Since I’ve been working on the windows installers for arora – I realized there were no arora rpms for moblin.
Presenting arora 0.10.2 rpms on moblin. Fast, lightweight and excellent flash support too (flash seems to play faster in moblin than on firefox).
Get it from the ibiblio moblin repository now.
For those finding the latest git windows build of arora is too buggy for you, here’s some great news.
I have compiled openssl 0.9.8n dlls on windows, and used them for the arora 0.10.2 stable build. With these in mind, arora 0.10.2 is running as sweet as ever.
You may download the stable binary for windows installer at the ostalks ibiblio mirror
Don’t ever let yourself be put down because other people say it can’t be done.
This is a simple story of how leveraging open source technologies can bring you to heights and depths you thought you could never reach.
Around 2002, November, I was asked by one of our ministry head to think of a way to make a new website geared for students. When I think of now, it was really like a social network on a much much smaller scale.
The situation here on the student network’s proposed site was this: they had already searched for a software development firm in Manila and asked for a quotation and timeframe of the work. They said it would take 3 months, and about a six digit amount to get it done. Since that was way too much, they decided to look into the outreach here in Cebu and ask around if there were any people somehow knowledgeable enough to take the challenge.
A few months before, where I was working, I had started studying and implementing some LAMP architecture on the corporate website. Mind you, my skills then were not so mature yet. PHP was still version 4.x and there were even some 3.x versions around. You can even call me a greenhorn (newbie) during this time – on the company I was in, all I had was Dreamweaver 4 to work upon the website, and some tutorials from the web on how to set up and program in php.
To make the long story short, I and two other people from the community (serving in ministry work), were tasked to do what one would have thought to be impossible to do during that time – make the student network site, complete with interactive forums and one login registrations to be part of the site, and with ALL content in less than one month. Yes, that’s right, the site was going to be launched a little bit after Christmas.
Since I was working then, we had to take turns in programming and developing the site. I was the head then of the 3 person team in Cebu. The two were not working yet, so I tasked them to make the different sections of the site. We were working at my home (no problems, I was single then 
). Some people from our main branch in Manila were sending designs for us to cut and slice and place in the site.
After of almost a month of non-stop work on the site. It was done, and uploaded to a shared server through dialup (it would take 3-4 hours to update the whole site).
What’s the lesson of this experience? If I were to use proprietary software and languages it would be a whole lot more expensive (I knew there was asp, and coldfusion, but hosting for that was expensive). We had to use the one available on most cheap servers at that time, and that was a LAMP based server. We leveraged free forum software and modified it and integrated it into the site’s one login and registration. If we had started from scratch we wouldn’t have had finished the site on time. Open Source is all about collaboration, and this experience has taught me a lot about coordinating remotely too.
Looking back, I was to lead the original web team here for about 2 more years, before moving on (by then they had grown to more than 5) – after which, I was still assigned to the original website which we made, and helped worked on two more sites and administered the ministry’s server (which was now a dedicated server). The site which we first started won the Catholic Mass Media Awards for Best Website for 3 straight years before becoming a Hall of Fame Awardee. I was incidentally there using a borrowed suit during the first time we won (it was held in Ateneo and televised nationwide, hosted by some guy and Donita Rose), and that by itself was an experience I’ll never forget. You can get the list of winners during the first time the site won at the cmma foundation website here.
Dream Big. It can be done.
Hi there guys,
I noticed moblin’s repository of packages are quite limited. Yes, I know, moblin is gonna be meego in Q2 2010, but for the moment, I need my application fix.
Presenting a little moblin rpm repository until I meego comes, or whatever…
Two applications are in there, GFtp and Gnumeric. Those applications fitted my requirements for a useable netbook system.
To use the repository, just enter this as ostalks_moblin.repo in the yum.repos.d folder (updated to ibiblio):
[ostalks_moblin]
name=OStalks Moblin Repo $releasever – $basearch
baseurl=http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/ostalks/moblin/RPMS/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
I am also willing to compile applications for you guys, when I do get the time – I’m doing this on my own free time.
