just by leaning over the fence a little, and expanding the scope of an Enterprise Wiki into the serious CMS space. We already ‘compete’ reasonably well in the Knowledge Management and Collaboration areas, and by working on the Wiki’s accessibility, we should be able to make it more usable for the less regular users.

Interesting Take-Aways

  • You should not expect professional content from amateur author
  • (CMS) solutions should be disposable. If you have not outgrown your cms in 3 years. You bought too much, or you have not grown enough.
  • There are two types of Open Source CMS’s, Community based and Commercial. Commercial Vendors should be treated the same way as Closed Source ones – they have simply reduced the upfront cost to Zero.
  • Watch your ‘Geeks’ – they are early adopters that are working out what works, and you will be using those things in years to come.

All in all a refreshing reminder of the ideas I’ve had that get forgotten in the heat of working for clients.

ever had Perl CPAN not work on your debian, even though you installed make etc?

CPAN, while incredibly useful, can be a pain, if you forget that you need to re-configure it after installing essential tools.

For example, if you make the mistake of setting up a basic, non-development Debian virtual machine, configure CPAN, try to use it, and on seeing ‘make’ errors like (from install Bundle::CPAN of all things) :

Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Running install for module Compress::Raw::Zlib
Running make for P/PM/PMQS/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz
Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012
Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Running make for P/PM/PMQS/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz
Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012
Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible

cpan>

You install make apt-get update ; apt-get install build-essential…, only to continue to see the same errors wizz past….

CPAN really truly needs to realise that the make settings are mis configured, and tell you.

What you need to do, is to tell your cpan about it by running:
cpan> o conf init

OR, if you’ve not yet messed (configured) up your cpan, install build-essential first.

And while you’re contemplating using cpan, think hard about trying dh-make-perl instead 🙂

Ideally, CPAN should be able to realise that it can’t call make if it does not know where it is – and point this fact out, rather than making it appear as though the package being installed has an issue.

Beware Perl Encode.pm v2.25 when updating TWiki 4.2.2 or WysiwygPlugin

I just ran across a pretty annoying issue when updating one of my TWiki’s from 4.2.0 to 4.2.2. The server it is on was running Perl 5.10, but the Encode module was 2.25, resulting in Wysiwyg edits having all their spaces replaced with %20, and line feeds %0A ala

%20Debian%20equivalent%20of%20chkconfig%0A%0A/usr/sbin/update-rc.d%20avahi-daemon%20defaults%0A%0Ahttp%3A//wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardware%0A

(look familiar Martin? :))


perl -MCPAN -e shell

upgrade Encode

Got me to Encode v2.26, which fixed it for me.

update: Martin’s just confirmed that it didn’t help him on perl 5.8.4, so perhaps its an odd combination of outdated modules?

Enterprise Wiki – Debian TWiki repository updated to TWiki 4.2.2

I’ve just updated the Experimental TWiki and Plugins repository. It now contains TWiki 4.2.2 and 226 Plugins, Contribs and Skins that you can simply apt-get install

To use them, add the following 2 lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib
deb-src http://distributedinformation.com/experimental/ experimental main contrib

then type

apt-get update

to update the available packages.

you can now see all 226 packages with apt-cache search twiki-

and install (assuming you don’t have twiki installed yet)

apt-get install apache2 twiki

Now that I’ve added external dependancies to the repository, complex TWiki Plugin like ImageGalleryPlugin is as easy as apt-get install twiki-imagegalleryplugin and then enabling it via configure.


etch:~# apt-get install twiki-imagegalleryplugin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
defoma gsfonts libfreetype6 libgraphics-magick-perl libgraphicsmagick1 libice6 libjasper-1.701-1 libjpeg62 liblcms1 libmagick9 libpng12-0 libsm6 libtiff4 libwmf0.2-7
libx11-6 libx11-data libxau6 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml2 libxt6 perlmagick x11-common
Suggested packages:
defoma-doc psfontmgr x-ttcidfont-conf dfontmgr libfreetype6-dev graphicsmagick-dbg libjasper-runtime liblcms-utils libwmf-bin
Recommended packages:
libft-perl gs-gpl gs xml-core
The following NEW packages will be installed:
defoma gsfonts libfreetype6 libgraphics-magick-perl libgraphicsmagick1 libice6 libjasper-1.701-1 libjpeg62 liblcms1 libmagick9 libpng12-0 libsm6 libtiff4 libwmf0.2-7
libx11-6 libx11-data libxau6 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml2 libxt6 perlmagick twiki-imagegalleryplugin x11-common
0 upgraded, 24 newly installed, 0 to remove and 15 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.2MB of archives.
After unpacking 25.4MB of additional disk space will be used.

You will still need to use configure to enable Plugins.

Please report your experiences to me – bugs, gripes, you name it – its a work in progress. and I need your help!

Working towards Native TWiki attachment search

And along the way, TWiki’s inbuilt Topic and structured Search is going to get a boost too.

I’ve been working on trying to bring SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn into TWiki properly – by adding it as a configuration item in the SearchAlgorithms. So far, its a pretty cool – it super fast, especially on my test topic set of 50,000 plants – even allowing simple structured queries based on TWiki FormFields.

The work will require a few refactorings that will be in TWiki 4.2.2 and above (planned for mid-September), so I expect things to move along quickly.

Enterprise Wiki – TWiki 4.2.1 update released

This release makes over 150 improvements to the current Enterprise TWiki.

Along with many WYSIWYG Editing improvements, better UTF8 support, User mapping fixes and SEARCH improvements, This release contains an optimization that should see 4.2.1 being 10-30% faster than 4.2.0.

I will be updating the TWikiInstallers as soon as I can – the Windows installer should see the biggest impact, as I have managed to fix a number of SEARCH issues that are windows specific.

see TWikiRelease04x02x01 for more details.