primoz.tech.blog

LessWatts

"LessWatts is about creating a community around saving power on Linux, bringing developers, users, and sysadmins together to share software, optimizations, and tips and tricks.

You can get tips, software, and tuning from this site and its forums, but we also want your input and involvement! Share your best tricks, test the software under development, contribute code, report bugs or issues, or simply help out other people who have questions. "

http://www.lesswatts.org/

Open a Terminal and Type the following

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu --type string "Super_L"

Source: http://linuxtree.blogspot.com/2010/01/windows-button-in-ubuntu-910.html

I survived first two weeks on Ubuntu. Among all programs I mentioned in previous post I successfully installed and used following:

• SQuirrel SQL Client - Universal SQL client for almost all databases.
• Soap UI - soapUI is the leading tool for Web Service Testing.
• VMWare Workstation - VMware Workstation makes it simple to create and run multiple virtual machines on your desktop or laptop computer.
• Bluefish Editor - Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners
• SpiderOak - SpiderOak provides an easy, secure and consolidated free online backup, sync, sharing, access & storage solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
• Inkscape - An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
• Transmission - Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client.
• xCHM - xCHM is a cross-platform GUI front-end to chmlib. Chmlib is a library for dealing with Microsoft ITSS/CHM format files.

I also create successfull connection to Windows VPN and Open VPN network with default network manager. With Terminal server client I can connect to my Windows machines over RDP and VNC.

Overall I'm very happy with system. You can find almost all programs in their repository. There is also a lot of documentations, blogs and wikis for Ubuntu.

I'm still looking for good alternative to TortoiseSVN and Adobe Lightroom. Any suggestions?

Last year I changed my main development work from .NET to Java. I figured out that I don't need any special feature from Windows anymore.  I decided to try with Ubuntu Linux and survive.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition on software RAID 5 for root and RAID 1 for /boot. On Windows I used Intel ICH9R RAID and I have a lot of troubles to configure it on Linux, so I decided to use Software Raid. The bigest problem was, that raid arrays was constantly in Offline mode if I rebooted computer. When I install Ubuntu on software raid there was still old raid arrays making mess, because I didn't delete them, I just switched in BIOS from RAID to AHCI mode. When I deleted all arrays for ICH9R controller everything goes smooth and I rebooted in Ubuntu Linux.

On first day I installed and used:

• Firefox
• Eclipse 3.5
• Sun Java JDK
• Apache
• PHP
• MySQL
• GIMP
• Open Office
• VLC
• Brasero Disk Burner
• Pidigin
• Last.fm
• Restricted Extras

I'm still looking for good alternative for Adobe Lightroom.

Useful links

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID
• http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=188
• http://tuxtraining.com/2008/11/04/setting-up-software-raid-in-ubuntu-server
• http://www.ducea.com/2009/03/08/mdadm-cheat-sheet/
• http://johnpaulett.com/2009/06/26/install-eclipse-galileo-3-5-on-ubuntu-jaunty-9-04/
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Today I installed new version of VMWare server on Windows Vista x64. Looks like that new VMWare fixed all issues with non signed drivers in this new major release 2.0. I recommend that you upgrade version 1.x to 2.0 if you are using Vista x64.

• Problems with versions 1.x on Vista x64.
• VMWare Server

When I changed my job I also switched from Microsoft .NET world to IBM, Oracle and Suns world. I was familiar with SQL Server 2000, 2005 and their Management Studio. Management Studio is OK and you can do most things there. In my new environment I was faced with Oracle, DB2 and MS databases and all of them have their own clients. First of all when I saw  Oracle SQL+ -disaster - productivity 0.
I was forced to find some kind of universal client and I found this great SQuirreL Universal SQL Client. It is free and open source. You can use it with any databse which have available JDBC drivers.

Most important features for me:

• Code completion (intellisense)
• Editing of SQL results
• SQL queries history
• ...

There are also a lot of plugins available:

• SQL scripts
• Syntax Highlighting
• Refactoring Plugin
• Data Import Plugin
• DBCopy Plugin
• ...

Useful links

• http://www.squirrelsql.org/
• IBM Developerworks article about SQuirreL: SQuirreL SQL client: A single, open source front end to interact with your heterogeneous database environment

If you are using Subversion and Eclipse for Java development, you should add exclude rule (**/.svn/) to build process. Go to project Properties -> Java Build Path, choose Source tab and add exclude pattern. Now you will not have any .svn folders in bin.

You can get new major release of Eclipse on eclipse.org download website. There are plenty of eclipse packages and you can compare them here. You can read everything about new features:

• Ganymede site
• Eclipse Ganymede at a glance
• InfoQ
• Eclipse Hidden Treasures
• eclipse Dzone

I'll check this new package for J2EE and BIRT tomorrow morning.

I was testing some wiki engines for business use. I couldn't choose one all-round winner. Wiki must have have workspaces for different teams, hierarchical document organization, must be free and opensource, WYSIWYG editor, import/export (doc, pdf), discussions, ASP.NET or PHP,...

I checked following wiki engines:

MediaWiki

pros: easy to use and install, many plugins, many templates
cons: don't like document management (categories and namespaces), must install a lot of additional plugins

TWiki

pros: more enterprise oriented, like workspaces, good design
cons: I hate perl, confusing install procedure

TikiWiki

a lot out of the box packages, little confusing with all this packages, very ugly templates

XWiki

small amount of plugins, little confusing

Does anyone have any suggestions?

FlatPack is flat file parser that can handles fixed length and custom delimited CSV files. Column mapping is done through XML files and it is fully customizable. With this package you can read and write CSV files, it can handles string, numeric and date values.

Check out FlatPack project website on Sourceforge.

If you work with CSV files in Java, following projects might also be interesting.

• Ostermiller CSV utilities
• JDBC drivers for Excel and CSV files
• Java CSV Library

---UPDATE
User Motion Control on DZone posted a comment that I should also check Super CSV.