Have fun installing!
Well, it’s a short post.
Since I was around the area and was more or less free during the time, I attended a short meeting with a local Linux Users Group at the G2iX Techbar, IT Park, Cebu City, of which I am a member.
There was basically a short talk on Liferay, an Open Source Portal, Collaboration, Social Networking tool written in Java. After the talk was a discussion between the members about activities within the year.
Like I said, nothing much. People like Tom Wickline, head of the Bordeaux Group (a front-end to WINE), and writer to Wine-Reviews attended the meeting.
It also allowed me to show off my netbook running Moblin.
For those who don’t know who G2iX is, they’re a company headquartered in Manila, and specializes in Ruby on Rails development, Java, Dev Automation and Cloud Platform Deployment. They have also received awards like the Top Asian TechnoVisionary Awardee for 2006/2007 by ZDNet Asia, Top 20 Open Source Companies by Red Herring, among others.
I recently had a task to do for a friend of mine to migrate Visual FoxPro data into a mysql database.
As a programmer that doesn’t like to re-invent the wheel, I tried searching through google, but was only partially successful in getting code to insert dbf data into mysql (it was public domain code, but only had code to insert data into a table that was created earlier).
This is the code modified to work with any dbf file – it creates the table, then inserts the dbf data into the created table. The code was further modified to strip whitespaces from the text values (FoxPro/DBase pads text with spaces up to the length of the field). You may want to change this further, since this is a quick and dirty code for the sole purpose of importing dbf tables. This works with my rpms at the repository.
/*
* Part 2 code modified by Clint Christopher Canada from different public domain sources
* Part 1 code created by Clint Christopher Canada. BSD licensed.
*/
// This is Part I of the code
$tbl = "table to create";
$db_uname = 'mysql username';
$db_passwd = 'mysql password';
$db = 'database';
$conn = mysql_pconnect('localhost',$db_uname, $db_passwd);
// Path to dbase file
$db_path = ".DBF";
// Open dbase file
$dbh = dbase_open($db_path, 0)
or die("Error! Could not open dbase database file '$db_path'.");
// Get column information
$column_info = dbase_get_header_info($dbh);
// Display information
//print_r($column_info);
$line = array();
foreach($column_info as $col)
{
switch($col['type'])
{
case 'character':
$line[]= "`$col[name]` VARCHAR( $col[length] )";
break;
case 'number':
$line[]= "`$col[name]` FLOAT";
break;
case 'boolean':
$line[]= "`$col[name]` BOOL";
break;
case 'date':
$line[]= "`$col[name]` DATE";
break;
case 'memo':
$line[]= "`$col[name]` TEXT";
break;
}
}
$str = implode(",",$line);
$sql = "CREATE TABLE `$tbl` ( $str );";
mysql_select_db($db,$conn);
mysql_query($sql,$conn);
set_time_limit(0); // I added unlimited time limit here, because the records I imported were in the hundreds of thousands.
// This is part 2 of the code
import_dbf($db, $tbl, $db_path);
function import_dbf($db, $table, $dbf_file)
{
global $conn;
if (!$dbf = dbase_open ($dbf_file, 0)){ die("Could not open $dbf_file for import."); }
$num_rec = dbase_numrecords($dbf);
$num_fields = dbase_numfields($dbf);
$fields = array();
for ($i=1; $i<=$num_rec; $i++){
$row = @dbase_get_record_with_names($dbf,$i);
$q = "insert into $db.$table values (";
foreach ($row as $key => $val){
if ($key == 'deleted'){ continue; }
$q .= "'" . addslashes(trim($val)) . "',"; // Code modified to trim out whitespaces
}
if (isset($extra_col_val)){ $q .= "'$extra_col_val',"; }
$q = substr($q, 0, -1);
$q .= ')';
//if the query failed - go ahead and print a bunch of debug info
if (!$result = mysql_query($q, $conn)){
print (mysql_error() . " SQL: $q
\n");
print (substr_count($q, ',') + 1) . " Fields total.
