Saturday, May 29, 2010

SELF 2010

Two weeks to go, until South East Linux Fest (SELF) 2010 kicks off. This year is going to be (excuse the language) F'in awesome. Check out the speakers list, especially the last two: Wendy Seltzer and Wietse Venema. Various LUGS will also be well represented this year.

Sparks and I are headed out early to take advantage of the Friday and Sunday events. We should be rolling in late Thursday night (it's a 7-hour drive). This year, maybe I can stick around and convince Ian to redo his "buiding a package" tutorial. (That was Ian, wasn't it?)

Monday, May 3, 2010

Upgrade frustration

I never learn. I always want the cutting edge versions and always suffer for it. This time, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.4, instead of performing a clean install. Two things fell out which shouldn't have:

  • the ability to use a second video card

  • Alfresco


I can only guess that nVidia needs to redo their drivers to support 10.4. This loss is painful in that the second card is the one with TV out, for MythTV. I'm looking at two work-arounds. Switch to using the second card as the primary display or use the MVP box again. I'll probably try the former first as the MVP option is quite limited.

The loss of Alfresco could have been considered catastropic if I hadn't backed up my data first. I was using the Alfresco as the data store for PmWiki. This allowed me to attach objects (PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, etc.) to the wiki and also have full-text search for each. The trick for doing so was using davfs2 to mount Alfresco's WEBDAV service as a file system under PmWiki. It worked nicely, though it was a bit of a kluge and required manual mounting.

Upon completion, Alfreso would start and then kill itself a few minutes later. As I'm horrible at troubleshooting Java, I only tried to fix it for a couple hours.

After that, a short search revealed Namazu, which I'm currently putting through its paces. For me, it has two plusses: it's written in Perl (something I understand) and it doesn't affect the source object that you point it at.

If I can find some time (not this year!), I'll probably play with the underlying code. Wish me luck!