I don’t like monkeys in the house April 24, 2009
Posted by claudio in Desktop, General UNIX, Java, Programming, Ubuntu.Tags: GNU/Linux, Java, mono
2 comments
There have been some controversy about the .Net clone on Gnu/Linux: Mono.
I have been running Linux before Mono appeared and I remember the discussions. To be short: most reasons to introduce .Net on Linux are clearly bogus today. If you really want to use a high-level language with a VM, well … use Java (there are java-gtk2 bindings if you prefer a more native look than swing-gtk or swt-gtk). If you want to make it perfect, spend a fraction of the time and money of copying/rewriting a full stack (including a VM) and fix what need to be fixed on Java (specially now that’s GPL2). Besides, there are pretty decent IDEs that make you productive . If Java isn’t your cup of coffee tea (It should be as C# looks pretty similar to me), there are tons of other languages with gtk-bindings (I use gtk2-perl).
Anyway, being a user of a minority OS, there was one argument that stuck then: “we will enable thousands of windows programmers to run their programs unchanged on Linux”. I remember the apocalyptic warnings of “jumping on the .Net boat or drown and disappear”. Guess what, it didn’t happen. And it won’t happen. Windows developers prefer to write for the full and up-to-date .Net stack instead of an outdated Linux-clone. Nothing earth-shocking here. As long as the complete stack is not open (libraries), you will always play -incompatible- catchup.
What did we get instead? Beside a few proprietary applications (that can be counted on one hand), we’ve got some tools and applications that mainly run on Linux. Some of them are very nice, but nothing revolutionary that can not be written in an other language.
Do we need to live in fear of Microsofts lawyers for a few applications that can be written in a risk-free language or stack (e.g. Tomboy => Gnote)? To be honest, as long as the OS and my DE (Gnome) don’t depend on Mono, I don’t really care. If Microsoft sends its lawyers, there is always “apt-get purge libmono0 mono-common”. The problem I see is that Novell is pushing really hard to make Gnome dependant on Mono.
Removing Mono in that situation will mean holding the broken pieces of the Desktop in your hands.
Blastwave is dead, long live OpenCSW and … Blastwave! November 18, 2008
Posted by claudio in General UNIX, Solaris.Tags: Add new tag, blastwave, fork, opencsw, packaging, Solaris, sun
3 comments
Let’s face it. GNU/Linux is miles ahead of Solaris when talking about an integrated package management. The combo dpkg/apt-get on Debian and derivatives and even rpms are killer features for many sys-admins and users. The huge well-maintained software repositories are amazing.
Solaris pkg-system (SVR4 packages) and patch-system (individual patches and patchclusters) feel like ancient history. On a fun day I’ll end up writing a perl wrapper for pkgadd and co. (pkgrm, pkginfo, patchadd, patchrm…) to accept parameters in latin…
If you don’t feel like compiling from source dozens (hundreds?) applications and libraries you can always count on kind-of-sponsored-by-SUN sunfreeware. However, dependencies are handled by looking in a web page which dependencies the package has. And which dependencies the dependencies have on an other page, and… You get the picture.
Blastwave to the rescue? The last months have been sad for the Solaris community.
Tips & Tricks: merge postscripts or pdf files June 28, 2008
Posted by claudio in Desktop, General UNIX.Tags: "tips & tricks", gs, pdf, postscript, ps
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It’s nice that firefox 3 can directly create pdfs (print, select print to file). However, while doing research and creating pdfs of articles, some were split in different pages (or needed additional information, like citation information). Here’s how to merge those pdfs from the command line:
$ gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=result.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf input3.pdf
Change the PAPERSIZE value to “letter” if you live where the use that format. “result.pdf” is the result of merging “input1.pdf”, “input1.pdf” and “input1.pdf”. Change the values to fit your files.
What’s a pirate’s favourite UNIX utility? April 29, 2008
Posted by claudio in General UNIX.Tags: Add new tag, humour
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(/usr/bin/) ar
Lotus Notes 8 on Ubuntu 64-bit November 9, 2007
Posted by claudio in Desktop, GNU/Linux, General UNIX.Tags: amd64, gnu/linu, GNU/Linux, Linux, lotus notes, Ubuntu
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Ok, let’s be clear. Lotus Notes sucks. However, on my workplace all mail and calendar (meetings!) are administered through Lotus Notes on Windows. I run GNU/Linux (Ubuntu). All the hassle show how close source software sucks if you have configuration slightly different that expected by the seller. I am not running Windows or 32-bit RedHat. This post is a work in progress and will be adapted.
This is what I did to get the client running on Ubuntu 7.10 amd64: (more…)
Use external functions/modules in korn shell (ksh) August 7, 2007
Posted by claudio in GNU/Linux, General UNIX, Shell, Solaris.Tags: functions, ksh, modules, Programming, script, Shell, UNIX
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The korn shell is a great shell to write shell scripts. Some functionalities are really nice. By example, you can write your functions or modules in a separate file and use it within your program. The secret lies in the FPATH environment variable. (more…)