";
$problem_q = explode(',', $q);
$q1 = "desc $db.$table";
$result1 = mysql_query($q1, $conn);
$columns = array();
$i = 1;
while ($row1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($result1)){
$columns[$i] = $row1['Field'];
$i++;
}
$i = 1;
foreach ($problem_q as $pq){
print "$i column: {$columns[$i]} data: $pq
\n";
$i++;
}
die();
}
}
}
?>
One of my favorite Open Source Applications has undergone an major version Alpha Release!
Since I’m following Durian open movie project updates, I’m pretty excited what’s in store for 2.5, namely:
It is really catching up to commercial software, as it is, and it’s also a small package too (Just 18Mb)!
Look to the blender site for the release logs and the downloads.
I’ve been thinking. I think there’s a small window of opportunity here.
Mainly because since I’m researching on some things, and I’ve got a little spare time on my hands, why not make a Chromium Build? I’ve got the newest Ubuntu version, some modest harddisk space allocated to it (20Gb), and I’m also curious on how this baby works on my BenQ joybook (I personally have 3 netbooks, BenQ Joybook, Neo Vivid 1100, and the Blue H1).
Should be interesting to see how this would work out, especially on the Blue H1 (which is essentially an One Mini A110 netbook), which is basically a 1st generation netbook (7″ screen), and a Via processor.
So what do you guys think? It’s a go? If I have made builds for the Chromium OS, I might become generous enough to upload this for you to tinker and test out.
By the way, if any of you guys have the Blue H1, you should find the A110 wiki interesting enough. This was made by a Debian developer. Warning: these are geeky stuff.
Hi there folks.
As you may all know, Google released source code for it’s much ballyhooed OS, named after it’s popular browser named Chrome. I’ve been able to run a vmware image in VirtualBox and although I know it’s just a technical preview of the OS, I can say it’s pretty zippy (good for a sub-netbook machine).
Again, the emphasis, sub-netbook – I really don’t think this will replace your netbook/laptop any time soon as it’s primary OS.
As a side note, I am thinking of compiling and building the sources in Ubuntu soon so I can look at how they made the linux kernel boot that quick (even in VirtualBox, it booted up, in let’s say, less than 10 seconds?).
Anyways, I’m getting somewhat offtopic… here’s how to install Chrome OS in VirtualBox (I am assuming you have VirtualBox installed on your host OS already):
1. Download the vmware image here: http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/
2. Unarchive the vmware image to a folder of your choice.
3. Open up VirtualBox and click on the New Button.
Follow these screenshots shown below for setup:
Create Virtual Machine
Set OS Name
Set Memory Requirements
Select your vmware harddisk (3 screenshots below)
Finishing up
And you should be able to start your Chrome OS in VirtualBox by selecting Chrome OS and pressing start button (sample screenshots of Chrome OS below):
Looks like Tom posted a fresh news update on the codeweavers side of the fence.
Codenamed “Zombie Mallard”, this version sports compatibility to Left4Dead 2, and apparently, Codeweavers is running a raffle wherein the lucky winner customer buying CrossOver Games or CrossOver Offline gets an Intel Core i7-870 Lynnfield 2.93 Ghz Quad-Core Processor machine as a prize!
Sounds too good to be true?
Here’s an excerpt from the Codeweavers Site:
As part of our CrossOver Games 8.1 release, and its support for Left4Dead 2, we felt it was important to put superior firepower into the hands of our users! Any customer purchasing CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional until December 1st will be automatically registered to win this loaded CodeWeavers Gaming PC. We’ll pull the name out of the hat on December 1, 2009, just in time to have this little gem sitting under some lucky winner’s (non-denominational) Christmas / Hannukah / Kwanza / Festivus tree. Lovingly hand-crafted by our very own sysadmin / web genius / first-person shootist Jeremy Newman, we promise it will have all the woof you need to feed smoke to the baddies. Did we mention that it comes with a lifetime license for CrossOver Games Linux as well?
Look to Tom Wickline’s site for more details.
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